A Valentine's Day Plea to WWE

No more of this for a year (or ever)
Photo Credit: WWE.com

It's Valentine's Day, a Catholic saint's feast day which has been co-opted into a multi-million dollar event for the greeting card, stuffed animal, confectioners' and restaurant industries, under the guise of celebrating love. Granted, being married for almost four years now, I celebrate it with my wife, although neither one of us really goes overboard with gifts. That's besides the point though. Anyway, it feels like to me that whenever there's an angle that involves a man and a woman intermingling together in WWE, it involves love, or at the very least lust. Women are referred to as Divas who are smart, sexy and powerful in name only, and their only interaction with the men is as romantic interests.

No matter what anyone says, this doesn't mirror real life completely accurately. Especially in the way WWE always seems to portray the women in some negative capacity compared to the men. Then again, this is the same company whose Divas division is about as fully formed as post-conception zygote. WWE is a bastion of sexism and misogyny in pro wrestling, even more so than any other current company. So this next plea is going to be like shouting into an abyss eight times the size of the Pacific Ocean.

Now that that's out of the way, I want to beg, plead with WWE to consider dropping any and all romantic involvement between men and women as the basis for intergender angles for a year. I'll allow a grandfather clause to be instituted for the current Eve/Zack Ryder/John Cena love triangle, but after that, if men and women are going to interact, it should be as normal human beings, not as people who want to bone. Obviously, this seems to be extreme, but that's for a reason. WWE has leaned on the crutch so long that they really, really need to go in the opposite direction to course correct. They should develop stories where the genders mix and not only is sex not an option, but the women should actually be portrayed as intellectual equals to the men, if not superiors.

This isn't some bullshit affirmative action desire. Far too long the women in WWE have been treated as lower-than-second class citizens. People want the women to have a better build, but how can they if their characters are all not fleshed out and seen as shells of what the men are portrayed as? This perception can't be fixed by intermingling alone with themselves. They need to be shown respect by the men. Once they're given that currency, then they can start on the path to relevancy.

I fully expect that nothing of this sort will happen in WWE until the mindset of (or the personnel in) the front office changes. That being said, I'm just putting it out there. On a day when love is celebrated and profiteered, WWE should ignore it as a storyline trope and focus on making their women characters human rather than booty-popping, backstabbing eye candy.