eve-torres-slut-shaming

Worst: Slut Shaming

I’ve spent all morning and most of last night trying to figure out what to write about this. As a guy with a semi-reputable mainstream sports blog and passionate opinions that don’t always vibe with what passes as the Internet Wrestling Community, I run the risk of typing the entire column from a high horse standing on a soap box, balancing myself a few feet above its saddle on the stick crammed knob-deep up my ass.

I’m a wrestling fan. I’m also trying to be a decent human being. The rub here is that I haven’t always been one, and I know it. I grew up in southern Virginia, the child of two black sheep, the only white kid in my block of Section 8 housing. I forced religion on myself. By the time I hit puberty I was racist, homophobic, overweight and pissed off at a world that didn’t understand and constantly disappointed me. I was a different person back then, but before, during and after it, I was a wrestling fan.

Wrestling has done way, way worse than what happened last night. Let me get that out of the way early. This is not some self-righteous thing I decided to feel because of how offended I was, and yeah, I know that every f**king variety of Molly Holly having junk in her trunk, Lita having her sex toys auctioned off until she’s embarrassed into leaving and Trish Stratus on her hands and knees, forced to bark like a dog by the guy who pretend and for real employs her have been worse. A lot worse.

The problem I’m having is how much wrestling makes me feel like that fat awful kid who hated everything sometimes.

WWE in 2012 is TV-PG. The suggestion there is that a kid should be able to watch a show with parental guidance, but they aren’t going to hear the darker side of curse words or see anybody bleed. Mattel cares about that. Apparently what they don’t care about are the things that hurt the development of children much more deeply than seeing someone bleed heavy with a cut — there’s an attitude called “slut shaming” that happened here, and it’s the kind of thing you have to type on a brick wall.

Slut shaming is the idea that it’s okay to shame or attack a woman for being sexual, acknowledging sexual feelings, acting on sexual feelings or having one or more sexual partners. If you’re a woman and you have the sex that traditional society disproves of, you’re bad and you should feel bad. If you wank dismissively hard enough at it, it can be caused by things that don’t even have to do with how much sex you’re having, like wearing tight clothes, drinking, “asking for it” or the myriad of other bullsh*t excuses men with no goddamn sense or compassion use to keep their slippery position at the top of the social food chain.

Shaming a woman for being sexual contributes to rape culture. Rape supportive culture. The kinds of things you don’t want to read about in a comedy wrestling blog, and more importantly, things you shouldn’t have to read about in a comedy wrestling blog.

To open last night’s show, Eve Torres told the Bella Twins that she was using Zack Ryder, and that now she was going to use John Cena. Cena overheard the conversation before she could act on it, so he decided to go out to the ring and lay Eve’s betrayal bare. That in itself is fine, I guess. Eve was doing something bad behind our backs, and the Lead Good Guy on the program wanted to clue us in so we wouldn’t support her.

The first problem with this, ignoring the ten paragraphs I wrote before it, is that it was INCREDIBLY lazy writing. Last week WWE wrote themselves into a corner by having Cena save Eve, Eve respond to it in the heat of the moment by kissing him, Zack Ryder finding out and Kane manipulating everything to get the emotional drop on Cena before their match at Elimination Chamber. Because WWE only writes things a cycle at a time, they found themselves with a problem — they had three babyface characters in a complex emotional situation (written like the worst episode of ‘All My Children’ in history, but complex nonetheless) and needed

1. Fans to cheer John Cena again, because he’s got a match coming up with The Rock
2. Fans to continue cheering Zack Ryder, because he makes them a lot of money

So, instead of introducing any imaginable shade of grey or brief expository conversation between Cena and Ryder that could cause one or both of those things to go wrong, they blamed the woman. The woman who had been kidnapped and abused for several weeks. The woman who got kissed by Cena as much as she kissed Cena. Who simply kissed John Cena.

The idea is that Eve had been “using” Zack. This doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense by itself, because Eve is a former Divas Champion who had turned down Ryder’s advances for weeks, and only recently had come around to not wanting him to be violently injured. Hell, even last week she watched him angrily wheel away as she claimed she “just wanted to be friends”. The explanation for how exactly that used Zack Ryder to boost Eve’s popularity or role in the company remains to be seen.

Anyway.

What happens next is one of the most socially uncomfortable moments I’ve had the misfortune of tuning in for in a long time. Cena comes out to the ring and is immediately followed by Eve. He calls her a skank, a whore and a diseased bitch in the span of maybe two minutes and the entire situation between Cena, Ryder and Kane gets blamed on Eve, as if her cuntish meddling had led to Cena being glovemouthed for a month and Ryder being hopsitalized and nearly burned in Hell.

Keep in mind that this is John Cena doing the slut shaming. Not CM Punk. It would’ve been disappointing to see Punk do it, especially given how weird his reactions to women can be, but Punk isn’t the clean-cut do-gooding child-inspiring WWE franchise Superman. Punk isn’t the guy hugging handicapped little girls in video packages. He’s not Mr. Make-a-Wish, the guy that cares so much for the well-being of others that he’s willing to devote 300 of his 365 days a year to making sick kids feel better.

THAT’s the guy telling Eve Torres she’s a “hoeski” for kissing him once and suddenly having ulterior motives for it. Because she kissed him … again, kissed him, it’s not like she tricked him into having a clandestine orgy somewhere in the bowels of the Staples Center … she is worthy of scorn, not for being manipulative or a liar, but because she’s a skank, a whore, a bitch, everything you can call a woman for specifically being a woman.

It makes the crowd go “oooh” and get a little behind Cena, because they want to see the slut punished for being bad to the guy they like. That’s what it accomplishes. The guy in the Rise Above Hate shirt who tells you not to bully people is openly and unabashedly hating a woman for being a whore she’s never actually been. And at home, Zack Ryder — the loveable guy who spent the last several months pining over Eve and repeatedly expressing how much he loves her — types “broskis before hoeskis” on Twitter and makes it trend.

And that’s what we’re left with. Even the best of our characters are reducing women to objects, then condemning them for being objects when they get misrepresented or rejected.

The worst part of it all is that the people who don’t care think you should “get over it”. You should just accept that things are they way they are, that The Rock and CM Punk and John Cena calling each other gay as the biggest insult they can muster is fine, that Eve shouldn’t be called a bitch “unless she’s acting like a bitch”, that you’re thinking too hard and that we’re all just having fun.

I guess we are.

Wrestling has done worse things to women, and it’ll do worse things in the future. I remember how it felt to be the hateful, lonely kid I used to be, and my desperate need to glorify and cling to every stupid thing that made me happy back then will keep me watching. I’m looking down at the shows from a much higher horse these days, and from up here it feels like it’s not that bad of an idea to shout “stop it, you’re hurting people” sometimes, because hey, maybe somebody down there can hear you.