>>19002628Yeah.
The unspoken dirty little secret about why so many people traditionally look down on pro-wrestling is that, after figuring out it wasn't real, many people went on to see it as gay.
Now, in times with larger-than-life characters, wrestling has been able to move past that. 80's and 90s WWF and WCW come to mind. And it works when guys are going all out to make it look real: the traditional puroresu scene comes to mind, as does the 2014 - 2019 NJPW era.
But for the most part, those are aberrations rather than the norm for pro-wrestling. That's the mistake too many fans make - they think *that* is the norm when, really, it's the exception.
And outside those periods, men's wrestling seems gay.
But women's wrestling? Nothing gay about watching two chicks go at it, even if they're not doing anything well. My dad doesn't watch wrestling anymore and when I'd try to get him to watch he'd pretty much only watch the women's matches because, hey, two scantily-clad chicks doing shit together. Now factor in the facts that they're actually doing it a lot better than they did in the past and that they're motivated to prove what they can do in ways that men aren't and it's not surprising at all why the women's scene is thriving while the men's scene is on the decline.
Women's wrestling didn't kill wrestling. It's what's carrying it at the moment. People who don't see that long for a level of men's wrestling that's really quite rare.
