Guest Post: How Not to Handle Refusing Personal Information

If someone asks you for their personal information, and you say no, they should respect it

A certain wrestling promotion melted down on Twitter when two female wrestlers decided not to honor the promoter's request for personal information. A friend of the blog, who wishes to remain anonymous, has a commentary on it, and here at The Wrestling Blog, their request will be honored. Please read below:

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It has been zero days since wrestling was nonsense.

What with wrestling consistently being either a garbage fire or a shitshow, and sometimes both at once, you’d be forgiven for missing the latest bullshit in wrestling. A promoter asked two ladies booked on his show for their personal numbers (in case of emergency, even though both people suggested other reliable methods of contact) and both declined. The promoter kept pushing it, and both women posted their encounters on social media. The promotion was named by another wrestler, and things escalated.

By escalated, what I mean is “The promoter got defensive and started making “sexual assault is probably deserved” and “Let me make fun of cancer and suicide” jokes*”, and talent started to take notice and pull out of the show. The theater where the show is booked has been informed, is passing the information along to their governing body, and it looks like the show may not go on after all.

Now, before you hop onto your soapbox and start yelling about how SJWs are ruining wrestling – and I know some of you are about halfway there – have you ever stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, the reprehensible behavior of the promoter when told no probably had more to do with this situation than anyone calling them out on social media did? It would’ve been much easier to say, hey yeah, we know this isn’t acceptable, thanks for explaining, in the future we won’t ask for this.  Instead, once called out, they decided to double down and get horrifically defensive.

What a lot of people seem to forget is that no means no, in every situation. If someone says no, they don’t want you to have their private phone number, respect it. If a talent says no, I’m not comfortable with any aspect of a situation, acknowledge that and work to repair it.

Wrestling is still very much a closed-doors brother brother work environment. It doesn’t have to be.

In cases like this, it definitely helps that for once, it wasn’t.

* - "Jokes" is asterisked because they weren’t funny. At all.