It’s about freaking time.
For as long as I’ve watched wrestling, women have been demeaned, disgraced, sexualized, and under-appreciated. With the sole, SOLE exception of Trish Stratus and Lita, women in World Wrestling Entertainment have been nothing more than eye candy to the company’s apparent target audience since the late 1990’s. Terrible gimmick matches, such as “pillow fight” matches, scoured the weekly televised programs, as the color commentators drooled like depraved monsters over the athle… wait, no, excuse me, DIVAS (WWE’s term for women wrestlers), who deserved much better. The quality of the wrestling within the ring compared to watching preschoolers dance during the halftime show of a basketball game, and of course it would. Women wrestlers attempting to improve their in-ring ability during that time would be like asking a mascot of a basketball game to improve his half-court shot. It really didn’t matter. Why improve when your skill would never be properly utilized. Sure, wrestlers such as AJ Lee, Naomi, and Natalya had talent, but when you are given storylines like “You’re crazy,” or “You are a cheerleader to a man who pretends to be a dancing dinosaur from another planet,” or “You fart a lot” (And Jesus Christ, those last two were actual gimmicks), your success hits a hard glass ceiling, nay, a brick ceiling. Actually, think of the hardest ceiling material that you know, and that was the ceiling that women wrestlers had.
That is, until NXT.
NXT, WWE’s developmental brand, had gained quite a following since its inception since 2012, and one reason for this is because the women on the brand had the same type of matches, the same amount of time, and thus, the same amount of respect from the audience as the men. Women wrestlers such as Paige and Emma were huge hits, proving that in this day and age, women’s wrestling should be women, well, wrestling. However, another problem arose, because while NXT management was prepared to give the women all the time they need, WWE management, stuck in the past was not, stunting the growth of the women, and creating a fear within the NXT women and their viewers that no matter how great their ability, they would have to lower themselves to the same draconian rules and time slots that the WWE “divas” get.
Four women, however, would elevate the NXT women’s division and the entire brand to a level that no one saw coming.
Sasha Banks, Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, and Bayley. Many compare them to wrestling’s legendary Four Horsemen, dubbing them the Four Horsewomen. But for me, they draw more comparisons to the cruiserweights of WCW and the SmackDown Six. Just as the cruiserweights and the SmackDown Six, these women had such talent, and participated in such captivating matches, that they not only elevated their position within the division, but the division itself as well. For a literal year, ever since the now legendary match at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn, in which Bayley defeated Sasha Banks for the NXT Women’s championship, the Women’s Division of WWE skyrocketed in importance, from the “Diva’s Revolution,” a storyline that, while sloppily done, was a full-blown storyline that give the division more direction than it’s had in years, to the renaming of the “DIVA’S” division to the Women’s division, including the unveiling of the new Women’s Championship, which was followed by maybe the best match of Wrestlemania.
The Women’s division still needs some work. In a 3-hour Monday show, WWE management could do much, much better than 3 minutes for the women. However, after watching NXT Takeover: Brooklyn 2, after watching Ember Moon pulling off one of the greatest finishing moves I have ever seen, after watching Asuka and Bayley destroy each other in one of the most physical matches of the year, I can safely say that compared to the “Diva’s” division of yesteryear, this Women’s division is a thousand times better. Women are finally being given a chance within the WWE today. And it’s about damn time.
