Despite the gains and momentum that the North American women’s wrestling scene has gotten over the past decade, many predominantly white male wrestling promoters still treat and view women’s wrestling as today a “filler match”, “bathroom break match”, let alone just to fill out a “quota” for the sake of putting a women’s match on the card.
AEW has had massive issues when it comes to the awful booking and mishandling of their women’s division and it’s year 4 and they still can’t book the women well. It’s no secret that TK doesn’t care too much about women’s wrestling as shown in his self-inflated egotistical and masturbatory actions such as: 1. book a match with no build or story to it (WWE is massively guilty of doing this for many years and they still do today) 2. start a story and drag it out for way too long with no payoff such as no Women’s Blood and Guts. 3. absolutely no follow up to what happens to women who lose big matches especially big title matches 4. put them in the 9:15-9:30 pm “death slot” 4. focus on the same women like Britt and Saraya and The Outcasts.
For the past 4 years, one of the biggest legitimate constructive criticisms from The IWC about AEW is the mishandling and bad booking of their women’s division where they’re not given the time to develop their characters in promos/vignettes let alone have more than 1 women’s match because to them and TK, it’s not their top priority. If they’re willing to give certain performers who definitely should not be on tv like Jeff Jarrett and QT Marshall, then they should definitely devote more of that time to the women and I don’t mean a meaningless and forgettable 1 minute squash match from two weeks ago or last week’s dreadful women’s match on Dynamite. It’s understandable why Mercedes and Trinity snubbed AEW because they were like “hell naw we ain’t going there” to AEW because of the mistreatment and disrespect towards women when it comes to the bad booking as well as the toxic backstage politricks that have badly plagued the women’s division in AEW.
This is not just an ongoing issue with AEW, but this has been an issue with WWE under the current regime where Charlotte is still lingering around the world title picture, paying certain people like Ronda Rousey too much money for doing the bare minimum at the expense of full-time women like Shayna Bazler who work day in and day out to make good money. They also focus on mainly The 4 Horsewomen and that still continues to be a problem for WWE today. I have always hated how badly they’ve booked Asuka on the main roster because every time she does get a big win let alone a big title win, she always gets relegated to being second fiddle to either The 4 Horsewomen, Ronda, Carmella, and even to Bianca Belair (who I absolutely love to death btw) during her 4 month feud with Damage Control last year. Asuka is easily one of the best wrestlers let alone women’s wrestlers of the modern era and I am a big Asuka fan and I have seen her have killer matches when she was Kana in Japan against the likes of Joshi legend Meiko Satomura, Syuri, and especially Hikaru Shida. Asuka deserves better than how badly they’ve booked her on the main roster.
The issues regarding booking women aren’t just limited to WWE and AEW, this problem also happens at many U.S. indie wrestling promotions because I have seen female wrestling fans make posts on social media talk about how they would see mostly caucasoid men get up and go to the bathroom right before a women’s match is about to happen. I have also seen many U.S. indie promotions where they mostly have either 1 or 0 women’s matches and that’s absolutely egregious and totally unacceptable.
The Conclusion - To bring about genuine change when it comes to the women and women’s wrestling in general, these predominantly white male led American wrestling promotions should let a female veteran or someone else who has a much better track record of booking women’s wrestling better because at least they know and understand how to book women’s wrestling so that these women can one day reach their full potential and growth either as a on-screen character or an in-ring performer. Do Better By The Women!!!
By Kwame Shakir
