Erick Stevens with a hot take on women's wrestling.

[autisticgeordie]

Discuss? I don't want to say that he's being sexist, but it does seem like he's just burying a majority of the women on the indy scene and, maybe it's not on the women not being talented, maybe it's the fact that, understandably, a lot of women don't want to get into the scene considering how people seem to look down on them. I know that I wouldn't want to have to drive 15 hours, wrestling in front of 200 people and getting payed less than $100 to put up with that shit.

["Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay]

There are fewer women wrestlers?

It's almost like it's harder for a woman to get into wrestling!

But surely that ain't the case, Erick?

[I'm Team Bayley and Indi]

I'm not sure of the point he is trying to make

[David-Arquette was in WCW 2000]

If he's saying there are more male wrestlers than female wrestlers, hence more male talent, then he's not wrong. That's simply a fact of numbers, but I don't get the point or reasoning for it.

[kingoftheindies]

I mean there is less talent because there are less women wrestlers then men.

That being said I disagree. Plenty of talent out there. Big issue I think the women are not as visible unless they are doing inter gender matches.

[BorneAgain]

I do think women's wrestling in North America (especially the US) is still having to play catch-up to men's from how much its development was stifled in the territory days (with the likes of Moolah playing a large part in that) and the strong T&A focus in the 90s and aughts not helping much either.

Its definitely at its strongest now, but realistically its growth in numbers is going to be a generational process of female fans seeing the spotlighted talent in WWE/NXT/Impact/etc currently and in turn becoming wrestlers themselves 5/10/15 years from now.

[Deleted]

He’s right just based on numbers but it sounds like someone who’s bitter about not getting bookings.I legit had no idea he was still wrestling after he left ROH like a decade ago.

[Deleted]

I started to like the guy just as he retired.

Then he looked like this:



And that's the last thing I remember, until now... I just read he's coming to MLW!

[Steveweiser]

What Erick is saying was borne out at PROGRESS on Monday night - they were going to do Jinny vs. Toni Storm, but Toni withdrew due to illness. PROGRESS couldn't find a female wrestler with gear to face Jinny on short notice, so there was no women's match, and they weren't going to book Jinny against a man. It shows how low the numbers are when situations like this come up. They're not plentiful like we'd think.

[Mozenrath]

Jan 1, 2020 11:06:29 GMT -5 Steveweiser said:

What Erick is saying was borne out at PROGRESS on Monday night - they were going to do Jinny vs. Toni Storm, but Toni withdrew due to illness. PROGRESS couldn't find a female wrestler with gear to face Jinny on short notice, so there was no women's match, and they weren't going to book Jinny against a man. It shows how low the numbers are when situations like this come up. They're not plentiful like we'd think.

Okay, that makes sense, that they couldn't get a woman on that short of notice in that context.

In general, I think the number of women in wrestling is going to climb, though that is going to take time. Still, the future's bright, especially when you look at people like Kris Statlander who have only been at this like, what, 2-3 years?

[eJm]

Jan 1, 2020 11:06:29 GMT -5 Steveweiser said:

What Erick is saying was borne out at PROGRESS on Monday night - they were going to do Jinny vs. Toni Storm, but Toni withdrew due to illness. PROGRESS couldn't find a female wrestler with gear to face Jinny on short notice, so there was no women's match, and they weren't going to book Jinny against a man. It shows how low the numbers are when situations like this come up. They're not plentiful like we'd think.

Yeah, considering previous tweets of his, that seems a more reasonable viewpoint. And he’s not wrong.

From my own experience, I could name you people coming up or who are on the scene who are wrestling, some I know personally, but that doesn’t mean they’re TV ready or even indie show ready.

As Grizzly said, some of it has to do with how hard it still is to get in the business for people and the lack of opportunities. Like, for as great the Defiant shows have been in OTT, that shouldn’t really be as necessary as they are with the cards they want to build.

[Deleted]

Jan 1, 2020 11:06:29 GMT -5 Steveweiser said:

What Erick is saying was borne out at PROGRESS on Monday night - they were going to do Jinny vs. Toni Storm, but Toni withdrew due to illness. PROGRESS couldn't find a female wrestler with gear to face Jinny on short notice, so there was no women's match, and they weren't going to book Jinny against a man. It shows how low the numbers are when situations like this come up. They're not plentiful like we'd think.

I went and read the discussion on his feed.

He was talking about Beyond Wrestling.Someone was accusing them of not booking enough female talent so Erick tweeted what he tweeted and then explained himself saying there aren’t that many good female wrestlers on the indies and the ones that are are signed to big companies.

[Rave]

It's kind of stupidly put, but he's not wrong.

Honestly, with the kind of living shovelware that haunt the indies, I wouldn't quite say the male talent pool is that big, either.

[Steveweiser]

Jan 1, 2020 11:56:30 GMT -5 @mrbonezone said:

Jan 1, 2020 11:06:29 GMT -5 Steveweiser said:

What Erick is saying was borne out at PROGRESS on Monday night - they were going to do Jinny vs. Toni Storm, but Toni withdrew due to illness. PROGRESS couldn't find a female wrestler with gear to face Jinny on short notice, so there was no women's match, and they weren't going to book Jinny against a man. It shows how low the numbers are when situations like this come up. They're not plentiful like we'd think.

I went and read the discussion on his feed.

He was talking about Beyond Wrestling.Someone was accusing them of not booking enough female talent so Erick tweeted what he tweeted and then explained himself saying there aren’t that many good female wrestlers on the indies and the ones that are are signed to big companies.

With Beyond, they did reach out, but most of the women they regularly book were not available, and they're not putting new women on their second biggest show of the year.

[Deleted]

He sure did try really hard to frame that like a "I'm not racist, but..."

[Cyno]

I don't know why he's acting so defensive. It's just a simple manner of numbers: there's less women wrestlers than men. Now if we want to discuss why that is, that's a lot to unpack there that boils down to the view society in general has of female athletes compared to other women and male athletes.

[Dr. Bolty, Disaster Enby]

Jan 1, 2020 13:49:04 GMT -5 @mrsirdrdaddy said:

He sure did try really hard to frame that like a "I'm not racist, but..."

Yeah, the couching made it sound worse than the content.

It really is numbers. Let's assume there are about 1,000 male wrestlers on the indy scene and about 200 female wrestlers - these numbers are chosen arbitrarily to make the point. If we assume (for men and women) that 10% of them are excellent, 10% are terrible, 40% are average leaning good, and 40% are average leaning bad, then it is likely one will run out of women who are available to a given promotion and in that top 50% (of whom there would be 100) long before they run out of men in the same categories (of whom there would be 500). Not even counting that these proportions would be skewed by who has been snapped up with a major contract and who is only just breaking in and hasn't been discovered widely yet.

[Deleted]

Jan 1, 2020 13:49:04 GMT -5 @mrsirdrdaddy said:

He sure did try really hard to frame that like a "I'm not racist, but..."

The way he tweeted that with zero context makes it seem like he was trying to get a negative reaction and then when he did he finally explained what he meant.This was just poor execution overall when he was just tweeting this to get brownie points with the promotion that’s currently booking him.

[Georgina's Fancy Water]

He sure does sound pretty hyped to have a chance to belittle women.

[Deleted]

Someone is saying BEYOND doesn't have enough female wrestling?

Beyond Wrestling?

Really?

Someone got their dumbest criticism of 2020 in early I see.

Also, Erick Stevens is one of the most progressive voices in wrestling and people are assuming a lot of shit about him that isn't there just because they're taking one tweet out of context. It is not a reasonable expectation to explain the context of a wider conversation in every tweet you make.