Some girls wander by mistake....

7:50 am - Wed, Feb 22, 2012

11 notes

The Moral Responsibility of the WWE; or, Lifting the Sport Into the 21st Century

doctorawesomus:

In the last twenty-four hours, we’ve had CM Punk fall into a Twitter beef with convicted woman-beater Chris Brown and we’ve had John Cena, in character, trash a WWE Diva as a slut who has the woman disease and is a slut and also a slut. To say that wrestling, as a performing art of the carnival sort, is ill-equipped to deal with any sort of moral dilemma like this is redundant; Brandon Stroud, who has emerged not only as one of the funniest writers about wrestling, but also as its moral conscience, has already written an impassioned piece about how wrong it is for the top star of the company to slander a woman as a disease-carrying slut in front of his audience, and he makes it personal and fiery in a way I never could.  CM Punk’s response about his online kerfuffle is also necessary, for the cold fury that’s within his words. (I’d love to see Punk, who’s ascending the ladder of stardom, resolve his own in-character problems regarding femininity with the same steely resolve that he does out-of-character.)

I would like to like wrestling unabashedly.

I would like to not hide behind a pseudonym and fully embrace this wacky hybrid carnival spectacle and really enjoy it, but I can’t. I can’t, because the standard-bearer of this performance art routinely allows the worst sort of awful inverse-moralistic bullshit to pervade its programming, from its top star through its commentators down to encouraging its fans to tweet sexist nonsense. I would like to enjoy the performance art spectacle of astounding athletes battling and leaping through the air, to have it act out its own pocket versions of heroic epics, to have its televised Achilles vs. Hector and all the marvelous catharsis that can come from that, without feeling like I’m a goddamn knuckle-dragger who implicitly encourages this sort of bullshit in the year 2012.  (The fact that all of this is occurring while the Republican Party, at a loss for anything else to run on this year, is declaring a full-on Handsmaid-Tale jihad on women’s rights regarding reproductive health and choices about pregnancy is either coincidence or a Jungian gestalt, but it all feeds into the overwhelming insecurity pervading “real America” right now.)

This is about the WWE making a conscious decision to be better.

I get that Cena’s promo about Eve got a huge pop, just like I get that Chris Brown has women tweeting that he can beat them all he wants. I get that the WWE is laying the narrative track down as the train approaches, and that it’s easy for them to write themselves out of a bad angle (which Kane always seems to be involved in, weirdly) by blaming a lady and then moving on to the next thing. That doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it palatable. As long as the WWE insists on depicting heroes vs. villains, it has a narrative duty to make the villains actually villainous, and to make the heroes worthy of cheering. Just because you can play to the atavistic impulses doesn’t mean you should. And just because Cena seems like a genuinely good guy doesn’t mean you should give him a script that tells the children that women are horrible.

I get that the WWE knows its core demographic and that they’re vaguely threatened by vegans and treating women like people worthy of respect. That doesn’t mean you have to play down to them. Because there’s the business reason for doing so, sure — playing up to and beyond an audience’s moral intelligence might actually cultivate a larger fan base in the long run, one who’s not instantly turned off by Jerry Lawler, of all people, calling women “fat” — but there’s also the fact that the very demographic that the WWE is targeting is wrestling (hah) with all those “coastal trends” that are a fait accompli to us Northeast liberals but are now a very real part of the fabric of “real America,” that bullshit term used to describe the people Vince McMahon thinks will still eat up the nonsense they sling on a weekly basis on RAW.

When Vince expanded wrestling beyond its narrow niche in the 1980s, and when wrestling exploded in the 1990s, he garnered potential lifelong fans who could have still been fans long afterwards, except he saw a survival demographic and pandered to it. Hell, Bill Simmons would still be watching RAW if he didn’t know that wrestling “is what it is” and hadn’t matured, both as a person and as a man, to realize that for all the in-ring innovations, the builds and the promos and the trappings are still hopelessly awful and kind of degrading to everyone involved, including the audience. (I assume. Bill Simmons is free to speak for himself.)

Please: stop. Broaden your horizons. Don’t even go there, don’t dip into those empty wells that aren’t even applicable to modern life any more. Be better. Be better people, be better artists, just be better. It’s not enough to say, “wrestling’s always been like this,” because a) it hasn’t and b) CHANGE HAPPENS, and not to realize that is not only pissing away dollars (oh, business talk), but is condemning something goofy and weird and fun to never realize its full potential.

All of this. Reblogging in it’s entirety because a) brilliance, b) relevance, and c) thinking about all of this only causes unintelligible swearing and exasperated, high-pitched ranting.

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