Interview: Scarlett Harris, author of "A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of WWE"

Amira Rose Davis talks with cultural critic Scarlett Harris about her new book "A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment." They delve into the current state of women in the WWE, including issues of power, race, gender binaries and fandom.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Amira: Hey flamethrowers, today I am joined by Scarlett Harris, author of the new book, A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler. It's impossible for me to say that title and not say it like it's a Beyoncé lyric. [laughs]

Scarlett: That’s the idea.[laughs]

Amira: Exactly. And this book is “an abbreviated herstory of the World Wrestling Entertainment,” WWE. I was so thrilled to see this book because I have so many questions to ask Scarlett about wrestling. So, Scarlett, I want to Burn It All Down.

Scarlett: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited that we could do this. 

Amira: Absolutely. Now, the first thing I want to ask you, I'm so thrilled to see that you've taken the time and energy to do this, and I know that there's many fans out there who follow WWE or other wrestling platforms, and then there's laypeople like me that have like mostly I would say everything filtered through an entertainment lens. And what I mean by that is, you know, loved Glow watched Fighting with My Family and surprisingly liked it, and then watched it like 15,000 more times. And thinking about that, like, a lot of the notions that I have of wrestling, specifically women's stories in wrestling, comes from these like Hollywood treatments of it.

So, I wanted to start by asking if you would connect the dots for us who might not watch wrestling or know much about it. If people have only thought of wrestling through Glow or through Fighting with My Family, how much of that feels applicable to the sport as you know it, and if there's other things that you need to give people, what are the biggest things that you want people to know about wrestling, especially when it comes to women wrestlers? If you were to distill that down to a few things that we need to know before we dive into this conversation. 

Scarlett: Yeah. Well, I'm really glad you brought up the sort of pop cultural representations of wrestling lately because they are all centered on women or at least they were up until like, you know, the premiere of Young Rock a few weeks ago. They were all about women, whether that's Glow, Fighting with My Family, Total Divas, Total Bellas, et cetera. So, I think that's really interesting, and somewhat of a contrast to the way women's wrestling is presented in WWE, which starting about five years ago they sort of underwent a women's evolution. That was mostly started by fans on social media wanting women wrestlers to get more time, more character development and more of the show dedicated to them.

But then of course, as WWE is want to do, they kind of appropriated that and sort of made it their own marketing campaign of what we now know as the women's evolution. That's sort of been a stop-start effort. We see things like the first women's main event of WrestleMania a couple of years ago with Ronda Rousey, Becky Lynch, and Charlotte Flair. And then something as recent as a few weeks ago, which was the second women's main event of WrestleMania and the first ever main event featuring all-Black wrestlers which was between Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair. So, there's positive things like that, but as I kind of detail in the book, which is a cultural criticism, it's a collection of essays.

But it's loosely chronological, so we sort of start 50 years ago with The Fabulous Moolah and, you know, go through like the attitude era, which is sort of the late 90s, early 2000s, which probably a lot of people immediately think of when they think of wrestling, you know, that's kind of seared into our memories from childhood. And then, you know, up until today. So, as far as women's wrestling has come – which is still not far enough, in my opinion – there's still a lot of things that have gone on behind the scenes or even in front of the camera that women's wrestling is not taken as seriously as men's wrestling or as it should be.

Amira: Yeah. And I think that that's a really fascinating juxtaposition that you pointed out, that some of the pop culture representations that we have far outshine or, you know, symbolically kind of are more visible than actual women wrestlers in the sport now. And that kind of juxtaposition is really interesting because it really outlines one of the central things that you talk about, which is the erasure and invisibility of women's wrestling historically. And so you obviously have “diva” in the title and you talk about the hashtag #GiveDivasAChance, which was a fan-led social media movement about five, six years ago, that was in response to the short amount of time that WWE was giving to women wrestlers in the ring.

So, can you talk a little bit about that invisibility and that erasure? And I know that you talk about this evolution and it's changing, but is there still a disparity between the time that women wrestlers get both in terms of sponsorships, but in storylines and narratives? Where are the gaps still? 

Scarlett: Yeah, there definitely is. You mentioned sponsorships…I guess wrestling is different from most sports in that it's not really a sport at all, right? It’s sports entertainment. It's athletes, but it's scripted athletic competition. So, I don't watch any other sports so that's kind of my blind spot. I'm not super familiar with other women's sports and the roles that sponsorship play in them. But I will point out that recently…Because WWE wrestlers are independent contractors, right? They're freelances, but they sign contracts with WWE that pretty much allows them to only work for WWE, even though they're not classified as employees, which is, you know, a whole other kettle of fish.

So, in terms of sponsorships and working with other companies, there was a bit of a furor maybe six months ago or so with the pandemic, obviously, wrestlers are not able to travel. They're not able to sell merch at live shows and things like that, which is like a large part of where their revenue comes from. A lot of wrestlers were monetizing like Twitch streams and OnlyFans and things like that, and WWE actually stepped in and were like, no, you cannot make money through third parties. Which was a whole kind of labor dispute. I think it was perhaps even covered on John Oliver. Yeah. And it was picked up by the mainstream media. So I think that it's an important thing to know and just sort of highlights how differently women's wrestling is perhaps different from a women's sports more broadly.

But back to your original question, which was about invisibility of women in wrestling, I think sort of we’re at a point right now where the representation of women and the amount of time they get on WWE programming – which is, they have four weekly shows amounting to like about seven hour of weekly programming across the week. And you know, I don't have the stats right now, but there are other people who are actually tracking the time devoted to women's wrestling on TV, and I think we're almost at a point, or at least we were a couple of months ago, where it was at that dire kind of #GiveDivasAChance moment, which as you mentioned was the hashtag that fans kind of created on social media in response to like a 30 second tag team match, which isn't really even enough time to get a tag in, right?

So yeah, we sort of work at that point, like, we were leading up to WrestleMania, which was a few weeks ago, and just all of the storylines leading up to the women's matches were absolutely dismal. Even though we did get Sasha Banks versus Bianca Belair, the lead up to that was, you know, absolutely trash and it was involving a man as women's storylines are want to do. And Asuka, who is another women's champion in WWE, she was basically an afterthought, which actually she often has been throughout her tenure in WWE. She didn't even have a storyline leading up to WrestleMania until about two weeks before, and that was largely because one of the wrestlers who she was supposed to be feuding with got pregnant and had to leave. [laughs] So, just a real kind of hodgepodge of no real thought or dedication given to the women's division.

So, yeah, as far as sort of we've come in the last five or six years, and as far as WWE wants to say it's come, I don't think there's been a lot of change. And as far as pay equality and things like that, we're not really privy to a lot of that information as I'm sure it is across a lot of other industries as well. Maybe not necessarily regular sports, but you know, other industries, entertainment industries and stuff like that. There's just not a lot of transparency about salaries and things like that. But I don't think it's unfair to say that women in WWE still don't have pay equity. 

Amira: Right. No, you said something that was really interesting about storylines and I mean, I think that's one of the things that's so…Not baffling, but like frustrating about it, is like that people are really writing storylines and so the lack of care there is…There’s nothing else you can say other than it's just a lack of care. I wanted to ask you, for me and for others who might not know, can you just tell us who writes the storylines? What is the power structure like? When we say people don't have storylines or they're flat storylines or men are involved in women's storylines all the time – who, generally speaking, is controlling and writing these storylines? What is the demographic of the kind of administrative power of the WWE? 

Scarlett: Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say that if this was any other scripted television show it would have been canceled a long, long time ago. [laughter] But yeah, it's an interesting question and I'm glad you brought it up because wrestling fans often joke that WWE is created for an audience of one, and that one is Vincent McMahon–

Amira: McMahon! [Scarlett laughs] See, I knew that answer! I just wanted to basically figure out if my assumption that Vince McMahon is still in like the power seat after all this, or if he was like a kind of puppet and I didn't really know the inner workings of wrestling… 

Scarlett: No, you would be correct in assuming that he still runs the company, unfortunately, and while there is a writer's room or, you know, a creative department or whatever, which I believe has like at least one woman in it – I'm not sure that it's much more than that – and maybe, you know, a handful of people of color as well. Primarily it's straight white men as it has always been, and therein lies the problem, right? There's not that diversity of voices. There's not like people with a variety of experiences being like, “oh, hey, maybe this storyline is like slightly problematic,” or maybe we should, you know, devote more time to the women wrestlers or whatever. I think that there needs to be some kind of accountability like quotas or something like that, you know? Like, we need to devote this percentage of time to women on TV, we need to devote this percentage of time to wrestlers of color on TV, et cetera.

But unfortunately, even if there are people behind the scenes that are advocating for that, as I mentioned, it's still up to Vince McMahon. So they could be writing this really cool story, but then at the drop of a hat he might change his mind and then all of this, you know, build up to a certain storyline or feud or whatever is just dropped. And that happens all the time. 

Amira: Wow. Well, so, you know, scripted storylines are one thing, but then you have outside of that the real stories, the real history that have been kind of left in the dust, and one of the things I really appreciate about the work you do in this book is you give us some of that history and you give it to us the way history is, which is complicated and messy, particularly around the story of Moolah who, you know, The FAbulous Moolah, who I had known a little bit about, but watching you lay it out so starkly is just a reminder of some of the really complicated and terrible history that her real-life story represents. For people who are less familiar, can you give us a quick snapshot of a little bit of that history and why it's important to tell these kind of complicated histories and really document the history of women wrestlers?

Scarlett: Yeah. So, the first chapter in the book is about The Fabulous Moolah and she was for a time probably the most famous woman wrestler. So, she started in like the 50s. If you've got any listeners that were watching WWE like in the 80s and 90s, she was even around then. She wrestled into her eighties. You know, WWE kind of held her up as this kind of patron saint of women's wrestling for decades. And actually it's a funny story, and again, it's indicative of the power of fans and social media and that sort of thing. But a few years ago, 2018 I think it was, WWE named a match in her honor, so like a memorial match, The Fabulous Moolah Memorial Battle Royale at WrestleMania. And fans were like, no, no, no. She's like an alleged sex trafficker, you know? She treated the women that she trained horribly and didn't even train them, resulting in injuries in the ring and things like that.

She treated some of the Black women wrestlers under her tutelage really poorly and things like that. She stole money from the women that she forced to train under her and who she forced to, you know, take the bookings that she wanted and then stole the wages from those bookings. She forced them to live on her property and pay board and things like that. So, yeah, fans were like, nah, we're not having that. They petitioned Snickers, the sponsor of WrestleMania, to be like, do you really want to be supporting an event that's holding up an alleged sex trafficker? So, they ended up just changing it to call it the Women's Battle Royale, because apparently there are no other women wrestlers in the history of the sport. [laughs]

Amira: To celebrate, ever, right?

Scarlett: Yeah, exactly. I guess that kind of leads into like the rest of my book and what I've really tried to do, because you know, women in wrestling, they just fall by the wayside a lot of the time. People like Chyna, people like Sunny, people like Ashley Massaro, all of them I write about in the book. There's not a lot of support for wrestlers after they retire, both men and women, but there's so many more men, so there's more sort of stories about them for as many that kind of fall by the wayside and are just lost to history. So I really tried to, you know, find out about the ones that are out there and highlight them in the book, and I think there's sort of what we were saying before about like the pop cultural representations of women's wrestling.

There has been some stories of past women wrestlers highlighted recently, like there's the Vice documentary series, Dark Side of the Ring. Fabulous Moolah was a subject of one of the episodes in the first season. But, you know, I think there's probably only been about two episodes that have focused on women in the three season run. The third season is just about to come out. I've had some screeners of that and, yep, can report there’s no stories about women in that season either. So yeah, I just tried to grasp onto the women that we do know and I wanted to use The Fabulous Moolah as kind of a framework to discuss those women that she used and abused and who have sort of fallen out of history. I didn't want to kind of give her all of the spotlight, but I wanted to kind of use her as a way into these other women's stories.

Amira: When I think about divas and when I think about these wrestlers, one of the things I think about of course is their uniforms or their outfits, or, you know…I see them as like really hyper-feminized in a way where crowds are going wild and they're like really leaning into sexuality and I'm wondering how that works for wrestlers who present in more masculine ways, who perhaps…Are there non-binary wrestlers? Are there people who are pushing the gender spectrum within the sport? Is there a blueprint for being in women's wrestling that allows for different expression of femininity or sexuality? And what limits are placed on the way you can be a diva in the ring?

Scarlett: Yeah. I guess for the purposes of WWE, which obviously my book focuses on, and there's independent, women's wrestling, there's other companies that are on TV that are doing things differently to a certain extent. But yeah, just for the purposes of this, I'll focus on WWE. There are no openly non-binary or transgender wrestlers in WWE to public knowledge at the moment. Historically women's wrestling has been hyper-feminine. For a time women's wrestling was bra and panties matches, which is where you strip your opponent, like, the first person to strip their opponent down to her underwear wins. But we all win, right? Because, you know, wrestling is catered to the male gaze. And that was very much that attitude era that we kind of grew up on, so it's kind of a miracle that I'm as interested in women's wrestling and like, you know, equality for women in wrestling, having kind of grown up and been indoctrinated into that way of thinking.

Look, obviously women's wrestling now is still…Wrestling in general is an appearance-based medium, right? So, you know, it's always going to be about how you look. There are still plenty of like sexy women's wrestlers who are catering to the male gaze. There's a chapter in the book called hair, body face, and it's all about this. It's about how women use their appearances to tell a story, and I think in terms of wrestling gear, so the outfits that they wear in the ring, you know, I think there has been a move towards more functional, utilitarian gear that holds you in where you need to be held in, but still highlights the parts of your body that people need to see from, you know, like the top of the rafters, to see the moves being executed in the ring, right?

But women's wrestlers who might present in a more kind of masculine way – and I write in that chapter about how they're using their hair to do that. So, one of the wrestlers that kind of came to mind is Becky Lynch, who calls herself The Man because, you know, a couple of years ago she reached the pinnacle of the industry which has historically been like “the man,” like you're the man of the industry. So, she started calling herself that, which I have thoughts about and I write about in the book. But you know, she kind of started wearing her hair up and I write in the chapter the whole kind of aesthetic of WWE women's wrestlers now is that you have to have long flowing – usually colored in like a color of the rainbow, like candy-colored pink, purple, blue, orange, green, et cetera – full of extensions and things like that which, you know, in a way is another extension so to speak of that gear. The hair kind of flowing and whipping back and forth in the ring adds to the spectacle of it.

And you know, there's a couple of openly lesbian wrestlers in WWE, they wear their hair back as well. So I think that's kind of a way that they're sort of differentiating themselves within the strict confines of what you have to look like to be a woman wrestler in WWE.

Amira: And you’re talking about appearance, and one of the things that was in our torchbearers a few weeks ago was highlighting that at WrestleMania 37, like you mentioned, Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair became the first Black women to meet in a championship match. Doric Sam wrote a really great piece for this at The Undefeated that featured quotes from a lot of older retired Black women wrestlers like Naomi and Jazz, and this quote that Naomi gave to Sam for the article really stuck out to me, which was that this is 37 years in the making. “These girls are going out there to do something that's never been done before to inspire Black women and just women, period. These are the things that change the world, change wrestling, break stigmas and stereotypes. It's these moments.” 

I wanted to ask you about that moment when they're meeting on the ring, when they're breaking this history, and to talk about if there's a kind of playbook for the appearance and the way you lean into femininity and things like that? How has wrestling evolved, especially for women of color? What does it look like demographically? Are we seeing a kind of increase in wrestlers of color? Is this moment between Sasha and Bianca going to be a moment that does all those things Naomi thinks, like usher in a new kind of branch of this evolution? Is there an infrastructure there to continue to have a pipeline of women of color in wrestling? How would you read in race to the status of women in the WWE? 

Scarlett: Yeah. Look, I really hope so, but as history has told us, maybe not. But I think the fans really responded to that, like from the moment Bianca Belair won the Royal Rumble, which is a match of 30 people and the last person standing wins a championship match at WrestleMania, which is how we got to that point, and as soon as that happened we were all like yeah, okay, Sasha is the champion, this has to be the match. So, I hope that the positive reactions from fans towards this indicates to WWE that what we want is more representation and more wrestlers of color in prominent positions.

I do think that the past year during the pandemic the standout wrestlers were wrestlers of color, and particularly women of color like Sasha Banks, Bayley, Asuka, and Io Shirai – all women of color, and they pretty much carried WWE through the last year. Obviously there are no fans so WWE had to kind of reassess and, you know, I would argue that they shouldn't even be performing, but that's, another topic for another day. But yeah, it was women of color who kind of carried them through that transition period. There will also a bunch of stables, which is like wrestling speak for like a group of wrestlers of more than like two or three, but consisted of wrestlers of color. There was The Hurt Business, which was Black men.

There was Zelina Vega's stable. She's no longer with the company, and so are some of the people who were in her stable no longer with the company, but that was like a Latinx group. And then, yeah, as I mentioned, sort of all of the women of color who were shepherding them through that. Iwould like to think that WWE would recognize that, how valuable wrestlers of color are in breaking through to diverse viewerships and things like that. But yeah, it's still run by an old white man, primarily caters to old white men, although, you know, the audience is changing. So yeah, I'm not sure.

Amira: Yeah. You mentioned again that old white man, thinking about Vince McMahon – you know, one of the things that I am really wondering, we've seen one of the things that's happened in a lot of other sports that you've had kind of breakout superstars, whether it's LeBron James or Megan Rapinoe, right? Sue Bird, like, people who've been able to be outspoken and also be the kind of superstar attention-getter of their league. Do you see any wrestlers kind of poised to do that?

Because one of the things I think about is when I think about the top women in wrestling I go to McMahon’s relations. I think about Stephanie, I think about Linda, and then that doesn't give me much hope because, you know, I don't know much about Linda McMahon except that she also served in the Trump administration and just her proximity to power and not really doing anything for women's equity seems to be, you know, probably a canary in the mines for how she might impact the WWE. But I'm wondering if you know what has been the kind of leadership role of the women McMahons in thinking about the WWE in terms of gender issues? But also, do you see anybody poised to kind of break out, be the superstar who also takes up the mantle, and really tries to continue to shine some light on these issues?

Scarlett: Yeah. Well, it's funny you mentioned that because I would have said Bianca Belair is that person, and it's kind of a stroke of a miracle that WWE actually pulled the trigger on her and her popularity and allowed her to go to the main event of WrestleMania and win the championship and kind of, you know, push her as far as they have, because obviously being a Black woman in wrestling has not historically been an identity that WWE has kind of used as like a, you know, the star of the company or whatever, apart from I guess Sasha Banks as well. She’s been in The Mandalorian and stuff like that. I'm very happy about the fact that WWE has seen the star power of these two Black women and actually capitalized on it for once.

You mentioned Naomi before; I think that she is someone who really has that capacity as well. She returned to wrestling at the Royal Rumble 2020, so right before the pandemic, and she'd been not wrestling for a while. When she came back she went fully viral and you know, Black wrestling Twitter and Twitter in genera were just like, “Oh my God, who is this woman? We love her!” But unfortunately WWE, for whatever reason, just hasn't strapped the rocket to her back, unfortunately, even though she is a star of Total Divas, she has released singles. As you can see from that article, she has some really interesting and progressive ideas around women's wrestling and the representation of that. So I would really like to see her finally get sort of her due. So, we'll see what happens there.

In terms of the women McMahons, I mean, where do you want to start? Like, you kind of said it all with the fact that Linda was in the Trump cabinet. She left that position a couple of years ago to run the super pac for Trump's reelection which ended up…She gave money to the governor of Florida to keep WWE in operation so wrestlers were classed as essential workers during the pandemic, which is what allowed WWE to stay in operation – which I mentioned before, which I don't think that they should be, especially when shows like Glow are canceled because they claim that they can't safely run a wrestling show, yet wrestling is running during a pandemic?

But anyway…Yeah, I actually write about Stephanie. There’s a chapter kind of devoted to her and her fake feminism or like white feminism I guess you would call it. How she could sort of be seen as a a figurehead for that, like, “let’s get more women on boards” where, you know, women of color in like health and service industries get paid this many cents on the dollar of like a white man or whatever. So yes, it's an interesting topic to look at through the framework of these relations to the most powerful man in wrestling. But not necessarily a wholly progressive one. 

Amira: Well, the last question I want to ask you really is where you start you enter into the picture, which is not just as a writer, but a fan. And you just said, you know, the audience is also changing, and I wanted to end by asking you: what are those demographic changes happening in terms of wrestling fans? What is it like to be a woman and a progressive woman who's a fan of wrestling? And for those people who want to know why you love the sport, why do you come back to it? Can you tell us what made you fall in love with wrestling and what keeps you coming back despite all the bullshit?

Scarlett: Mm, that's the question I ask myself every day. [laughter] I don't know. I mean, like the prologue to the book is entitled Women's wrestling fans are suckers for punishment, and, you know, I still believe that's true. I think it's just a matter of that we want it to be and we believe it can be better. That's all I can say regarding that. As I mentioned before, I got into wrestling in 2001, so that was probably like just the tail end of the attitude era. So, you know, while women were like portrayed in their underwear a lot – like I'm thinking of people like Chyna and Lita, they were also portrayed as really strong and being able to go toe to toe with the men. I write about that in the chapter on inter-gender wrestling, which is men wrestling women, although it could be any gender. But as we said before, the gender makeup of the WWE is cisgender men and cisgender women.

So, even though some of the portrayals of women when I first got into wrestling and indeed today are problematic, I was able to grasp onto those more subversive portrayals of women. I also think I sort of stopped watching wrestling for a few years between 2010 and about 2013 or 14, and during that time I started reading a lot of feminist blogs, I started writing about feminism. I think I had always been a feminist, but I just was able to, reading those things, to have the tools to actually name that as my belief system. And so coming back into wrestling with that mindset was really valuable, and it just so happened to be coinciding with the women's evolution. So it's kind of, yeah, a twin kind of evolution of both my feminism and feminism in wrestling, I guess you could say, which has been an exciting but frustrating journey, and I think a lot of other women and minorities who are wrestling fans would probably feel the same. 

Amira: Well, if somebody was looking to get started, get into wrestling, first and foremost, check out Scarlett’s book, A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: an abbreviated herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. If you were to say, hey, first check out my book and B) here's where I would start, what events are coming up in the horizon that you would point people to? 

Scarlett: I unfortunately I usually only watch WWE, and I'm not sure if I would recommend that right now. [Amira laughs] But there are heaps of other wrestling companies on TV. Again, I'm not 100% sure that their portrayal of women's wrestling is where we would want it to be, but those companies are AEW and Impact. Impact has a really good women's division as well. That's probably where they're strongest. Their reputation has sort of been women's wrestling, even when WWE was dropping the ball on it. Then AEW is kind of like the new kid on the block. They started up a couple of years ago and are seen as direct competition to WWE.

Recently they had a really cool match, it was a women's hardcore match – so, a hardcore match is where you can use weapons, and when I say weapons I mean like chairs, thumbtacks, things like that, not like actual weapons, God forbid! And there was a kind of a viral moment that came out of that match, which was Britt Baker, one of the competitors in the match with blood just streaming down her face and into her eyes and she was just like maniacally grinning. I saw that viral image on Twitter and I was like, all right, I have to go and check out this match. So you know, again, I think women's wrestling is the bright spot of any wrestling company, so whatever people are looking for I think they will find it in women's wrestling.

Amira: Well, Scarlett, thank you so much for joining us on Burn It All Down. A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler is out now. Please check it out. And thanks!

Scarlett: Thanks Amira, this was great.

Shelby Weldon