Take up thy wrestling boots and walk - Suffragette City
Submitted by Pt2 on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 9:14 PM EST



DISCLAIMER: The following column is intended for satirical purposes only. It is not meant to seriously infer anything about the character of any persons mentioned within, nor is a statement suggesting anything untoward about WWE programming, or pro wrestling in general.


Where the hell did the audience go?

Remember just a few short years ago? Bill Clinton was President of the United States, Tony Blair was a popular figure, the Patriots still sucked, and virtually every male (and quite a few females) you knew would watch professional wrestling on a Monday Night.

It’s no secret that the RAW rating hasn’t exactly been what the WWE would like for some time now. I can’t help asking to myself, what happened to all those guys who were watching RAW religiously throughout the eighties, and throughout the attitude era. They’ve obviously all drifted away, but why? What has precipitated this shift in viewing habits?

I don’t think its bad angles. OK, we’ve seen more than our fair share of them over the past few years. Katie Vick jumps immediately to mind. HHH and Chris Jericho feuding over hand lotion don’t exactly inspire anybody, either. There’s Al Wilson (not technically on RAW, but still worthy of a mention), Vince McMahon’s explosion, and year after year of mind numbing diva searches.

But there is often a selective memory in play when people remember the attitude era, and people forget about the absolute preponderance of bad angles that we got when the WWE was supposedly at its best. Mae Young giving birth to a hand has to be at least as bad as anything we have seen in the past five or six years. The Bossman – Big Show feud must rank as not only the number one inspiration for fellow columnist Wevv Mang, but also as one of the greatest pieces of unintentional comedy of all time. I mean, seriously. ‘I GOT YOUR DADDY!’. Can’t beat that.

No, it isn’t the fact that we are getting a mouthful of shit from time to time, because we’ve always gotten the dud angles mixed in. Some people still maintain that the business is cyclical, but I’ve never really held that to true, myself. OK, so we’ve seen 2 cycles since Vince McMahon took over. They were up, they were down, they were up, and now they are down again. But the cyclical argument to me just seems like some weird kind of optimism. A sort of, things will work out OK in the end.

As far as I’m concerned, it was nothing to do with a ‘cyclical nature of the business’ that caused that peak that ended the first trough. It was literally the pressure on a highly competitive individual like Vince McMahon, combined with having a talent like Steve Austin, in the right place during the right social climate to become incredibly popular. There is nothing ‘cyclical’ about that. There is no guarantee whatsoever that they will ever create a superstar like Austin again, and saying that people will latch on to whoever is at the top, regardless of talent or how they are portrayed, is frankly laughably naïve.

No, I don’t buy into it being cyclical. I don’t think people are away simply because they are ‘burned out’ on wrestling, and that eventually people will come back because it’s cool again (not without the company actually managing to proactively find a way to make it cool, at any rate).

But I have to confess, I am running out of options. The cyclical nature comment tends to be a popular one, and it satisfies a lot of people. The other obvious reason would be related to issues in the quality of the programming, but like I have said, these have always been there. I have to admit it, dear reader, I was stumped.

Until I hit upon an epiphany. Now bear with me, this might be a little hard for some of you to swallow.

Hulk Hogan was on top of the company during the company’s first big surge. He was the man, the myth, the legend, the immortal, unstoppable Hulk Hogan. He was as popular as any wrestler has ever been. He was little short of a Greek god in the eyes of the viewing public.

Was it because he was a flag waving, patriotic sumbitch who took the title back from Iran? Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Lex Luger were both real patriotic, but they never reached the heights that Hogan did. Hell, they didn’t even come close.

Was it because of the Immortal Legdrop, his finishing manoeuvre? Doubtful. Yokozuna’s legdrop was always much more impressive, considering the incredible weight that was behind it.

No. I propose that Hulk Hogan’s popularity came because he, on regular intervals during the late eighties, beat Sherri Martel on live TV.

How often can you remember any time he got down with Savage or DiBiase, it ending with Sherri getting a hard right hand, or her head banged into the turnbuckle, or back body dropped, or any other combination of female abuse you can think of? Hogan (and occasionally Beefcake) beat her so many times I’m surprised he could even lift his arms by 1991. And he wasn’t alone. The evidence continues to mount, have no fear.

How many people reading this can recall Randy Savage’s 1987 heel run on the Intercontinental title? You remember how he treated Elizabeth? Pretty shitty, huh? Making here walk around behind him, not letting her do any interviews, making her stand exactly wherever he told her too and the like. He did all that to a woman on live TV, and within a year of losing the IC belt, he was one of the companies top good guys, was in the Wrestlemania main event, and was the WWF Champion. He treated his woman like shit on TV, and the fans took him to their heart.

The first time round, the company was fuelled by the success of the Mega Powers of misogyny – Hogan and Savage: Woman haters.

But then you look at the first downturn. Hogan quits the WWF, and is gone for years after Wrestlemania IX. Savage serves in a reduced role for another year, but is basically nothing but a sideshow – and besides, by this point he is (on screen) reconciled with Elizabeth, and so his drawing power is gone.

Their misogyny is replaced with Bret Hart – whose image certainly couldn’t get any cleaner – and Lex Luger, running with the Hogan patriotic gimmick, as the WWE mistakenly assumed that it was that that made Hogan the fan favourite that he became. As we all know, the audience tanked. Hart certainly had a lot of purist fans, but neither he nor Luger had the necessary girl-tossing qualities required to pull in those larger audiences.

The WWE gets in trouble as the edgier, racier WCW takes the lead in the Monday Night War during 1996. Bret Hart is on sabbatical during this time, and Lex Luger has defected back to Atlanta. In fact, it’s not unfair to say that through the hard summer of 1996, it was the draw power of one man in particular that kept the WWE afloat. That man was Shawn Michaels.

Michaels is an odd one to position. His gimmick is that of a heartbreaker, some one who uses women for sex and then leaves them, lying on the bed – to borrow a phrase from Axl Rose. In the early days, he certainly was misogynist, treating the much put upon Sherri Martel as if she were a piece of meat. You might argue though, that by the time of his popularity skyrocketing, all of the woman hating streaks were gone from his personality, and he was just a fan friendly babyface with a hint of attitude.

But you’d be wrong. He didn’t have a tremendous amount of on screen antagonism with the ladies during his best years, but he enjoyed an incredibly antagonistic relationship on screen with Sunny throughout the first year or so of his babyface run, The most obvious moment has to be when Shawn tricked Sunny into kissing his ass in front of a live crowd, in a moment that was relayed to the viewing audience at home for the best part of a year afterwards.

This playful level of woman hating drew Shawn enough attention to keep the WWE afloat during their darkest hours, but he didn’t have the serious misogynistic credibility in order to draw in the girl-tossing viewing public that would turn the tide in the Monday night war and restore the WWE to the top spot.

That would come in the Attitude era. I mean, think about it. Steve Austin pretty much stunned everything in sight. How many times do you think he stunned women? I’m sure it doesn’t actually bear thinking about. Then there was the kidnapping of Stephanie McMahon by the Undertaker, as even characters that had previously been completely removed from this sort of activity got in on the act. Dustin Runnels and his actions towards Terri at the tail end of 1997, broadcast live on TV, were followed pretty quick on the heels by the whole ‘Marc Mero is jealous of Sable’ angle, which most people might have forgotten, but Sable ended up losing; she had to be ‘saved’ by Vince McMahon. The Rock gave Stephanie the Rock Bottom at one point, and his popularity got so big he went on to be a fuckin’ movie star.

But these are all only minor incidents compared with two of the massive drawing points of the attitude era. It’s no secret that the WWE viewing figures were at their highest during in 1999… when Jeff Jarrett, in a complete coincidence, just happened to be running a misogynist angle. Think it’s any coincidence that the WWE happened to get the biggest ratings of the Monday Night War when Jeff was regularly beating up and scrapping with not one, not two, but THREE women? The Kat, Debra McMichael (later Williams… more on that in a minute) and Chyna all caught the wrong side of Jeff at some point during that angle.

If that’s not enough for you, how about the fact that the WWE put the final nail in the coffin of WCW during the year 2000 – when the Dudley boyz put absolutely anything female through a table? I remember Lita, Trish Stratus, Terri, Stephanie McMahon, Stacy Keibler, and even Octogenarian Mae Young all ‘getting wood’ at some point. You can’t tell me you don’t remember how absolutely crazy the crowd went every time one of those pretty little things went through a table? I can remember when Trish took the plunge to this day. I doubt the Washington crowd could have made more noise if they had tried.

But then, it all went wrong. Jarrett was gone. The Dudley Boyz stopped putting people through tables, and eventually went into singles competition. Vince treated Trish Stratus like a dog, Austin kept the flag flying for a little while with his treatment of Debra (now his wife) throughout the alliance angle, and HHH attempted to keep the faith by hitting his (supposedly ex) wife with the Pedigree upon his return from injury, but as these incidents got few and far between, the audience dwindled.

We don’t really have too much of this today. They are freak occurrences. Sure, there have been incidents in the wrestler’s private lives. Austin and Debra’s marriage seemed to be case of life reflecting art; Randy Orton apparently has been a concern, and there are other incidents that probably shouldn’t be mentioned again. Not here.

But none of this stuff is in the on screen product, and THAT is why people are staying away. If you are reading this, the odds are you, like me, still watch wrestling, so we are OK, we are excluded from this, but the simple fact is that if you only watched wrestling when it was big, you were probably only watching wrestling to see pretty girls get the shit kicked out of them.

People talk about wrestling being a misogynist product, but we’ve solved the equation. It’s really quite simple, when you think about it.

If you stopped watching wrestling in 2002, then you hate women. It’s really very simple.










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