Another key to this story is April Mendez, A.J. Lee, Punk’s wife and still a WWE performer under contract, who is out of action with a neck injury. Mendez was supposed to return and had been booked in a return angle and was scheduled on shows, and was supposed to return at some point soon (of course that has been the case for weeks). She is still in the Raw open. Given the situation, it will be far more difficult for her to return, and actions on 2/24 made it worse.
The company had expected her back from her neck injury for about two months.
Mendez, 27, made her role more interesting on 2/24. After Stephanie McMahon tweeted “Thank You Patty Arquette for having the courage to fight for women’s rights on such a grand platform,” in response to Arquette’s Oscar acceptance speech for winning Best Supporting Actress in the movie “Boyhood.”
Arquette said, “To every woman who gave birth to every citizen and taxpayer of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States.”
Mendez, on Twitter, called McMahon a hypocrite for her backing what Arquette said.
“Your female wrestlers have record selling merchandise and have starred in the highest rated segments of the show times. And yet they receive a fraction of the wages and screen time of the majority of the male roster.”
Mendez was a strong merchandise seller when she was around, but the formula on a percentage basis for merchandise for most of the roster is the same, with a few top stars getting higher cuts. None of the women sell at anywhere close to the level of the top guys.
Women’s segments were rarely above average rated during the period I was getting segment-by-segment breakdowns, until about a year ago. That said, Mendez was working key segments with people like Daniel Bryan, Kane and C.M. Punk and some main event segments that did very well. Actually, in TNA, there was a period where the women were in the highest rated segment of the show most of the time, and far more than the high paid stars like Sting, Kurt Angle, Rob Van Dam, Jeff Hardy or even Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair. None of the women earned anything close to what the male stars earned, and only a few times were they put in the main event segment even though they consistently outdrew the main event segment.
As a general rule in WWE, and of course there are exceptions, the women are paid significantly less than the men at similar levels, and obviously when it comes to match time, that’s an indisputable point. In NXT, that isn’t the case. I was told that the women in NXT actually, as a general rule, make more than the men, because so many of the men came from indie backgrounds and are willing to come in at any price to be in WWE. The women, many
of who came from modeling, like the male athletes with backgrounds, are paid better for the most part, with the idea that the women need to earn at a certain level to maintain the kind of looks the WWE wants their women to have.
But the problem as much as time is also the portrayal. On the main roster, they are portrayed not as athletes, fighters, talented technical wrestlers or brawlers, or even women with serious issues with each other. Their storyline issues are generally more shallow and childish. While it’s not 100% sex objects as in the bra and panties days, the women are still there more as sex objects and less as wrestlers, athletes and true superstars than the men are.
Their role is to wrestle in provocative outfits and for the most part their worth is based on their looks far more than the men. No man could have gotten out of developmental with the skill set of Rosa Mendes, Cameron or Eva Marie. There is no argument about equality in portrayal or money that can defend the company on this one other than it is what the wrestling business has always been.
While it is about looks for men to a degree, you will never see an unattractive woman with a bad genetic body, no matter how talented they are technically, in a WWE ring. Sara Amato, who trains the women in NXT, I would not call unattractive at all, yet she was deemed not attractive enough to be anything but be a trainer, even though she was a more talented wrestler than almost all on the roster. Melissa Anderson is probably the furthest thing from unattractive, yet she never did nor is she likely to ever get a WWE look and it was said to be because she didn’t have the right look. One woman who was cut by WWE, and ended up having a successful long career in TNA, said she was told when released by John Laurinaitis, even though she was doing well as a wrestler, that, “We’re looking for tens and you’re not that.” Others at the recruiting level were told that while WWE no longer would allow their performers to pose in Playboy, what they are mainly looking for is women physically attractive enough to do so.
They had done angles in the past to portray Molly Holly as fat, Mickie James as fat, and Natalya and Gail Kim as unattractive.
But where we are now is a big improvement from ten years ago, but yeah, Stephanie McMahon was really asking for it not to have the perspective to the can of worms she was opening up. While they expect none of the talent to have the guts, or stupidity, or whatever you want to say, to criticize them, it’s not as if people aren’t starting to talk due to the jealousy by the main roster stars of the praise that the women in NXT have gotten because they are portrayed more athletically, put in consistent real semi-mains on big shows, and are allowed time for their matches.
It’s the whole WWE main roster vs. NXT women’s portrayal that has become a hot topic the past few weeks. Given those portrayals, Stephanie did completely open herself up by giving that response to Arquette. But who would have thought any of the women would dare do it? But one of them did.
And by doing so, I guess that tells where she is mentally about WWE right now.
The story, once USA Today picked it up, caused the twitter of Vince McMahon to respond, saying, “We hear you. Keep watching,” with the hashtag of “Give Divas a chance.”
Stephanie responded in very un-McMahon after a public attack like fashion, writing to Lee, “Thank you. I appreciate your opinion.”
Clearly, she had no other way to respond past ignoring everything, because any kind of a defense would open the story up more and bury her and the company, and the story had gotten too big to do that.
One person familiar with the situation as it was going down said Mendez wrote what she did on her own, it wasn’t an angle and the company was completely blind sided by it. Stephanie was absolutely furious at being shown up and made to look bad by one of their own employees, but that seeing the big picture, Vince McMahon ordered Stephanie to respond in the way she did. The only thing the company could do under the circumstances was to diffuse the situation as quickly as possible, because stories about unequal treatment of women starting to get out are can’t wins, similar to the company’s quick attempts of late to quell charges about being racist to Latinos.
It’s also notable that it makes twice that talent has complained publicly and not gotten the burial treatment in response. Darren Young, who hadn’t been used, who was brought back to TV although his push with the recreating of the Prime Time Players has every fingerprint of every three week and forget push. This came off his complaints about WWE running shows last week in Abu Dhabi due to how that country treats women and homosexuals. He was ordered to take the tweets down, however. Lee did not take her tweets down.
This was a contrast from the day when Steve Austin complained about bad creative, and then was booked to lose to Brock Lesnar on Raw with no build-up when Lesnar was still climbing the ladder. Well, that didn’t work out well for anyone.
Like I wrote a few weeks ago, they’ve got three ways to play this. They can make an overt break from the past, make it clear, tell people it’s coming, get rid of certain talent and bring up the NXT talent and make those who can go the focal point in longer matches. If they do that in one fell swoop and stick to their guns, it may or may not be a success. It’s a success in NXT, but NXT is a terrible lab for ideas because the audience make-up is so much smaller and more narrow than what WWE needs. But that doesn’t mean it will fail on the main roster. Athletic women’s wrestling in Japan in the late 70s and early 80s was far bigger on Japanese television then the Attitude Era Monday Night Wars were on U.S. television. But what works in a different culture isn’t guaranteed to work here either. And while that style of wrestling still exists in Japan, it is not very popular today, as, like everything, it’s heyday was largely based on being on network television in strong time slots, and when it could no longer do network caliber numbers, Japan doesn’t have hundreds of secondary channels that still do good numbers that an entertainment form can be built off.
They can do a slow change, something Paul Levesque talked about having to do, when talking about the world changing and Ronda Rousey’s appeal. The problem is, there was no slow change involving Rousey. Dana White went 100 miles an hour shoving her down people’s throats, and quite frankly, opened himself and herself up to the idea of a huge failure. And plenty of people were wishing for that to happen.
Or they can keep doing what their vision of wrestling is, maybe do some lip service, make some slight tweaks, humor the audience, but until you see a woman’s match in a similar spot on a WWE house show or PPV show that it is on an NXT show, then it’s really lip service.
And quite frankly, it could fail. Vince tried with Wendi Richter and Alundra Blayze to make women pro wrestling superstars and both were major failures. It wasn’t the push in either case, it was the public not accepting the push. At the same time, in the 40s and into the early 50s, at a time when promoters lived and died based on weekly box office, women headlined all the time everywhere because the top ones, if not overused, could outdraw the men. I’ve seen weekly dockets from strong wrestling cities where women headlined all the time, and Mildred Burke was treated in the promotional material with equal reverence to Lou Thesz.
Times change and the only way to know what will happen now is to legitimately test it out.
What we do know is the current method of portrayal of the women comes across as a time filler. The angles are usually bad. The matches are rushed.
Some of the women pushed are not very good, and a few are better than they are given the chance to show. When they get to the big show, based on the portrayal on TV, their angles aren’t over. People then see their matches as filler between the important stuff and they don’t get a lot of reaction. Unless there is a marked change in portrayal that is made a big deal of and is based around featuring a lot of talent that hasn’t been on the main roster in the key spots, the current system will continue.
Is it possible the current audience will never accept anything else? Yes. At the same time, everything so many said about what the UFC audience would buy or accept turned out to be false.
In the end, the UFC fan base has reacted much like the NXT audience. The sex of the competitors isn’t very important. If the match is exciting, the fans like it a lot. If it’s no good, the reaction is the same as a men’s match that isn’t any good. The title is over and it draws, but that’s more due to the superstar who holds it than the belt itself.
Carla Esparza has a belt and she’s not going to draw with it, and people aren’t going to care a lot about her fights. Miesha Tate just set a prelims viewership record with Sara McMann. Ronda Rousey would draw equal to any man in the company if she had the same caliber of opponents, and even without them, outdraws the heavyweight champion and most of the other champions.
Brooks, who has been quiet since the lawsuit, and I presume he will remain so on the subject until it is settled, did back his wife with a remark saying right after, when someone wrote “Your wife is pretty rad,” from the remarks, he responded back, “Yes I am aware. I should totally marry her.”
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