Why on earth is the first big post-Mania story in women’s wrestling one where we encourage the audience to boo and hiss at a woman who leans into traditional expressions of femininity?
I don’t want to imply that I think Moolah should be less reviled — but rather that Vince McMahon receives less than he deserves. They’re two peas in a pod as promoters who benefited by treating wrestlers like resources rather than people.
I thought that trying to suss out the pay gap between male and female wrestlers would be easier — they’re all doing the same job for the same company. It was not.
I think the real things to be said about this match have to wait for after WrestleMania. Right now it’s a lot of talk and hype, but how it’s handled in the heat of that “WrestleMania Moment” is what’s going to determine what it means to the trajectory of women’s wrestling.
Last week I talked about how the implicit “not like the other girls” trope sticks in my craw, and there’s an extension of the train of thought that actually interests me more: the notion of who is allowed to be pretty. I think about a lot because it hits personally for me — I spent
Wrestling is a narrative — it’s a tale told in dropkicks. Like with any narrative work, calling on tropes that the viewer recognizes is a shortcut in character growth.
Someone saw this photo on the Internet and decided that the best way to describe what they saw was “catfighting.” Nevermind that one of those women may be one of the notable champions of women’s wrestling in the early 1900’s. It’s an image of two women fighting, so what could they be doing other than “catfighting?”