Women have always been in the ring, but now we're finally paying attention
“Japan made me who I am today,” says an uber-confident Australian wrestler named Toni Storm. The 22-year-old is wearing a tracksuit representing Japanese women’s wrestling promotion “Stardom,” where she holds a championship belt.
“I remember coming back from my first tour in Japan and feeling a bit more respected, because of how hard it is out there.” Storm began to train at the age of 13 with the support of her mom, who would sell hot dogs at local wrestling shows to pay for her daughter’s training. “I’m my own rock band now. There’s no agent, no manager. I earn most of my money selling merch and photos.” She’s just off a year where she wrestled in more than 100 matches, barnstorming from England to Tokyo. Storm is at the forefront of a game-changing boom period in women’s wrestling that’s brought me here, inside an American Legion hall on the outskirt of Los Angeles, for a professional wrestling seminar that aims to develop the next Toni Storm.
A group of wide-eyed women sit on a mat, looking up at Stardom wrestler Kris Wolf and another woman, Bull Nakano, a stoic figure from Japan, who would wrestle in the ‘80s and ‘90s with a spiked-blue mane and lightning bolts scrawled across her face. When Nakano would strike her opponents on the chest, she’d grunt like a raging bull. Nakano is a living tribute to her roots in the All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling promotion, which has become the underground punk band that never saw mainstream success, but influenced everyone who saw them.
“Unless you tape traded, you didn’t know about them,” says Dave Meltzer, who’s been reporting on pro wrestling for over three decades. “If there was an internet then, everything that’s happening right now would have happened 35 years ago.”
“I think we’re getting to a point where two women can finally headline a stadium in America, like they did in Japan,” says wrestler Cheerleader Melissa, one of the pioneers of the Southern California indie scene of the mid-2000s. She once tried out for World Wrestling Entertainment—the major leagues of pro wrestling—only to be rejected because she didn’t look like a Pam Anderson facsimile, which was, for a time, the archetype for what the WWE presented on TV. “I was trying out for a position that didn’t exist,” says Melissa, who like many others, peaked when the mainstream wasn’t ready for them.
“Before Ronda, I guess you could make the argument that nobody was going to pay to see the women. She shut those arguments down.”
“The WWE would tell the women to wrestle like girls, even though in the indies, the women were being trained to wrestle like men,” says Meltzer, describing an objectifying tradition where women were forced into cheesy catfights—pulling hair, slapping each other and tumbling around the ring. That’s why this is such a moment for women in wrestling, because for the longest time, women’s wrestling in the mainstream was bad. “It’s finally being respected as a sport,” says Storm. “Gone are the days of women being sexualized.”
The founders of women’s wrestling promotions Rise and Shimmer, Kevin Harvey and Dave Prazak respectively, were two promoters who pushed for an end to the mudwrestling and softcore porn matches popular in the mid-2000s. What’s happening now is a course-correction after years of presenting women like glorified booth babes, a rebranding the WWE is describing as a “Women’s Revolution.” It’s the result of pressure from below—a grassroots kick in the balls. “Because of the internet, wrestling fans began to discover women’s wrestling in Japan, or the indies, where women were being treated seriously as athletes, which made them go, ‘how come the WWE is still doing the other shit?’”
The WWE’s ground-zero moment in the “Women’s Revolution” is one of the most debated subjects in wrestling. But between 2014 and 2016, Ronda Rousey was at the zenith of an Ultimate Fighting Championship run that proved female fighters were pay-per-view draws.
“Before Ronda,” says Meltzer, “I guess you could make the argument that nobody was going to pay to see the women. She shut those arguments down.” Rousey is now signed to the WWE as a full-time pro wrestler. But as far back as the late ‘80s, there was another Ronda Rousey-like figure who honed her craft in Japanese dojos, taking beating after beating, kickboxing her way into a harder style she tried to export to the WWE.
“I wanted to bring real athleticism to women’s wrestling, but I knew I had to go to Japan first,” says WWE Hall of Famer Madusa, who became the face of women’s wrestling in America in the ‘90s, when she was rebranded as “Alundra Blayze.” During her brief run in the WWE, Blayze would wrestle Nakano in a series of hard-hitting and technically superior women’s matches that were ahead of their time.
In 1995, while still champion, Madusa was cut from the WWE. Soon after, the whole division was extinguished in a move that’s still criticized today. “My era was the lost era. We were just pushed aside,” she says. “But that’s where the revolution began.” Meltzer believes North American fans weren’t ready for Madusa’s “strong-style” wrestling, which, ironically, is the current style of the WWE’s undefeated female megastar, Asuka. The Japanese wrestler was recruited to help fuel their “Women’s Revolution,” which is part feminist uprising, part marketing campaign.
“I couldn’t relate to women wrestling in bikinis or lingerie. It was very alienating, and it made becoming a wrestler feel like a pipe dream.”
“I’m not with the WWE’s take on the ‘women’s revolution,’ because it started in TNA 10 years ago,” says Rosemary, a former rugby star who’s spent the last three years carrying the women’s division of Toronto-based wrestling promotion TNA as a face-painted demon who speaks in riddles. Rosemary is part of the second wave of TNA, now called Impact Wrestling, a byproduct of an era that crowned their first women’s champion in 2007.
“I couldn’t relate to women wrestling in bikinis or lingerie,” says Rosemary, referring to the WWE’s sexualized bra-and-panties matches of the late ‘90s and 2000s, when the only female wrestlers she admired were rogue elements like Chyna, a muscular force of nature who debuted in the WWE in 1997. “They would call me Chyna in high school,” she says. “Which I took as a compliment.”
“It was very alienating, and it made becoming a wrestler feel like a pipe dream,” says Rosemary. “That changed when I started watching TNA.” That was circa 2007, when she was just a fangirl in Winnipeg who found a new breed of female wrestler in TNA’s “Knockouts” division.
Maybe that’s where the “boom” began, from the headquarters of TNA, where Gail Kim studied tapes of wrestlers in Japan and Mexico, pushing herself to deliver scientific and artistically top-shelf performances that would make her male bosses pay attention. “There wasn’t really anyone to look up to when I was growing up in the ‘80s,” says Kim, the first TNA “Knockouts” champion and a former WWE “Diva” whose first match for the company was a humiliating bra-and-panties match. “TNA allowed me to be myself,” says Kim. But like Madusa a generation before her, she had to fight to gain her artistic freedom. “At the time, all they would say was that ‘nobody likes women’s wrestling.’ Which changed after my feud with Kong, which is something I’m very proud of.”
Awesome Kong was a 250-pound black woman who cut her teeth in Japanese dojos in the early 2000s. She dressed like a gladiator, threw stiff spinning-back punches and was a gnarly juxtaposition to Kim, whom she dwarfed in size. “We were pulling in the highest ratings on the show,” says Kim, who matched Kong with a grittiness that helped produced some of the most compelling altercations on TNA television in the late 2000s, showing athletic women’s wrestling could draw big ratings.
“Awesome Kong proved that you didn’t have to be a model to make it,” says Viper Niven, a plus-sized wrestler from the U.K. “That’s what kept me going.” Niven’s star recently grew after competing in the WWE’s inaugural Mae Young Classic, an invitational women’s tournament held last summer that included independent wrestlers like Niven’s rival, Toni Storm.
“Wrestlers bridge the gap between being a human and superhuman. People are always telling me how they want me to wrestle, or how they want me to look. I don’t like that,” Niven saw the Mae Young Classic as an opportunity to break the mold. “I just want people to stop categorizing me, or people like me.”
By now, the WWE has signed many of the best female wrestlers in the world. However, a few outliers of the “boom” are still free agents whose talents are unmatched by anyone contracted in the big leagues.
“Io’s the best in the world, period,” says Niven, who’s now wrestling for Stardom, the promotion where Io Shirai is the kind of jaw-dropping performer who narrows the separation between men’s and women’s wrestling. Shirai began training to become a wrestler in Japanese dojos at the age of 17. Prior to that, she trained heavily in gymnastics, which gave her the eye-popping mechanics to become a true daredevil.
“I never watched wrestling until I became a wrestler,” says Shirai, who tells me she didn’t know about the Japanese pro wrestling scene until her career began to take off. “As I continued in my own career, I realized how great they were.” Her recent matches in Tokyo are—for her opponents—the equivalent of playing a round of tennis with Serena Williams, or dancing with Baryshnikov.
“When I won my first championship, I felt crushed by the pressure,” says Shirai. “But as my spirit and body became stronger, it began to feel more rewarding to be on top.” Shirai is quietly building a resume that makes her the LeBron James of wrestling, a phenom who’s being recruited by everyone from the WWE to Impact.
Shirai is the peak of a women’s wrestling boom that doesn’t have a precise point of origin, but continues to move at warp speed, on the shoulders of many wrestlers like Toni Storm, Viper Niven and Rosemary.
Three years ago, after the two hadn’t spoken for over two decades, Madusa finally got to talk to her old boss and the most powerful executive in wrestling, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon. “He looked at me and said, ‘Alundra, we need more women like you. You’re exactly what we need right now…another you.’”
“I just lost it,” she says. “I mean, it took 20 years?”