Talking about women’s wrestling in the US on social media is basically a cursed topic, mostly because of stan culture and the always entertaining stopwatch people; it doesn’t matter if it’s in AEW or in WWE, talking about women’s wrestling is just a curse topic, especially if we talk about WWE.
Last night we saw WWE pull a bait-and-switch on the previously announced steel cage match between Becky Lynch and Bayley. We would later find about thanks to a report by Fightful that the reason to this bait-and-switch was due to the Sami Zayn and Bloodline segment went too long and the steel cage match needed to be trimmed down due to time. The fact that a heavily advertised match suffered because of a segment can be forgiven, but when the women’s division is always the ones that suffer all this on a consistente basis, a pattern exists, and one that has been around for too long. WWE could’ve easily cut time from any of the legends’ segments, but they chose the women’s match as the one to cut time, something we would see consistently in WWE pre-women’s revolution in the main roster.
Many people in wrestling have the misinformed idea that WWE has the best women’s wrestling in the world, the reality of the situation is that several have surpassed WWE on this, and not only that, WWE has regressed in some aspects of their women’s division, and this trend keeps going, unfortunately for all the talented wrestlers they have under contract.
When women’s matches were short or not even booked on RAW or SmackDown, the general excuse given was that of being Vince’s fault or saying the illogical argument that women had segments instead of matches and that was okay, well, Vince is no longer in charge and Paul Levesque is now in charge of booking the main roster we still see episodes of RAW and SmackDown with very short matches, and bad booking.
WWE in social media has been able to dodge criticisms, at least for the most part due to people like stopwatch people are more focused on AEW and timing the women’s matches there. This lack of criticisms on the women’s division for such a long time have allowed WWE to keep doing their bad booking on the women’s division, and that’s why you still see things like what happened with Lynch vs. Bayley or episodes of SmackDown with zero women’s matches on a consistent basis.
The regression of the women’s division in WWE is something that has been happening for a long time now, and people are just starting to see the effects of it. Terrible decisions like picking Ronda Rousey ahead of Mercedes Mone (AKA Sasha Banks) are decisions that in the long run will hurt WWE a lot, especially if another big name in the women’s division of WWE decides to make the jump to another promotion.
We can pinpoint the exact moment women’s wrestling regressed in WWE; that was in 2019 at WrestleMania 35, the first Mania with a women’s match as the main event was a historic moment for women’s wrestling, the match itself wasn’t something special but it has an historic moment, the culmination of years in the making. After that moment, WWE stopped trying and slowing started to regressed to bad habits in terms of booking, and even with Vince gone those bad habits and bad booking are not gone.
People will create hashtags like #WWEWomenDeserveBetter, but come next week people will forget about this, and all the criticisms they are giving currently to the women’s division of WWE, and we’ll be back to square down, as WWE slowly regresses even more in their women’s division.
