Anyone with even a vague relation to a live woman can tell that when it comes right down to it, WWE has zero idea on how to write for women. Someone wrote JEALOUSY and THAT L THING THEY DO ON THEIR FOREHEAD THAT MEANS LOSER in permanent marker on the creative whiteboard, and no one saying the words “Divas Revolution” has bothered to buy a damn Magic Eraser.
While we can buy into what WWE is selling, and paint one half of their working women as ‘real’ wrestlers, and chant YOU CAN’T WRESTLE at the other half, in doing so, we tend to forget the people playing out these parts. Recently, Paige addressed just how difficult it can be to work under a team of writers who have probably never observed women outside of the fictional reality of WWE-produced shows during a Q&A at Wizard World Comic Con. She says that she ‘picks her battles,’ a phrase every woman (including this one) has unfortunately been told to do in the workplace.
One such ‘battle’ was the 5-1 incident at Survivor Series that saw Paige, a heel, outnumbered by faces, having the opposite effect as intended:
I knew it was going to turn out the way it did because I was on the bad guys’ side, but I said to them, ‘There’s five girls against one girl, even if she’s a bad guy, [the audience] is going to support the one by herself’ and that’s how it turned out. The whole crowd ended up turning on the good guys and chanting for me instead, but it’s just like, ‘Okay, so you’re dumb. I told you this.’
Another issue that went ignored with awkward, yet hilarious consequences? The time they named her stable after a porno and gave BangBros a 56 percent spike in traffic:
I said to a couple of the writers, I was like, ‘Dude, Submission Sorority? Don’t let children google that. So we have to, like, change it.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, we’ll speak with Vince at some point.’ And, I’m like, ‘Okay.’ And then I see we get called the Submission Sorority on RAW the next day. There are millions of people watching, and then suddenly people are like, ‘Oh great, you’re in a porn group.’
Now, I know this is a pretty crazy idea, but maybe if you’re not a woman and you’re writing about women in wrestling, maybe it’s a good idea to take more stock in a woman who was literally in a wrestling ring since her time in the womb? I know, I know, it’s pretty out there, but hey, take a chance. You know, if you can do it without making all the other boy writers jealous, I guess.
(Via Reddit)
