Bitch had it coming - A Consideration of Violence Against Women in Professional Wrestling
Several weeks in the future TNA star and 300lb male Bully Ray is going to enlist the assistance of his similarly sized brother to brutally assault a women one third of his size whilst an arena full of men shout encouragement. Warning, the preceding sentence, as well as many subsequent sentences, contain spoilers for TNA Impact, so those of you living in caves on Mars are recommended to stop reading two minutes ago.
Two large men powerbombed a comparatively helpless female through a table, and the consensus from the crowd at the event, as well as the keyboard warriors reading about it online, is that this was somewhere between 'perfectly OK' and 'fuckin awesome'. I'd like you, the reader, to take a few minutes of your life to accompany me on a journey as we look into why this is the case, and search for the conclusion as to weather or not it is a good thing.
Contemporary wrestling has had a very hit or miss relationship with its treatment of women as characters, with significantly fewer hits than misses. Researching the issue, I was alarmed to discover that TNA is actually the high point of the American industry in this area. SPIKE TV has always maintained an iron-cast boycott on male on female violence, and those angles Impact has run which crossed into this territory, Bobby Roode abusing Tracy Brooks and Bobby Roode (again!) punching Sharmell, were handled with what for the medium accounts to class and sensitivity.
Ring of Honour, which likes to pride itself on being the highbrow wrestling alternative, is guilty for allowing the continued existence of those appalling She's a crack ****e chants long into the new millennium, and once ran an angle where the late Larry Sweeney punched a women in the back of the head and then forced his client to publicly rape her whilst a section of the audience chanted Suck her tits.
The WWE's record has been extensively scrutinised already. The attitude era was a hotbed of exploitative male on female violence being played of shock value. The man at the centre of next month's controversy, then named Bubba Ray Dudley, made a habit of powerbombing women for what amounted to shits and giggles. Since the swing towards PG content things have got a lot quieter on the eastern front, but I'll remind you that it was only a couple of years ago that Randy Orton was sexually abusing an unconscious Stephanie McMahon in order to sell a Wrestlemania main event.
The less said about WCW and ECW the better.
So, to the surprise of nobody, we've successfully established a pattern in the hyper-masculine pro-wrestling industry's treatment of the fairer sex next we have to establish the extent to which this is unacceptable. Obviously this will vary from person to person. There are those out there for whom any kind of physicality directed against women will always be several steps over the line. Similarly, those sub-human creatures who were in the Ring of Honour crowd applauding Sweeney's escapades probably wish he'd ripped Alison Danger's clothes off and taken a shit on her face.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm going to be approaching the topic from the perspective that violence against women is wrong, but I'm going to attempt as close to an objective analysis of the situation as I can. I can't promise a total absence of personal bias, but this is not a cunning 2000 word Trojen horse to smuggle my viewpoint into your head.
In honour of that, despite being firmly against violence against women in professional wrestling, I'm going to begin my analysis by looking at a few of the times that I feel it has been used well, or at least acceptably, over the years. Like any sufficiently detailed historical analysis, we're going to start with Chyna.
Chyna was routinely beaten up by men. Eddie Guerrero attacked her from behind with a title belt at survivor series and not an eyebrow was raised. This is because the cultural taboo against violence towards women does not actually have anything to do with women; it's a taboo against violence towards those who are unable to defend themselves. Violence against women elicits much the same reaction as violence against the disabled, or violence against children.
Chyna was an imposing athlete who routinely locked up with male competitors on equal terms no vulnerability, no taboo.
Another occasion that comes to mind of violence against women being used well comes from the TNA angle I alluded to earlier, where Bobby Roode punched Booker T's wife in the face. For those without a basic grounding in TNA, just imagine a mildly better executed version of Jericho punching Rebecca Hickenbottom. When Roode inadvertently punched Sharmell it was taken seriously by everyone involved. The commentators, athletes and even Roode himself recognised it as being incredibly serious, and there was absolutely no question that, accident or not, Bobby Roode was the bad guy. It wasn't exploitative like Vince McMahon's abuse of Trish, and it wasn't played for shock value like Sweeney. Wrestling tries to tell stories, and sometimes in a serious story you have to show a bad guy doing a bad thing as long as the situation is treated with respect and not played for laughs or exploitation then I don't see a major problem.
Where I start to feel incredibly uncomfortable is when violence against women, or children, or the physically or mentally disabled is presented as something funny or entertaining. It's not funny. Where I find it even more troubling, is when I see it being presented as acceptable, appropriate or (as in the case of future TNA) commendable.
Ahha! I hear someone somewhere declare at this point, I have spotted the hypocrisy in this argument. Even if we all agree that violence against women is wrong, so is violence against the elderly, but I didn't see people complaining about Bret stoving Vince's head in with a chair at Wrestlemania.
Personally I complained loudly because that match was a pile of shit, but to take this not unreasonable counterpoint seriously for a minute, and to leave aside the obvious dodge of Vince probably being able to run circles around Bret there's a greater point to be considered here. Violence against women is, I hope, unquestionably wrong, but so is almost all violence. There are absolutely no circumstances, outside of self defence, in which it is tolerable to hit people with a steel chair, yet we happily tolerate that in our wrestling broadcast why then should the same logic not be applied to the powerbombing of women through tables.
My counter to this is that, as a society we don't have a major problem with this kind of physical violence. Steel chair assaults and random suplexings happen, but they're not a major aspect of our day to day lives. What we do have in our culture is an enormous problem when it comes to violence against women. Around two-and-a-half-million women are assaulted or raped by their partner in the United States EVERY YEAR.
There are those out there who will pretend that this has nothing to do with professional wrestling, but those people are wrong. It has very little to do with professional wrestling, but the connection is there. The justification of this claim: history. You remember that fucking terrifying domestic abuse statistic I gave you seventeen seconds ago? Well that's about the best it's ever been. It used to be, and in sections of the world still is, considered culturally acceptable for men to beat their partners. It wasn't until 1970 in the US that courts even started to recognise the idea that marital rape could exist, and before those days violence against women was routinely tolerated or ignored.
That cultural taboo we all grew up with against hitting women didn't just happen. It took a fucking lot of hard work from a lot of people over a long period of time to make it happen. The violence against women acts, recognition of equal legal rights and the portrayal of women in the media are all battles that are continuing to this day. Every time any form of media belittles, trivialises or otherwise contradicts this taboo it works against it and very gradually moves us back the way we've come. I'm not going to blow things out of proportion and say wrestling is causing violence against women, but it's working to strengthen an eminent social structure that defines the beating of women as acceptable behaviour.
Going back to Dixie Carter (remember her) for a few minutes; I was cruising the internet recently absorbing the reception to this segment and a disconcertingly large number of people seemed to be making remarks in the vein of 'Dixie getting beaten up was OK because she was evil'. Her character was a baddy, and therefore had it coming.
The university of Arkansas commissioned a study into domestic violence motivation in 1997 wherein perpetrators of violence against women were asked to explain their motivation in the wake of incidents, and the overwhelming majority of rationalisations given by the domestic abusers was that there were provoked or enraged by their partner, who in some way shape or form 'had it coming'.
Correlation does not imply causation, but when you have the same reaction to violence against women in the media as to real life, it makes you wonder. We have a very significant portion of the population, mostly young males who fit snugly into wrestling's target demographic, who appear to be of the opinion that there are circumstances, outside of immediate self defence, in which it is wholly appropriate to hurt, molest, abuse, rape or otherwise kick the shit out of women who can't defend themselves.
With this in mind, I humbly submit that having televisual media directed at these young men re-enforce this world view is not a good thing.
Obviously I don't beat women, and hopefully neither do you. As such we should be free to enjoy watching Dixie Carter consensually go through a table for our entertainment; but the world is a bit bigger than just us. We don't see the ten million victims of domestic violence since 2010, but as long as I know that they are there, I don't want to enjoy media which visibly contributes towards their fate.
Violence against women is not funny, it's not entertaining, and in the real world away from internet hypothetical involving shotgun toting transgender Hitler, it's almost never appropriate. If your showing it as a bad thing in a serious story then more power to you. If you're writing that inevitable Wonder Women movie then have at it. But showing a gang of men delivering a beating to a defenseless women whilst a larger gang of men cheer them on, that's not cool, and I don't plan on watching it.
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That's the consensus that I've arrived at after subjecting the matter to quite a lot of thought. You doubtless have your own and, conditionally on it being more eloquent than 'it's wrestling so who gives a shit', I am at this point legitimately interested in what it is. Oh, and because I feel the need to do this post every piece of writing I produce here, the TL : DR jokes are not even remotely funny, and are made exclusively by people with small penises.
