Tired of Sex? You Might Be Alone on This

Kiss happens sometimes.
Photo Credit: WWE.com

On my way into work this morning, one of the commercials on the radio show I listen to was for the local news (I know, I know, but my iPod's broken and it's either that or silence), promising details on a salacious, "inappropriate relationship between two powerful school administrators." Their hook was that they had intercepted "flirtatious e-mails" from the two. Were they one or both of them married? Were they exchanging sex for favors in the district? Were they coordinating dirty boning sessions? Were they just flirty e-mails sent between two consenting adults? Of course, you'll have to tune in to find out. I personally won't, because I really don't care what two consenting adults do in the bedroom. What they do is their business, and the business of the people they're hurting if they happen to be married/engaged/in a relationship with someone else.

But you know what? I am not most people. The news stories that blow up the biggest are about people banging. It's true. David Petraeus could have dropped three MOABs on Karachi, Pakistan despite the fact there was no one from the Taliban or al-Qaeda in a three mile radius of the city, and he wouldn't have gotten the media scrutiny he's getting right now for having an affair with his biographer. It's why gossip rags sell like hotcakes. We want to know who's having sex, where they're having it, and why they decide to have it with each other instead of with poor Jennifer Aniston.

So, if you want to know why WWE is running with John Cena and AJ Lee as an item as their co-top story right now, it's because people love to watch other people have sex. Or at least they like to imagine how it would be if they were having sex. That's the heart of the angle. It's an attention grabber. The more I think about it, the more I actually appreciate it as a story too. I thought that the execution was bad for a few reasons.

First, I thought it was bad because Vickie Guerrero was the biggest hypocrite of all of this. She MARRIED Edge when she was in charge of Smackdown. But with that part of the story came the realization that Vickie Guerrero is a villain. She is supposed to be a hypocrite. Then came the thought that it was bad because no one brought up that Guerrero was married to Edge. Cena himself actually brought this up, and it was shot down because Guerrero is not someone acting rationally here. That trump card was not going to stop her because she doesn't care about being proven wrong. She cares about getting to Lee.

Then, there's the idea that Guerrero's pettiness is annoying, and I'm guessing that's the point of this. They want us to be mad at Guerrero for throwing every circumstantial piece of evidence at Cena and Lee for whatever reason, so why let her act with the panache of a Bond villain? Hell, why does anyone think they cast her in the role as temp boss instead of someone who COULD be a Bond villain?

About the only thing I'm not a fan of with this story is the fact that the slut-shaming of Lee is at the heart of it. Yes, Guerrero and Dolph Ziggler are going to get their comeuppance out of this, or at least they should, but the fact remains that Lee has bounced around from Daniel Bryan to CM Punk to Kane to Cena and possibly to Ziggler if WWE Creative is going to go full predictability on this. That's five people within the span of a few months. Now, to me or possibly to you or to a sane person in a gender-equal society that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist), that's not a big deal. To the WWE writers and the fans who not only like to hear news stories about sex, but make judgments about the sex people have and the number of partners they have it with, that's a "bad" thing.

But the fact that there's a storyline involving people hooking up? Well, it's not exactly the best way to go for a company that's famous for its misogyny. If all things were equal though, it would make total sense. No matter what footing the males and females were on comparative to each other, when you get them together, they're going to want to bone. And when they do, the fans and casual observers are going to want to be there to watch. It's easy meat. I don't really know if WWE is going to continue on with it as well as they have been in retrospect.

But let's not get all indignant just because people be hookin' up on a wrestling show. You may not like it, but man, the number of people who do and who are reacting to this angle have to be digging this between getting their fill of the Petraeus scandal and wondering which two young Hollywood stars are getting together next.