My love for women’s wrestling is entirely accidental.
In the early days of the Internet Wrestling Community, back when it took an hour to download a small JPEG of Sunny in her bikini, there was no streaming and no easily accessible wrestling beyond the scant offerings at your local Blockbuster.
Nevertheless, we persisted.
Super fans shared wrestling from around the world by trading VHS tapes, stacking VCRs on top of each other and making grainy copies of matches from both long ago and far, far away. Once a week I’d make the short drive to the post office in Athens, Georgia with dozens of video tapes to mail around the country (and even the world).
I’m pretty sure the postal workers thought (my now wife) Kristina and I were involved in some kind of amateur porno operation. What else could explain the constant flow of tapes?
At the time, that would have been less embarrassing than admitting you were a hardcore fan of professional wrestling.
Like many fans in the 1990s, I gravitated towards All Japan Pro Wrestling, obsessed with the solid, thudding strikes and suplexes that walked a razor’s edge between paralysis and perfection. Soon names like Kawada and Kobashi stood right alongside Jordan and Woodson in the pantheon of my personal athletic gods.
That’s why, when I was first introduced to All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling, it was a bitter disappointment. I got the tape by mistake, expecting to see Stan Hansen clotheslining a fool’s head off. Instead it was women. Wrestling.
Growing up as a fan in the South (or, honestly, anywhere in America), I didn’t know much about women’s wrestling. It simply didn’t exist. While women might occasionally pop up on live cards here and there, they certainly didn’t appear in the ring after Arn Anderson at 6:05 PM on the SuperStation, so I had no idea what to expect.
Addicts aren’t particularly choosy when the Jones’ing gets bad enough, so eventually that women’s wrestling tape made its way into my Hitachi even if it wasn’t the particular high I was chasing.
To say my mind was blown is an understatement.
Simply put, Akira Hokuto, Shinobu Kandori, Aja Kong and the gang were every bit as great as their male counterparts, often surpassing them on both a technical and emotional level. Soon enough, Japanese Joshi (which basically translates to “young woman”) wrestling joined my regular rotation and I collected hundreds of tapes of women in their early 20s pretending to fight in leotards while wearing very questionable hair styles.
It was pro wrestling at its very best.
I write all this to say that I’m not opposed to women’s wrestling. I’m inclined to enjoy and support women stepping in the ring to hit each other right in the mouth. I was a women’s wrestling super fan before many of you reading this were even born. I understand that the gentler sex is every bit as capable of perpetrating obscene displays of simulated violence as their male counterparts.
More-so at its height.
Unfortunately, the women’s revolution was slow coming in the United States. While the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling reached a certain niche audience in the 1980s, athletic-oriented women’s wrestling didn’t exist in a very real way until Sasha Banks, Bayley and Charlotte Flair dragged the WWE into the future. At the same time, Ronda Rousey emerged as a major worldwide pay-per-view sensation, serving as a proof of concept and showing women could draw real money in combat sports.
That energy was crackling just as All Elite Wrestling launched in 2019. That same year Rousey, Flair and Becky Lynch main-evented WrestleMania, showing women could be presented at the sport’s highest level.
Expectations as AEW launched were high, especially when it seemed likely many great Japanese talents would make their way to these shores. Some even suggested Joshi-style wrestling could be AEW’s answer to the cruiserweight division that made WCW undercards so much fun to watch in the late-1990s, a chance for the promotion to show fans something they hadn’t really seen before.
Then the women’s division landed with a distinct thud, failing to fully launch and never quite recovering as year one quickly became year three. There were standouts and the emergence of one bonafide star, the charismatic heel Britt Baker and a serious prospect in Jade Cargill. But, for the most part, fans could expect a single women’s match a week on the main television shows and a collection of occasionally awkward matches on the YouTube side programming. With the exception of a couple of memorable bloodbaths, the entire division has felt like forgettable filler, hampered by COVID and an inability to import talent from Japan as often as planned.
Critics (both legitimate and bad-faith trolls looking for something to latch onto), have consistently pointed to the division as the main chink in AEW’s thick armor, a rare misfire for a promotion that has hit the bullseye time and again in one of the best runs of television in modern American wrestling history. In their version of the narrative, women in AEW aren’t used properly and deserve more time on television. Some even track match times to point out the lack of fairness in AEW’s presentation, starting from the position that men and women should be equally represented on wrestling television.
The truth is a little more complicated than that bad faith counting suggests. There are only a handful of English-speaking women capable of performing at an elite level, making it hard to justify AEW focusing too much television time on women’s wrestling. That’s not really anybody in AEW’s fault. It’s the product of the almost complete absence of women from the sport for decades and WWE’s focus on cat fights and PG-13 level displays of tits and ass that mostly characterized women’s wrestling in the Attitude Era. The women’s wrestling infrastructure in America just wasn’t ready or geared to quickly launch another national promotion out of the gate. Camera-ready, experienced talent just didn’t exist to allow AEW to get up and running.
This is the first generation of American women given the opportunity to develop as true well-rounded professionals. They have been dropped in the deep end with no life guard, sinking or swimming with nary a life boat in sight. There aren’t any Chris Jerichos to bring in on the women’s side to drive interest and help develop younger talent. Women from that generation were relegated to wrestling in their bra and panties and, frankly, weren’t very good. There were a few promotional missteps, most notably the perplexing decision to devote precious TV time and promotional energy to Brandi Rhodes, an inexperienced wrestler who wasn’t able to convert that time into anything meaningful.
For the most part, however, AEW has done a decent job utilizing the talents they have access to. More importantly, as far as establishing intent, when Baker did catch fire with the audience, they were quick to respond. She was given a real and sustained push when it was warranted. A good faith reading of that situation makes it clear that AEW is willing to give women a chance—when the audience does.
That’s good wrestling promotion.
Slowly but surely women’s wrestling is growing in the United States. The next generation of women like Cora Jade and Sky Blue will have established stars to emulate and learn from. In ten years, we might be in a place where you could reasonably suggest that a pro wrestling show give equal time to men and women.
We aren’t there yet. We’re not even close.
Right now, AEW has three hours of national television. That’s not enough time to feature the many established, top-level acts Tony Khan has been collecting like Pokemon cards.
CM Punk, Bryan Danielson, the Elite, Keith Lee, Jon Moxley, Adam Page, FTR, MJF, Chris Jericho, Jungle Boy, Wardlow, Lucha Bros, Sammy Guevara, Swerve, Pac, Andrade, Team Taz…you get the point. The AEW roster is diverse in every meaning of the word and it is large. There are many mouths to feed and only 132 minutes of television time to dole out.
And that’s before you start adding two women’s wrestling champions into the mix. Some AEW fans say they want to see more women on their television. But at whose expense?
Television time is already in short supply. Adding a third women’s program means something has to fall off the show. That doesn’t benefit the audience—it’s as simple as that. As cruel as it sounds, the bottom half of the AEW women’s top 10 is not operating at the same level as most of the men in the promotion.
I don’t say that with any animus. If you started a third show centered on the AEW women, I’d watch it. But, if presented a choice between Bryan Danielson wrestling on TV for 15 minutes or a young wrestler learning her craft in real time, well, I’m choosing the Dragon. And I don’t think I’m alone. We’ve been to more than a dozen AEW shows live and the women’s match often coincides with long lines at the rest rooms and concession stands. Likewise, television ratings frequently see viewership decline during segments featuring women’s wrestling.
Does it suck for young talent to be competing with the likes of Chris Jericho for 10 minutes of television time? Yes. But AEW is the big leagues. Performers have to earn a place on the card. It can’t be gifted—fans see right through that kind of pandering and it doesn’t benefit anyone to be given opportunities before they are capable of delivering on them. Many careers have been knee-capped when a wrestler was pushed beyond their ability to execute what’s required.
I understand the desire to see more opportunities for women in wrestling. I’d like that too. But, right now, I think AEW is actually doing a good job of mixing women in where they can and where it is merited, while also doing the hard work of building a promotion from the ground up. Securing a major TV deal is the key to the promotion’s future. Right now, AEW needs to do all it can to build stars and attract an audience on television.
Checking certain boxes to appease critics is a concern a company that’s already made it can worry about. They are trying to highlight the best wrestlers—gender, it appears from the outside is a secondary concern. And, considering the company is still trying to secure its footing in a very tumultuous business, that just makes sense.