There’s one sad truth that’s haunted professional wrestling’s attempt at booking women’s wrestling – the specter of body shaming, the easiest and cheapest heat you can possibly garner, will eventually rear its ugly head. The innocent feminine-coded good girl versus aggressive, masculine bad girl, pay per views co-sponsored by Girls Gone Wild, bikini contests and gravy bowl contests, Tough Enough contestants required to shout at each other about the ‘wideness of their gapes,’ and the most recent sight of Alexa Bliss making fun of Nia Jax for being ‘big,’ pro wrestling has always had a problem that screams out for change.
1983-1998:
Scary Sherri’s Chest is Hairy
In the early 80s, women’s wrestling didn’t have much gender coding or size shaming going on, mostly because during Vince’s first heyday, women’s wrestling was nothing more than an afterthought. Sure, Wendi Richter and Moolah wrestled at the first WrestleMania, took part in the Rock N Wrestling Connection, and helped launch wrestling into the stratosphere of public consciousness , but Judy Martin, Velvet McIntyre and many other wrestlers existed mostly to be fed to Moolah and had no feuds or personalities of their own. At least, there was nothing gendered about that conflict – just two women who hated one another fighting because they wanted a belt, and because Cyndi Lauper had a beef with Captain Lou Albano. Most of the other major singles conflicts that happened until the WWE dissolved its women’s league in 1989 were like that. When Sherri Martel retired the first version of the women’s belt after a feud with Rockin’ Robin, Robin floundered as a ring announcer before being cut from the company.
Then they chose to move Sherri Martel into a managerial role, and that was where the nonsense began. For Martel’s character took up with the Macho Man, who was evil, and Martel – with her spiked hair, her glitter, her vicious kicks – must be as evil as he was.
She was contrasted instantly with Elizabeth – Elizabeth the pure, the sweet, the good, who was a shrinking violet, a ministering angel. Sherri was the devil; Elizabeth, aligned with Dusty Rhodes, with Hogan, only did mean things because she was ordered to or because her team was in trouble. (Her biggest act of defiance and independence before she split with Savage? Taking off a long skirt and strutting in a bikini bottom to distract Andre the Giant and Ted DiBiase during the main event of SummerSlam 88.) That Sherri – coded as aggressive, coded all in black – was treated as some sort of aberration whose aggression was unnatural, even evil. It was all in the name of making her an effective heel – the payoff being an atomic drop or sleeper hold from one of the company’s faces.
Then there was Sapphire. The company’s only black valet for years, she was treated as a dowdy joke while she was a babyface. When she turned heel and briefly became Ted DiBiase’s new valet, she was treated as a money-grubbing maid figure, literally seen on TV ironing money in a fur coat and evening gown which her “common man” previous employer Dusty Rhodes couldn’t afford to give her. This misogynoir was naturally not addressed before she was released from the company. Her presence was treated as a joke, a rib on Dusty, and a cruel caricature once she was a heel.
When women’s wrestling was briefly revived as a concept in the company in the mid-90s, blonde, tough and female-coded Madusa Micelli held the WWF Women’s Title for ages, engaging in long feuds with the bigger, tougher Bull Nakano and Aja Kong. They and Bertha Faye – Rhonda Singh, who was honored as Monster Ripper in Japan – were rarely seen as real threats and were booked as plus-sized jokes, with Faye in particular being booked into a comedy love storyline with Harvey Whippleman, skipping around in brightly colored bows and pigtails.
It’s interesting to note that in this same period, in the NWA and down in the territories, how varied and scattershot the way women were portrayed. In the NWA/WCW, there were three major female athletes in the company – Woman, Madusa and Missy Hyatt. Woman was a calculated, cool-minded businesswoman who dressed as a geeky fangirl to trick Rick Steiner into lowering his guard so she could forward her team, Doom, to the front of the tag rankings – until she became the Sandman’s kendo-stick wielding valet in ECW. There, she was a mirror verse Miss Elizabeth, something she was, amazingly, not shamed for.
Missy Hyatt – who started life in the business as a funny, bratty deliciously evil valet who was always looking out for number one – was cut adrift in WCW after separating from her ex-husband Eddie Gilbert, whom she had been valeting for along with the Steiner Brothers. She became mainly a television personality. She had a brief feud with Paul E Dangerously – a battle of the sexes in which he was the heel, and the crowd was supposed to root for Missy. When Madusa joined the company and became a part of the Dangerous Alliance, the war switched to a Missy/Madusa battle, which unfortunately culminated in a bikini contest in 1992. Again, that old coding resurfaced – aggressive Madusa was seen as a less “desirable” choice due to coding, seen as ugly compared to Missy’s blonde, stereotypical femininity. Thus arrived and, mercifully, went the only incident of body shaming in early WCW history.
I don’t need to tell you that in ECW – land where women were subjected to ‘she’s a crack whore’ chants and stripped for extra cash when the ring broke down, and where a women recieving a bare-bottomed spanking at the end of a match was used to sell vhs tapes of the company’s shows – the body shaming and sex shaming ran rampant onscreen. Even characters like Beulah who escaped from the trap of the company’s booking for women was subjected to such chants, to angles like “Kimona and Beulah are suddenly bi and make out for the crowd for reasons.”
ECW’s lack of variety was not reflected in the territories. While the use of women in them could be stereotypical and loaded with body shaming, you could not draw a clear comparison between the way the Dirty White Girl, Toni Adams, Miss Texas, Lady Blossom, Sunshine, Dark Journey, Baby Doll and Precious were booked. Some girls were happily calculating; some were Elizabeth style angels of the ring. Most kicked butt on their own terms and for their own names.
1998-2010:
“I’d Rather Be In Chyna”
It all began with Sunny. Combining youthful energy, a playful sense of sex appeal and a great mind for the business, Sunny was no Elizabeth and no Sherri – and the company didn’t know how to book her, beyond selling pin-ups after she became one of the most downloaded women in the days of the early internet. While Sunny’s sexuality was at the forefront of her character portrayal, the real focus was on her calculating business acumen; her way of getting over the guy she was with. Aside from the time she led Phinneous Godwin into believing she loved him to make an opportunity for the Smoking Gunns to get the tag belts, leading to the pay-off of her being slopped, she wasn’t treated as a whore using her body to get what she wanted.
Then Sable arrived, and things changed again, with amazing rapidity. Portrayed as another distant, introverted Elizabeth type, when the previously shy Sable stripped off her top during a bikini contest, revealing two latex handprints covering her nipples, it ushered in a new era for women in the company. she replaced Sunny as the main female face of the company – and a new era of body shaming began.
I don’t need to tell you how disastrous booking was for women in the post-Attitude era. There was virgin-shaming (see my article on Molly Holly for that mess). Whole feuds were built around the ‘sluttiness’ or lack thereof of the women being booked, around the size of their body parts
There was body shaming – mainly characterized by Ivory’s time in the Right to Censor. Caught in a fistfight with Miss Kat, who considered running about topless a joy and fought against the organization’s insistence she wear sackcloth, Ivory was cold, disapproving, and the women’s champion for a very long time.
There was age shaming – nearly subverted by Mae Young, who took on her storyline affair with Mark Henry with gusto even as she gave birth to a plastic sex toy.
And naturally, there was plain-old sex shaming. Lita and Edge lived through an angle in which their affair was used to sell tickets. This was followed by Lita’s character being raped and impregnated by Kane and then being forced to marry him, suffering through a storyline miscarriage and being mocked at her own baby shower for being a slut. Her final moment in the company involved Cryme Tyme trying to sell her dildos and bra to the audience while she ran away in shame.
For men, it was a different world. At the same time, The Godfather and Val Venis were seen as heroes for having as much storyline sex as they could with any woman in the vicinity. While Godfather was portrayed as a literal pimp who would buy off opponents by licensing his prostitutes to them for the night, Val was a porn star who slept with the significant others of his opponent, to cuckold the man and shamed and publicly discarded the women.
And, bringing up the rear like a dromedary made of shit, there was transphobia when Mark Henry, in a scene straight out of Family Guy, violently vomited when Chyna tricked him into groping a trans woman friend of hers in a show of revenge.
The company gloried in this lack of boundaries and tried to sell bikini shoot videos, creating a pay per view crossover event co-sponsored by Girls Gone Wild, and instituting a revolving door policy with Hugh Heffner’s Playboy. For every bright spot like Chyna’s run as Intercontinental champion and her relationship with Eddie Gurerro, the Jericho/Trish/Lita/Christian love quadrangle, the fun of watching Nidia enjoying her redneck persona, and many classic matches by many of the women in the company, there were entire angles circling around Chris Jericho calling Stephanie McMahon a “bottom feeding trash bag ho” and posting evidence of her breast augmentation on the big screen for everyone to point and laugh at.
There was Trish on her knees barking like a dog and getting garbage dumped on her; there was Mickie and Trish, playing obsessed fan and stalkee, doing whole spots in their first encounter where Mickie reacted orgiastically to being touched by her crush. It was messy – and until the sponsors complained, it sold tickets. In the ultimate coupe de grace when it came to the women’s division – soon the ‘Diva’s Division’ – the company placed Harvey Whippleman and Santino Marella in the ring in drag as “Hervina” and “Santina” in twin comedy acts that bookended this era; both held the women’s championship briefly. When the girls weren’t rolling around in Jell-O or helping get over a bewigged Harvey, they were performing in angles involving HLA (Hint: these matches were promoted with a teeshirt featuring a tongue and a box).
Down in WCW, Elizabeth participated in a domestic violence angle – one of several launched by the company in this period, the Nitro Girls were turned into pin-up idols, and Daphne and Stacy Kiebler fought over David Flair. Kiebler would soon become the victim to yet another Vince Russo pregnancy angle where it would be revealed that Russo was the father of her baby – a twist that never happened, because the company died before he could wrap the story up . The first NWO pay per view included the sight women who weren’t conventionally attractive competing for the group’s sexual attention during the first Miss NWO competition, just one of many excruciating lowlights. When Vince McMahon bought out WCW and the companies merged, one could only hope things would get better.
It would take a few twists to bring that about.
The 10s:
Pipe Bomb
The weird transition time between the inauguration of the Divas belt and AJ Lee’s pipe bomb was an odd time in the company. WWE focused on bringing in fitness models, usually through Tough Enough and Diva Search, and then training them to do minimal wrestling matches while its veterans, like Gail Kim, did the heavy lifting. The contest that brought us Christy Hemme, the Bella Twins, and other young divas also brought us the sight of Hemme sitting in a pie because her ‘butt was hungry’, and the infamous sound of the women cutting promos that included the semi-censored phrase “(she has a) gap big enough to drive a Mac Truck through.” When Hemme, Ashley Massaro, Candice Michelle, Michelle McCool and Layla Al ran the Divas division, it was a catty world filled with body shaming, headed by Vickie Gurerro, who was portrayed as repellant due to her age and body size even as she escorted Dolph Ziggler to the ring and became a GM for Smackdown (though, of course, the shrill persona she portrayed didn’t help matters). It was also a world where Jillian Hall’s entire gimmick revolved around two things – the huge fake mole on her cheek and the fact that she couldn’t sing. The worst example was when an entire angle was built around LayCool calling Mickie James “Piggie James” and mocked her weight, the result of a backstage punishment for James breaking out to forge a music career outside of the company’s strictures.
The valet side of the equation wasn’t much better either, as Sharmell essayed a beauty queen character who was required to do little more than be an object upon which The Boogeyman spat worms. Literally.
Enter AJ Lee. After an inauspicious start during Tough Enough, Lee proved she wasn’t one of the other girls… by both breaking out of the mold of her love-starved, madness-tinged character and insulting the other girls. Sigh.
AJ was both unique for her time and unique for the company when she burst out and became Divas Champion. The first character since Trish who could be universally loved by every single age group the WWE marketed to, she was placed in a series of love angles that – rarity of rarities – she was allowed to leave, control and manipulate. Not since Sunny had we seen a female character take control of her romantic and professional life with such smooth fearlessness. She was a heel, but not a slutshamed one. She became a Raw GM within months of her first initial push as a wrestler.
Then came the pipe bomb. While it was the first real salvo for the Divas Revolution, it came at the expense of girls-hating-girls and insinuating that the only reason the company employed the Bella Twins was because of their behind the scenes relationships and that women like Naomi didn’t have value because they started out portraying cheerleader types. In its feminism it was retrograde and backwards, suggesting more feminine, girly gimicks were less than because of their native girliness.
But to the credit of the company, a lotus grew from the ashes. Nuanced, different characters emerged from the NXT system and began to claim the stage even after AJ retired from the game, from the irrepressible Bayley to the confident Sasha Banks to the electric Asuka. Angles were based around the same sorts of things that caused men to fight – honor and principal. For the most part. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.
While the WWE struggled with its demons, TNA’s women’s picture at this time surged ahead, then fell backwards. On the plus side of things, it managed to be diverse; only on TNA would ODB, Gail Kim and Lacey Von Erich be pushed all at the same time. A lot of the foundation work for the variety of the Divas revolution was also rooted in the early part of TNA’s women’s division – but TNA also hosted embarrassing storylines like the Claire Lynch fiaso. There were labor disputes – an incident where Daffney, working a Sarah Palin-like angle, was injured and then denied compensation for it- and for a long time, their main heels were The Beautiful People, dedicated to cleansing the world, “One ugly person at a time.”
In Summation:
For every advancement that women’s wrestling has made in the modern era – from the emergence of intergender wrestling as a marketable pursuit for the first time since Chyna was active, to the first all-women Royal Rumble match, to Sasha Banks and Bayley headlining their first NXT Pay Per View, to the Mae Young Classic, the booking of women in the WWE has alternated between interesting ideas to old, retroactive ones that barely generated heat.
We’ve had amazing booking to set up the Bayley/Sasha angle – and terrible booking in the Alexa Bliss/Bayley angle of last year, where the company nonstop destroyed Bayley’s character by infantilizing her, virgin-shaming her, and then allowing her no offense in the kendo stick match between the two women.
Conflicted thinking continues to haunt the company’s booking. Subjecting us to weeks of Alexa Bliss making fun of Nia Jax’s weight (ironically while standing beside Mickie James) was a tooth grinding reminder of weight-based angles of old… and provided a completely satisfying experience watching Nia kick Alexa’s butt from pillar to post. One simply wants the company to give its female wrestlers interesting, varied storylines, the same courtesy afforded to their male counterparts.
One step forward, one step back. Is it sad to say we’ve come a long way when it’s a sign of progress that the company didn’t turn a leaked sex tape between Paige and Xavier Woods into an angle? That we aren’t subjected to beauty vs beast matches and the sight of women rolling around in hot oil? Only the future will tell.
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