Rob: Who’s Worth What?

So this week while we were all spending too much time on Twitter the WWE on Fox account put out one of those ‘You got $15, pick your team’ for some of the ladies in the WWE, with different dollar amounts per row.  Now the real hook to these things is who costs ‘too much’ and who’s getting shafted by being listed way too low.  But in the world of pro wrestling, where that decision is being made about you by the boss with no way to overcome it on the field it can have a whole different meaning.  After all, if you’re in the $1 tier you can’t just go out there and beat one of the $5 tier women because it’s not a shoot fight.  So being in the $1 tier can be a bit too on the nose sometimes.  Which brings us to Natalya, who was listed on that tier and went off about it, followed by several of her co-workers, leading to another banner day on Wrestling Twitter.

I’ll admit that my initial reaction was “y’all are really mad about THAT?” but over time and after some conversations here and there I looked at it a different way.  One of the things that I saw that made a lot of sense was that the tier meme wasn’t coming from some random guy on Twitter or some dirtsheet writer or some YouTuber, it was WWE on FOX who are in connection with her employer.  And because of that it can easily be taken as a sign of what her employer thinks about her.  And that would sting no matter who you are.  Look, most of us are some level of expendable on our jobs but you don’t want them telling you that.

Yeah, but they did these with the men and nobody cared!

OK, you do know that the men and women get criticized on entirely different levels about everything.  To boot:

• Kofi Kingston got his jaw broken during a match against Cedric Alexander and Shelton Benjamin and nobody said a word about either man being unsafe or even tried to find when it happened.  Meanwhile Nia Jax gets called unsafe when she does moves that look rough and don’t injure anyone, complete with gifs, slow motion clips and everything.
• Even aspect of how they look – hair, makeup, gear, their bodies, – gets put under a microscope every week while the men can all come out with basic black trunks and the same haircut and the same facial hair.
• The women’s love lives are fodder for all kinds of online chatter, to the point where several have gotten accused of getting a push by way of sleeping with the right guy on the roster.  An accusation that is rarely lobbed at the COO of the company, who is only married to the owner’s daughter.
• The women get the worst parts of stan culture way more than the men do.  All the insinuations and rumors of backstabbing, hating each other, being terrible people compared to other fans’ favorites are cranked up a lot louder when they are the subject.  We laugh about Brock Lesnar shoot punching Braun Strowman but we’ll take what we think is a telling facial expression between two women in a match and craft all kinds of narratives from it.

That’s just a partial list; there’s other stuff out there.  But now as far as Natalya goes, well there isn’t a day that goes by where people be it fans on the internet, podcasters, you name it saying that she serves no purpose and should just go home.  People have been telling her to retire for years – not because she’s slowed down or isn’t good or they’re a fan of someone else but because they just don’t want to be bothered with her on their television.  We all have people that just don’t do anything for us and we’d rather see someone else over but it at least seems like few people have it said about them totally unprovoked like she does.  She doesn’t get booked for wins or championships over some of your favorites, there aren’t any whispers or rumors or made up stories about her being bad to anyone, and there aren’t any posts from her on social media that are controversial in any kind of way.  And yet people constantly are saying that she is a waste of a roster spot and should just retire already.

And if you’re her, then it’s real easy to feel some kind of way about that.  After all she has gone through getting stuck with a farting gimmick and the two minute match era of the Diva’s division.  She has been used countless times to serve as the glue in Royal Rumbles, battle royals, and other multi-woman matches that she had zero chance of winning.  She’s been used as a ‘well, we don’t have anyone else for right now’ challenger to take a loss in title matches and as a first important victory for ladies who either on their way up or returning to action.  And more recently she’s been a trainer for several of the ladies during the pandemic, having them over to the ring she has set up at her house to work on their skills.  A lot of the women who you’ve noticed improvement in lately have been working with her.  Anyone who believes that she has no value to the company clearly has not been paying attention.  And yet, the ones most likely to say something are those very people who call themselves ‘smart’ fans.  Explain that.

Finally, step back and take a look at the bigger picture.  These ladies are human beings.  How many people do we interact with online every day who point to similar kinds of things as affecting their mental health?  How do we react to them?  And how do we react to stories of our favorite wrestlers having some mental health issues?  We put on our capes and fly in to fight everyone when it’s one of our favorites but when it’s someone who isn’t how often do we say or think that they just need to get over it? We really do pick and choose who we think is allowed to be upset and what they’re allowed to be upset about.  And if you’re going to dig your heels in that this is some penny ante stuff that should be ignored…………

Is that how you get down all the time?  Don’t lie, we can see your tweets and every time you got worked up over something “small”.  I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve worked myself into a shoot more than once over some things that you guys may find to be trivial.  So if a take on someone’s worth to their employer gets them in a mood, they’re entitled to that if we’re going to be consistent.  No it doesn’t bother me directly and it didn’t bother everyone there.  But given what she’s gone through there and what she’s contributed it’s not crazy that she didn’t care for that assessment.