WWE Is Bringing Back Intergender Wrestling With Becky Lynch Vs. James Ellsworth

WWE lost a lot more than its PG-13 rating when the Attitude Era ended well over a decade ago. Among the many other match-types and somewhat-racy themes that died with the Attitude Era, intergender wrestling is something that’s been a no-no on WWE television for a long, long time.

WWE’s reasoning here has always been pretty straightforward. Both Raw and SmackDown are billed as PG, family-friendly television shows these days, and while WWE will occasionally skirt that line, they stay in-bounds more often than not. The fear with intergender wrestling is that you’d be potentially promoting a man beating a woman, and despite the fact that you know what’s really going on inside of a WWE ring, a lot of the PG viewers might not, and WWE has a lot of advertisers to answer to.

While WWE has shied away from intergender wrestling recently, a plethora of indie wrestling companies, along with Lucha Underground, have embraced it. To the credit of those performers, namely Kimber Lee and Candice LeRae, they’ve produced some incredible intergender matches, but the stigma around intergender wrestling remains. A lot of people, wrestlers included, just don’t like it.
WWE’s history with intergender wrestling, and the recent lack thereof, makes Monday’s announcement that Becky Lynch will be wrestling James Ellsworth on SmackDown this Tuesday all the more shocking.

According to Cathy Kelly, Lynch and Ellsworth are fighting over who is the ‘true captain’ of SmackDown’s Survivor Series team, but this feud between Lynch, Carmella, and Ellsworth is something that WWE has been building for weeks. The match itself is less interesting than the tonal shift from WWE here. Could this indicate a significant return of intergender wrestling on WWE television?

This is a good test case for WWE, if nothing else. From a simple eye-test, Ellsworth vs. Lynch has the aesthetic of a fair fight. This isn’t Bubba Ray putting Mae Young through a table with a powerbomb.