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| Should the King of Sport also have a Queen? Maybe, but it's not a big deal. Graphics via NJPW1972.com |
The fact that women don't wrestle in New Japan is a seeming point of contention for a group of people, many of whom are WWE partisans. In order to give this post an air of good faith, it needs to recognize that many of them argue in bad faith, like they are riding into battle on behalf of WWE, a shining feminist beacon from the top of Titan Towers in their minds. Granted, not all of them have this mindset, but those who don't tend to attract the WWE stans to their cause like flies to honey.
Of course, I don't need to explain why a pro-WWE slant to this argument is bunk. While WWE does allow women to wrestle, the roster is hardly what I would call robust. A women's non-title feud has about as good a chance of making the pay-per-view card of a non-Evolution show as I do of winning the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Feature Film. Even though Ronda Rousey, Becky Lynch, and Charlotte Flair headlined WrestleMania, you can look at their pay compared to men in far lower positions than they are and see they're not seeing the fruit of their labor comparative to men in commensurate positions.
Within a decade of the present, the women had a bedazzled parody of how a toxically masculine meathead sees as feminine for a title belt, and they couldn't even get a title match on WrestleMania on a regular basis. Within 20 years of the present, WWE had "Hot Lesbian Action" as a running show component and had a pillow fight as the only contribution for women to a Mania card. The company's answer to having a "women's revolution" is ignoring that past ever happened instead of acknowledging and apologizing for it.
Of course, the WWE partisans are bad, but those who aren't WWE partisans on the "NJPW is BAD for not booking women" argument might have an argument if it wasn't so low on the totem pole of priorities in wrestling. Not caring if women in New Japan is a tenuous position morally, which makes the best position probably that "everyone involved wants it to be this way, so leave them alone." Granted, that's a bad argument too, but it's the least bad out of all of them. The issues in wrestling that trump it are numerous, because if you haven't noticed, wrestling is a shitty, shady business. You could nail New Japan for more serious matters like its treatment of its roster medically, how Hiroshi Tanahashi may have been pressured to work with an injured arm because he was needed, rather than doing something drastic like trying to elevate someone else or giving, say, Hirooki Goto a better faith push than the one he had had recently.
The WWE partisans seem, as a group, mad that Dave Meltzer among others give New Japan better critical cred than they do WWE. Again, if you wanted to ping Meltzer on grounds of misogyny, well, you could look at he and Jim Ross brushing off the accusations of domestic abuse from Tomoaki Honma's girlfriend or his mishandling of accusations against Sean Orleans or more pointedly Michael Elgin of rape, domestic abuse, and covering all that shit up. While no billion-dollar corporation like Bushiroad deserves to get off scot-free because of the fact that they're willing participants and beneficiaries of capitalism, what people fail to realize is that any sins of theirs do not atone for the grotesque actions of WWE. It doesn't make Bushiroad or New Japan "good" in a moral sense, but it certainly makes them better than WWE.
The reason why no one really comes out good in this argument is that the people defending New Japan use just the worst reasons. "Gedo can't book anything but a main event scene, so he shouldn't be trusted with women." Then New Japan should release everyone that isn't in the core five or six people in conversation for the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship. "It has always been like this in Japan, so I have no real authority to tell them no." Well, certainly, people outside of cultures that practice rancid customs have said things about those rancid customs and been right. Women have always been treated as second-class citizens in Saudi Arabia; care to tell detractors of that regime not to comment on their culture? "I don't want to see Bushiroad raid joshi promotions." I don't either, but don't pretend it's not happening from WWE. Sure, WWE has only poached Kairi Hojo and Io Shirai from STARDOM so far, who were both rumored to be victims of top-level joshi's longstanding "old women can't wrestle" policy. However, don't think that when NXT Japan starts up that Paul Levesque won't start taking joshi wrestlers for his own vanity. "Oh, it's only men arguing for New Japan to have women." Yeah, and most of the people I'm seeing make counterarguments are men too. It's almost like Wrestling Twitter is dominated by sexists who push women away, whether or not they identify as feminists.
Just because these people aren't making good arguments doesn't mean they're not marginally in the right. It's just their reasoning is embarrassing and probably the reason why every three months or so, some dipshit like Allan Cheapshot feels emboldened to proclaim "If you don't think New Japan should have women, you are WRONG." Most people try to use morality as a weapon instead of a shield, and that's when things get really stupid. While no, gender segregation in the big Japanese companies isn't exactly ideal, it's also so far down on the list of things wrong with pro wrestling that I can't imagine caring about it so much that I'd want to relitigate it quarterly. As with so many other problems, this "problem" would go away with the socialization of wrestling and moving it away from capitalism. Because that might not happen anytime soon, it's a problem that I think people will have to deal with it, whether or not they think it can earn them brownie points with some section of Woke Twitter.
