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| The Bellas did good. Photo Credit: WWE.com |
“They are the busiest, yet most successful women I know and they are those women who, when you meet them, you want the most success for them because they are so sweet, so genuine,” she told PEOPLE at the Billboard Music Awards. “They’ve gone on to Total Bellas. They have their wine. Now that they a skin care, they have pet shampoo. I think it’s fantastic what they’re doing.”The Bella Twins are obviously WWE's biggest overall female success story. They went from Johnny Ace Special signings to being decent (Brie) to excellent (Nikki) wrestlers in the ring, holding their own with the influx of indie wrestler signings that signified the beginning of the "Women's Evolution." They additionally found success out of the ring as breakout stars of Total Divas, leveraging it into their own spinoff reality show. While WWE will eternally prop up Trish Stratus and Lita as the foremothers of the women's division that shouldn't have needed to wait until 2016 to get respect, it's really the Bella Twins as their most successful act.
I would not be writing about this interview if it was the only notable thing to happen surrounding it. 411 Wrestling, perhaps the top aggregator site in wrestling news, had to go and editorialize, not in their recap article, but in the tweet, screenshotted here in case they end up deleting:
"Alright then." The condescension drips off that phrase like ice cream off a cone on a hot summer day. I don't know whether the person composing that tweet is some kind of wrestling snob who discounts the success of the pre-Women's Evolution models-centered signings or if they can't believe someone would say the Bellas are more successful than, say, Ronda Rousey. Where I might understand the disbelief is if they thought it was a line fed to Bliss from Vince McMahon. Hell, Ryback tweeted that everyone has to give over their social media passwords to WWE, which was corroborated by Mike Johnson of PWSpyware on their Elite audio. They love controlling narratives, although to me it feels like a People interview where Bliss praised two women who are in WWE's orbit loosely right now feels sketchy.
Regardless, that kind of attitude continues to show that the industry is a perilous proposition for women in all facets. The news reporters and aggregators are barely different from companies who marginalize women while claiming they're lifting them up. I mean, WWE likes to pretend that it's some champion of women's rights by having them headline WrestleMania, but unless they were involved in a title match, you couldn't find another woman on the card unless they were in a "let's get everyone a Mania paycheck" battle royale. They do the bare minimum and expect plaudits for equality. Wake me up when they find something for Nikki Cross to do on a regular basis.
But the reporters back these attitudes up the way they slant their reports. Brushing off the success of the Bella Twins from someone who really admires them because they either don't meet some arbitrary standard of success or because they're so sexist to believe that women from a less progressed era of WWE could never attain such success as those after a random date. It shows how the industry needs a top down cleansing to rid it of all the sexism steeped in it.
Whether you like it or not, women are taking over. More and more women are getting into the business, and more and more they are demanding spotlight. The fact that they're kept in seperate promotions or in boutique divisions feels wrong. Among the big players who run shows, WWE has probably the best usage rate on women, and their women's division still needs room for a ton of improvement. The fact that the fourth estate is lagging behind instead of jumping out in front and calling these promotions on their shit is troublesome. Whether it's Dave Meltzer or 411, wrestling journalism has to do better when it comes to talking about and advocating for women in wrestling, and it can start by not condescending to a woman when she cites people that may not have the best critical reputation as inspirations.
