There’s something incredible happening in the world of wrestling.
Yes, wrestling.
I felt it Monday evening, watching WWE’s: “Monday Night Raw” event live in Charlotte.
The lineup included one women’s match, a title bout plopped in the middle of the three-hour show. The reigning champion, Charlotte, daughter of wrestling legend Ric Flair, entered to resounding boos. Her opponent, Sasha Banks, came in to cheers. This was a good sign: in years past, fans used the women’s matches as a cue for a bathroom break.
The fight kept the audience pretty attentive before ending in a count-out, which means there was no winner. It was announced that the match would restart later, a no-disqualification match, and it would be the main event.
The crowd roared.
Recently, WWE noticed a change in how viewers responded to the women’s matches. The divas, as the women were called until recently, were viewed less as competitors and more as eye candy. When the E! Network’s Total Divas launched in 2013, viewers got an inside look at how hard the women worked. Fans began to respect the women for what they were seeing. For many of them, it was something they were seeing for the first time.
As Total Divas gained a following, new, younger female talents were joining the WWE with a desire to wrestle, not to wear stilettos and to hang on the arms of male wrestlers. They hustled to put on matches that were better than those of the men —because the women realized that to gain more respect, they had to hold themselves to a higher standard.
(Does that sound familiar??)
As this all was occurring, in February 2015, a women’s match lasted less than a minute on live television for WWE. The response made it clear that the women were making an impact. The hashtag #GiveDivasAChance started trending on Twitter, and WWE took notice.
Kristen Wile lives in Charlotte, N.C., where she is senior editor of the city magazine. She met her husband, Jon, working at The Washington Post, and she describes herself as a recovering wonk. American University grad, Upstate New York native and the proud parent of two rescue pit bulls, Rosie and Titan, and a tortoise, Desmond.