Criticism is GOOD, Actually
By now we all know in wrestling promos there’s a give and take when it comes to great heels and great faces. The industry has evolved so much that crowds no longer respond to the schoolyard-level jabs and digs of yesteryear. It's harder to be convincing these days with the erosion of kayfabe in favor of reality, where everyone wants to know what’s going on behind the scenes. What's the REAL drama?
Well when the real drama makes its way into promos and lines of reality get blurred, it certainly makes for a more interesting time. Still, “cheap heat” is a frequent go-to of heels and “tweeners”, sometimes even the faces are not opposed to taking low blows if it means besting their opponent on the mic.
Last Wednesday AEW had a segment that was, if we’re being completely honest here, lazy, poorly-executed, and misogynistic as all hell. Heels are going to say offensive things, that’s their nature, we expect guys like MJF to make really abrasive, inappropriate comments bordering on unacceptable. There’s a difference between making a really clever insult at someone’s life/career and going for the low hanging fruit of insulting three women who have virtually nothing to do with the segment.
Case in point, MJF laid into Double J (Jeff Jarrett) by calling him the “LAST Outlaw” because his face is “the last thing your promotion sees before it dies.” That was clever! A smart and well-crafted dig at Jarrett’s history of being an egomaniac whose bad business acumen caused a lot of struggle for previous wrestling promotions like TNA.
Then came the cheap heat. Not even that, it was straight up misogyny. Which, yeah, we get it, is a part of the business. MANY OF US WISH IT WEREN’T, but that is an unfortunate reality. And for a company that prides itself on being an alternative, we want different, not more of the same. MJF made a disgusting remark towards Jeff’s wife, Karen and even dragged Kurt Angle into the mix. It was crass, vulgar, and unnecessary. But ok, that’s MJF right? We get that, we expect it at this point, we still don’t like it, still don’t want it.
What happened next was even more disappointing, as a stumbling and seemingly lost Jeff Jarrett struggled to find an equally inflammatory retort and slogged through calling Max’s mom a prostitute, as well as his current girlfriend, who also works for the company, Alicia Atout. Again we know as fans that there’s no shortage of misogynistic insults and promos that take place in wrestling. It's definitely not the last time we’ll see it either. But hopefully it's the last we’ll see of it from these two, directed at each other.
The whole segment was like a boring 3-act play. Jarrett would talk, then Max would talk, then Jarrett, then Max and one more time for shits and giggles. They could have conveyed everything they needed to say in one back-and-forth and probably saved about ten extra minutes of that precious tv time. Dr. Baker has correctly criticized MJF in the past for hogging tv time with his long-winded promos.
Possibly the most egregious offense about this whole segment is it dragging on so long, it took time away from the first-ever Women’s Casino Gauntlet match. People were UPSET. Whether that match was planned to be that length exactly and everyone hit their times or not- It was so unnecessary in many ways and did a massive disservice to the women, who not only work for the company, but who also enjoy watching the show.
Many, myself included, were upset about the lack of number of women who were advertised to be in the gauntlet, but weren’t a part of it. They didn’t even take a moment to do a post match promo for Toni and Mariah, which would have been a nice cherry on top of what was a really decent match, to be completely fair. The women killed it! The backlash on Threads and Bluesky spawned at least two different hashtags begging AEW to give the women more time and to give us more women’s wrestling.
Thankfully, in this business things can always change. After a loud backlash, it appears our displeasure was seen and heard, many of us tagged AEW to insure that. The almighty “pivot” seemed to be employed this week as many of us started to groan at the thought of another rambling Double J promo, it was promptly interrupted by Claudio Castagnolli, which now seems to be setting up a personal battle with Jarrett and Moxley/Death Riders. Later Maxwell came out and continued to talk about Jeff as if the program with him was still on, at the conclusion of which Hangman Adam Page came out for his scheduled match, but not before commanding MJF to leave because he wasn’t having any of it. Now it seems last week's pointless setup has diverged into two stories that will hopefully be much more satisfactory for everyone involved. Jarrett will promptly lose and be sacrificed on the altar of violence to the god of the Death Riders, Jon Moxley. I wonder if he’ll use a plastic bag..maybe Jeff’s guitar? And MJF seems to now be on a potential collision course with Hangman, reigniting the ONLY time they interacted in five years at the beginning of AEW when MJF beat Hangman for the first ever Dynamite diamond ring. Hangman was also on MJF’s list of people who will never beat him for the Triple B (AEW World Championship).
The point, dear Sickos, is that criticism works and is necessary! Sure you can get mad when your favorite wrestler loses or the story isn’t told the way you crafted it in your head, that’s a personal issue, I can only recommend changing the channel at that point. But when we have a roster of over forty of the most talented women wrestlers in the Western hemisphere and you can only find time for one match and one segment a week? That is unacceptable. It needs to be called out. They NEED to do better. Here’s to hoping they keep listening to us. We NEED to keep applying pressure because we love this thing and it deserves to be as great as we know it can be. The people have spoken, and we want #MoreWomensWrestling.
Visual art by Brett Michelle