Cool It on Gendered Language, K?

Not sure I'd trust this guy to tell me who's a man or not but hey
Photo Credit: Kevin Steen

NWA Powerrrrrrr has been a good find for the first two weeks. The third episode dropped yesterday at 6:05 PM Eastern Time, but I haven't gotten to it yet. That being said, it's a breath of fresh air for old school wrestling done by guys who have a knack for timing. The promos are mostly good too. It's refreshing to see a show that lets guys talk without overscripting. There are some missteps, however, as with any wrestling show. The most glaring to me is the insistence that Powerrrrrrrrrr is for "men." Multiple times an episode, whether it be Eli Drake or Jim Cornette or someone else, there's this insistence that the NWA has MEN. It was mentioned once that the counter for the comparison is "boys" rather than "women," but you can see how it might be troubling when that clarification only comes up once in the second episode. Even without that qualifier, insisting that your show is for "MEN" spoken by people with a history of chauvinism might be off-putting.

Contrary to popular belief, gay, trans, and nonbinary people watch wrestling. So do women. They go through life being told that they're not good enough to do hard tasks because they're not MEN. Many of the people harassing, assaulting, and demeaning them are MEN. Toxic masculinity is a big problem, and when it tends to be brought up, especially concerning wrestling, it gets dismissed because what's more masculine than wrestling, even though many of the best wrestlers of all time are women, the very best among them being Japanese women who weigh less than Yokozuna's legs. I think you can have masculinity, or things that people consider to be masculine, without them being toxic.

For example, All Elite Wrestling, one of the companies that Cornette at least is accusing of being filled with boys compared to the MEN they have without actually saying their name, has a lot of hard-hitting action. It might be in a different style than what the NWA presents on Powerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, but it goes hard to the point where there's no denying that under different presentation, they could be considered MEN. About the only thing I dislike about the presentation is Jim Ross' insistence at saying things like "Sonny Kiss may be weird BUT BAH GAWD HE'S TOUGH BELIEVE ME." Jim, no one who tunes into Dark or Dynamite thinks Kiss isn't tough or doesn't belong. He did the same thing with Shinsuke Nakamura at WrestleKingdom 9. But Ross by far is the worst part of any given telecast. Otherwise, the fact that people like Kiss and Nyla Rose can be who they are without qualifier on Dynamite leads by example.

What can Powerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr do to improve presentation? I see nothing wrong with the intent of what they're saying. Wrestlers like Drake and both Storms and Trevor Murdoch are rough and tumble. They're not fancy. They hit hard. That's not the domain of men compared to boys. They're certainly not the domain of men compared to women, which to their credit, they acknowledge by featuring Allysin Kay, Ashley Vox, and other fierce female competitors. There are ways you can put that across that aren't yelling at various LGBT+ viewers you might have, whether or not you realize you're doing it. A little bit of care goes a long way.