The Attitude Era was a complicated place for female athletes. The booking was infamous, and character-wise there weren’t many options. If you weren’t a sexy Sable type charged with stripping down and rolling in oversized gravy boats with pinnacle pushes usually centering around Playboy centerfolds, then you were a slightly more chaste Chyna type, forced to deal with slings and arrows aimed at your gender or body image. Basically: you were a Madonna or a whore, and the current business model favored the whore. In WWE, everyone is disposable, but to be female and attractive was to be seen as doubly homogeneous by management.
Booking wise, there are two beautifully cardinal examples of this sort of thinking, a mold that took decades to be shattered. Molly Holly and Dawn Marie couldn’t be more different as characters, but both were hemmed in by the restrictions of booking at the time, and both disappeared from the company’s onscreen storylines due to the impact of their booking.
With Molly’s recent return to WWE for the Women’s Royal Rumble, I thought I’d take a look back at these two disparate women and the odd way in which the flat, uncreative way in which the company booked women at the time did them both a disservice.
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They didn’t start out this way at first. Dawn Marie gained fame by becoming the valet for Lance Storm on ECW; giggly, bubble-headed and ditzy, she projected a sense of humor as well as an aura of glamour. Her biggest ECW angles involved butts: her own and other people’s. She mainly became involved in multiple paddle matches with Tammy Sytch, and the company used to sell videos by showing footage of Rick Rude spanking her, the camera zooming in on her buttocks. When WWE signed her, she spent a couple of months with an “executive assistant” gimmick, one of the many women who fought for the privilege of being the (onscreen) “favorite” of Mister McMahon.
Molly’s beginnings were quite different. First the evening gowned, bare-footed Miss Madness or Mona in WCW, she gained fame as the pigtailed youngest cousin of the Holly clan and then the superheroine sidekick of The Hurricane. Backing up her sunshine sweetness with talent, she became a fan favorite of children in an era where the company’s interest in selling to the young had dwindled to nearly nothing.
The Attitude Era would change everything for both women, for better or for worse.
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The soapy, over the top atmosphere of the Russo era of the WWE, Dawn and Molly each had a role to play. Molly – firmly refusing to do more revealing bikini shoots or reach for that Playboy-shaped holy grail – was stuck with a gimmick that parodied the tenants of her Christian faith, and even her self-confessed virginity. Dawn Marie, happy to be freer with her body, was stuck in a mess of a storyline that weighed heavily on her physical charms and would win 2003’s Gooker Award.
Molly rolled with the punches of her gimmick, even though she later admitted she didn’t like being a heel or having her gimmick hinge on the sex she was or wasn’t having. The gimmick was indeed predicated on her so-called purity – dressing in pants and modest blouses, appearing in swimsuit contests in neck-high tank, Molly portrayed villain whose purity meant she was morally superior to those around her. The gimmick lasted a surprisingly long time and the angle got surprisingly vicious, resulting in her losing a hair-versus-career match and spending months sporting a bald head, and eventually ending with a turn that resulted in the size of her posterior became a sticking point (a lot of 90s and early 00’s wrestling was pretty butt focused for some reason). Jerry Lawler went so vicious during his time in the commentary booth while trying to get the audience to call her a ‘fat ass’ that Molly was hurt by the taunting in real life. Though she by her own confession was never really happy with the gimmick, in that time period and with her personal beliefs providing restrictions, there weren’t any better opportunities for her in the company.
Dawn’s direction was entirely different. She had one angle, but that angle was memorable for the wrong reasons. Playing a gold digger who loved to get naked and was deeply invested in shtuping her opponent’s father to death, she and Torrie Wilson battled their way through months of storyline in which Dawn slept with Torrie’s dad, blackmailed Torrie into sleeping with her married Torrie’s father in her underwear, killed Al with even more honeymoon sex, and then brawled with Torrie at the funeral. It took about six months to end the angle, with Torrie the face finally coming out on top.
The last dregs of both of their time in the company petered out. Molly left and retired after losing a schoolgirl battle royal that involved her flashing a pair of oversized pink panties; Dawn ended up in a feud with Charlie Haas where she and Jackie Gayda ended up getting simultaneously dumped onscreen. Molly left when her contract was up; Dawn was fired while on maternity leave and ended up suing Vince for emotional distress.
Molly did everything wrong when it comes to Attitude Era marketability but managed to hew out a memorable gimmick, even though she hated playing it and it involved humiliation as well as not-so-veiled corporate insults and her insulting a (storyline) rape victim by giving her condoms at a baby shower. But she couldn’t find artistic satisfaction in the Attitude Era, and left the company.
Dawn did everything right according to the tenants of the WWE at that time and still found herself released when she did the one thing with her body that Vince McMahon found unmarketable and became a single mother.
In the end, we’re all better for this new era in women’s wrestling, and it’s a good thing that happiness, health, and – most importantly – diversity have now begun reign there.
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