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Andrew Chan on His New Book Why Mariah Carey Matters: “It’s Hard for People to Process That She’s a Singer-Songwriter”

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This post originally appeared on Shondaland.

“Mariah Carey’s voice is a portal to the sublime,” says Andrew Chan, author of Why Mariah Carey Matters, a new book from University of Texas Press that examines the pop star’s life, career, and legacy in detail. “I know that sounds overwrought, but it’s melodramatic just like her music! There’s a reason that there’s a mythology around the voice and that certain vocalists become myths themselves because they are showing us what it can evoke and achieve when it’s used beyond its own limits.” Why Mariah Carey Matters seeks to unpack that myth.

Growing up, Chan split his time between the southern U.S. and Malaysia, where he was raised on Chinese pop divas. His appreciation for China’s pop stars led him to American pop divas, such as Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and the apex, Mariah Carey. “At the time, I didn’t have the language to describe what her voice was doing for me, but it was a very visceral reaction for a child [to have],” Chan tells Shondaland during a recent interview.

Though at the time Carey was marketed as a white-coded, ethnically ambiguous pop star, it was her lyrics about searching for belonging and identity that Chan connected with. As a gay Asian boy growing up in the American South, who also felt out of place in Malaysia as an American, Chan felt he could relate to Carey.

“What she was able to articulate — not just lyrically but sonically — about the experience of being an outsider and living in between identities spoke to me even before I really knew that that was what was at stake in her music,” he says. That’s clear from the jump even in the titles of some of Carey’s later albums —The Emancipation of Mimi, E=MC2, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, and Me. I Am Mariah … The Elusive Chanteuse — as well as her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. But it’s also apparent as early as 1997’s Butterfly, which Chan believes is Carey’s best album and contains the song “Close My Eyes,” with the lyrics “I was a wayward child with the weight of the world that I held deep inside.”

At some point in Carey’s career, probably around the time she broke away from the adult contemporary genre and pioneered the art of the remix, Carey’s identity as a mixed-race woman — her father is Black, and her mother is white — came to the fore. Previously, what we thought of as a crossover artist was a regionally or culturally specific kind of musician, as Chan describes it, moving into mainstream pop. But Carey debuted in the early ’90s with No. 1 pop ballads “Vision of Love,” “Emotions,” and “Hero” before moving into remixes with 1993’s “Dreamlover” and, perhaps most famously, “Fantasy” in 1995, whose “Bad Boy Remix” version was named Pitchfork’s top song of the ’90s (“which would have been inconceivable in the ’90s for a publication like Pitchfork,” Chan adds). Since then, Carey’s music has been heavily and obviously influenced by the genres that she grew up with and loves. “She’s a genre chameleon,” Chan says.

But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the highly decorated diva. If you came of age in the early aughts, you would have been privy to Carey’s struggles in 2001 after the ill-timed and poorly received dual release of the movie Glitter, in which she starred, and the accompanying album of the same name. What makes her different from a lot of other famous women who experienced similar turmoil in that decade and have since been revisited by the culture is that Carey engineered her own comeback, with 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi spawning the No. 1 single “We Belong Together.” Coupled with this is the playing up of her high-femme, camp image as the timeless Queen of Christmas, which Chan likens to a “shield” against scrutiny and other past traumas. Carey’s Christmas single “All I Want for Christmas Is You” hits the top 10 every holiday season, thus garnering her the accolade as the first and only artist with a Billboard No. 1 single in four consecutive decades.

Despite this, Carey is still underrated and underappreciated by the public, a space that she’s occupied since the beginning of her career. “You didn’t want to admit that you loved Mariah,” Chan offers. “But Mariah was simultaneously one of the most beloved and top-selling artists of her time as well as one of the most dismissed artists, partly because she was so popular, as if her success was purely generated by the prioritization of her record label.” 

People still don’t realize that Carey has co-written, co-produced, and arranged the vocals on 99 percent of her music. Chan says, “She has 19 No. 1 Billboard hits, which is the most achieved by any solo artist, and she co-wrote 18 of them. One of them was a cover. And these are just the number ones! She is an incredible musical mind, but as she herself will say, she doesn’t have the image attached to her of being behind a piano or holding a guitar. She isn’t like a Joni Mitchell or a Taylor Swift with the guitar, she isn’t behind the piano like Roberta Flack or Alicia Keys, so it’s hard for people to process that she’s a singer-songwriter. She is as much a singer-songwriter as anyone I just mentioned, and what’s remarkable about that is that she writes songs that are tailored to the uniqueness of her voice.”

What’s more, Chan says, is the ignorance of “the depth of her musicianship, and by that I mean the sound she created with the voice that is like no other; the style that is inimitable. You hear a Mariah song and immediately know it’s a Mariah song.”

So, what are Chan’s favorite songs then? “Breakdown” from 1997’s Butterfly, and “Candy Bling” from 2009’s Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel. He also name-checks “Always Be My Baby” (one of this writer’s favorite Mariah Carey songs) as no less “perfect of a pop song than ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles.” Cue the outrage from those aforementioned music snobs.

For Chan, though, it all comes back to the famous five-octave vocal range, all the way up to the whistle register. “In her voice, I found escape, but I’m also brought back to the place that I was escaping from. In her music, people find a certain transcendence the same way one might find in religion.” And that’s why Mariah Carey matters.

Novelist Laura Lippman on Prom Mom, Tess Monaghan, and “the Possibilities of Late Life”

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This piece originally appeared on Shondaland.

Laura Lippman, the prolific crime novelist whose latest book, Prom Mom, is released on July 25, taught me the importance of reading the acknowledgments. To promote her previous novel, 2021’s Dream Girl, Lippman talked on a podcast about a novel called Heritage that influenced her claustrophobic meta tale of a writer who is being stalked. It sounded interesting, so I spent weeks trawling Goodreads trying to find this elusive out-of-print novel about a young novelist growing increasingly obsessed with her editor. Lo and behold, when I read Dream Girl a few weeks after listening to the podcast and reached Lippman’s acknowledgments, she spelled out that her inspiration was, in fact, A Novel Called Heritage by Margaret Mitchell Dukore — not a novel titled Heritage (face-palm).

So, when I got my hands on Prom Mom, you better believe I made a beeline for the acknowledgments this time, and I’m glad I did because Lippman lists the podcast You’re Wrong About and its host, Sarah Marshall, as big motivations for the developments of Prom Mom.

Lippman was inspired by a 2020 episode of the show about the 1990s sensationalism of teens who hid their pregnancies (either knowingly or unaware), gave birth at the prom, and promptly returned to the dance floor in a state of denial. Via Twitter, where many long-distance friendships germinate in our current age, Lippman and Marshall became friends and during Covid had meandering phone conversations while going on physically solitary walks.

“I’m friends with people who I’m basically old enough to be their mom! I’m definitely old enough to be Sarah’s mom,” Lippman tells Shondaland from her home in Baltimore, where many if not all of her 25 novels (as well as several short story and essay collections) are set. “I have a lot of friends in their 20s and 30s and 40s, and I’m 64. I feel that has been one of the most positive things I’ve ever done because it keeps me in touch with things. So when I’m writing a novel like Prom Mom where the characters are significantly younger than I am, I don’t worry about that.”

Presumably, the Covid-set phone calls between two of the characters in Prom Mom in tandem in their cars were inspired by Lippman’s calls with Marshall, but Lippman says she actually drew from a friend’s affair that occurred during the early days of the pandemic. “I don’t think he knows that!” she exclaims.

“I’m fascinated by people who, in the middle of a pandemic, would be like, ‘Yeah, I can have an affair,’” Lippman continues, adding how the human condition will rationalize just about anything when it comes to obtaining what we think we deserve, which is what we come to find out about Nice Guy™ Joe, one of three protagonists in Prom Mom, who “can justify pretty much anything he does.”

Lippman says, “I believe that people who identify as good are the worst people in the world! As soon as you’re like, ‘I’m good,’ I’m nervous about you.” It’s Joe’s wife, Meredith, a plastic surgeon who does humanitarian work in Guatemala and always reads the book for book club, as Lippman describes her, who scares her the most: “Meredith is the most terrifying person in the book because we agree on so many things!”

And then, there’s Amber, the titular prom mom who returns to her hometown, Baltimore, having fled decades ago, post-juvenile detention for allegedly killing the baby she gave birth to at the prom, whose father was Joe. “I have the most empathy for Amber,” Lippman says, but “those three people — ugh!”

This is not the only time Lippman has written about the taboo topic of alleged infanticide. Her first stand-alone novel outside of the Tess Monaghan detective series that kept Lippman busy (literally, as she wrote the series’ initial seven books while working full-time as a journalist at The Baltimore Sun) for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Every Secret Thing, was about two 11-year-old girls who kill a baby, which her publisher and agent tried to dissuade her from writing about.

“If I were the kind of writer who was extremely calculating, I wouldn’t have written this book. No one wants to read about Covid; dead-baby stories are not good,” she says.

“[Every Secret Thing was] not a Tess book because it’s not about Tess. One thing that some crime novelists don’t really talk about is that when you have these serious protagonists, the books are always about them and not about the victims or the people affected. It’s about how the crime affected the investigator. I love those books too, but I feel like sometimes it’s more important [to focus on] the people who were directly affected by it. To write about two 11-year-old girls who kill a baby and have it be a Tess novel — no, it needs to be about them. What happened to them? And what happened to the mother of the child who died? Those are the people who matter.”

The reason Lippman hasn’t returned to Tess Monaghan since 2015 is twofold: Firstly, Lippman’s imagination “got a lot darker,” creating the likes of Amber, Joe, and Meredith, who “don’t fit the series.” Secondly, reflecting on what happened in Lippman’s own life when she became a mother at 51, the writer thought it would be “funny” to give Tess a baby herself, which immediately lowered the stakes as to what risks a detective could feasibly take. “I feel she has a responsibility as a mother and a spouse to be very careful, which is anathema to a suspense novel,” Lippman says. Tess Monaghan fans, never fear, though: Lippman foresees a trilogy to wrap up the PI’s story. “I just don’t know what they are yet.”

Lippman does know what her follow-up to Prom Mom is, though, which she’s currently writing. “After writing this book, I needed to write a book about someone super-nice.” Enter: Mrs. Blossom, a minor character from the Tess Monaghan series. Inspired by the 1963 movie Charade and the 1967 children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the as-yet-untitled cozy mystery is described by Lippman as being about “this almost-70-year-old widow who’s gone on her first European vacation, and she somehow gets mixed up in this search for a missing Pakistani sculpture, an antiquity that should be repatriated, that went missing from a Baltimore museum years ago and is now believed to be somewhere in her proximity.“What I really wanted to write about is the possibilities of late life,” Lippman continues, saying she has “a responsibility to savor life” for her older sister, who has Parkinson’s and lives in a nursing home. She’s one of the reasons, along with Lippman’s 92-year-old mother, who is a resident of a continuing care community, Lippman has to stay in the U.S. despite “multiple moments — usually after mass shootings” but also in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which one can’t help but be reminded of when reading Prom Mom — when she has considered leaving. Though Lippman, who is “not a prescient person,” she says, wasn’t conscious of the looming Supreme Court decision when she wrote Prom Mom, “maybe it was down there all along.”

How a New York Times Nail Salon Exposé Inspired Mai Nguyen to Write Sunshine Nails.

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This post originally appeared on Shondaland.

What does Tippi Hedren, the actress in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and grandmother of Dakota Johnson, have to do with the Vietnamese nail salon industry? Wanting to help Vietnamese refugees learn a skill that would gain them autonomy in the United States after the war, Hedren had her manicurist teach a group of about 20 Vietnamese women nail art, and they, in turn, taught their friends and family. And the rest is history … that you can read in Mai Nguyen’s 2014 article on how Vietnamese-owned nail salons became so ubiquitous across North America in the 1980s and ’90s. This includes Nguyen’s family, who opened their own salon in Canada in 1997.

“I wanted to write more about it. I wasn’t done. The 2,000-word article wasn’t enough,” Nguyen tells Shondaland from her home in Toronto, where her debut novel, Sunshine Nails, out July 4, is set. That article was followed by a New York Times exposé on labor abuses in nail salons a year later, and Nguyen was inspired to try her hand at fiction to continue writing about the industry. “I thought it would be easier to just make up a family!”

She continues, “It was a much more fun process this way because I can combine all the experiences I’ve had growing up in a nail salon family and create characters based on a combination of everyone I’ve ever met.”

Sunshine Nails, named for the nail salon owned by the Tran family in rapidly gentrifying downtown Toronto, follows prodigal daughter Jessica, who has returned to the city after leaving a glitzy career as a Hollywood casting director. The novel also centers on Dustin, Jessica’s younger brother, who is growing increasingly disillusioned by the tech start-up where he works; Thuy, their recently emigrated cousin, who dreams of becoming a nurse instead of toiling away at Sunshine Nails; Jessica and Dustin’s father, Phil, whose “innocence” and “joy” at getting to “infiltrate a private female domain where you get to hear all the gossip and inner lives of women,” Nguyen says, might cloud his business judgment; and matriarch Debbie, who feels at odds with her mất gốc (disconnected from their culture) children and niece, who have so many more opportunities than she did at their age, when she and Phil were forced to immigrate to Canada.

“A lot of times when you see nail technicians in TV and movies, you mostly see the back of their head, or maybe they’ll make a joke or be the butt of the joke, and you never see them again,” says Nguyen, which, unlike, say, Claws, calls to mind the scene in Sex and the City when the girls are getting pedicures while talking about money in the uncomfortably titled episode “The Caste System.”

“I wanted to see nail technicians as the main characters,” says Nguyen.

Nguyen deftly renders all her main characters and their intergenerational relationships. As mentioned, there’s tension between Jessica and Dustin and their parents, which Nguyen acknowledges is a common theme among second-generation stories. “I’m not breaking any boundaries here. It’s definitely a trope to talk about the generational struggles, and I wanted to do it in the context of work and labor,” she says.

Perhaps more interesting is the palpable strain between Debbie and Thuy and, in turn, the “layer of [tension between] older immigrants and newer immigrants.” The author says Thuy was supposed to be a side character, but she “grew” and “blossomed” as Nguyen wrote her. In one of many bright spots in Sunshine Nails — or the sheen on a freshly lacquered manicure, if you will — Thuy comes into her own, surprising her family and readers. “Just because you sponsored me doesn’t mean I have to go down the one path that you told me to,” Nguyen says of Thuy’s motivation.

Jessica is similarly resistant to her family’s continual goading to come and work at Sunshine Nails. Though Nguyen has said that the Trans are an amalgamation of different people she’s known throughout her life and not based on any one family member or experience, some of Nguyen is mirrored in Jessica. For example, Nguyen would help out at her family’s salon on weekends and during the summer, and recalls a time, post-NYT article, when a client put Nguyen’s tip directly into her pocket, lest the manager — Nguyen’s dad — steal it, an anecdote that made it into the book.

“That investigative article did wonders for making sure those labor abuses didn’t persist … but on the other hand, the article did a disservice to the nail salon industry in general. A lot of customers started looking at all nail salons as potential places where worker abuse took place, and that’s not the case at all,” Nguyen says. “I think a lot of people wanted to make sure that the consumer choices they were making were guilt-free.”

There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, some argue, and although gentrification looms large in Sunshine Nails, Nguyen needed a “bona fide villain.” That villain comes in the form of Take Ten, a bougie manicure chain that moves in across the street from Sunshine Nails, and its glamorous proprietor, Savannah Shaw.

So, if Nguyen found herself called back to help her family’s salon in the manner that Jessica is, would she do it?

“No, I couldn’t do it! I don’t want to bend over and touch people’s feet and clip their nails!” she laughs. “It requires so much determination and patience. Running any business requires [that].”

Go Home, Women’s Wrestling!

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This post originally appeared on FanFyte.

Writer Gene Kwak released his debut novel Go Home, Ricky!, about an indie wrestler named Ricky Twohatchet, earlier this year. Ricky is trying to make ends meet after sustaining an injury in the ring, breaking up with his girlfriend and receiving core-shaking news about his identity and upbringing. It’s the latest in a long line of pop culture centered on men’s wrestling after the halcyon days of the women’s wrestling evolution that went mainstream.

Cast your mind back to 2019: GLOW had just aired its third and—though we didn’t know it yet—final season, Florence Pugh kicked off her banner year by playing Paige in Fighting with My Family, Total Divas and Total Bellas were still airing and Becky Lynch was wrestling’s biggest crossover star since John Cena. Wrestling was cool again—or at least as cool as it was ever going to be since its late ’90s heyday—and women were spearheading that, coinciding with the pinnacle of the women’s wrestling evolution.

Two years later and it would appear that it was all a fever dream. Total Divas hasn’t filmed since 2019, GLOW was unceremoniously canceled due to the logistics of filming a wrestling show in a pandemic (nevermind the fact that actual wrestling companies have continued on) and Becky Lynch has only just returned from taking a year off at the height of her popularity to have a baby. As commentary for the first women’s main event of WrestleMania, at the 35th installment in 2019, would have us believe, the women’s “evolution [is] complete.” The second women’s main event of WrestleMania (and the first between two Black wrestlers of any gender) between Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair this year notwithstanding, women’s wrestling in WWE has continued to experience periods of pre-#GiveDivasAChance dismality, the most recent of which was two consecutive episodes of SmackDown in September with no women’s matches at all. But hey, women can wrestle in Saudi Arabia now so they’re equal, right?

Women’s wrestling doesn’t fare much better in AEW, where their women’s division has proved problematic for bookers since day one, and many women’s matches are pushed to AEW Dark on YouTube. And while Women of Wrestling was recently rebooted, it’s with racist bully Tessa Blanchard at the helm.

Men’s wrestling, however, is thriving, with AEW a smorgasbord of white male indie darlings. The majority of the VICE docuseries Dark Side of the Ring has been about problematic men, and despite Netflix’s reasoning that producing a show about wrestling was too risky, that hasn’t stopped Starz from greenlighting men’s wrestling show Heels starring Stephen Amell, the first season of which just concluded. Similarly, a fictionalized retelling of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s upbringing, Young Rock, aired earlier this year on NBC to great success. It will take more to convince me, but the general consensus is that men’s wrestling is back on top.

Which brings us to Go Home, Ricky!, by far the best mainstream representation of wrestling since GLOW. And while, yes, the novel is centered on a young man’s experience, Kwak wanted to use his main character to illuminate other identities.

“It was about showing different elements of toxic masculinity,” he tells me. When I posit the thesis of this essay to him, he exclaims that, “promoting women shouldn’t be an angle, it should just be a thing!” Indeed.

“My goal as a writer is to render everybody on the page with a level of grace,” he continues. “I still want to give them agency. There are people who come and go in the book but you still get a sense that they’re still living their lives off the page.”

“There were questions I wanted to tackle as a writer: a character who was on a search for his father, identity, masculinity, his relationship with his mother, wrestling, midwestern stuff…,” Kwak says. “It’s a wrestling book but there’s actually not a lot of wrestling in it. It’s about how wrestling informs [Ricky’s] life and his viewpoints. It’s a book about the search for his father but it’s actually about his mother. There’s all these different ways that I tried to play with or upend expectations and I hope people pick up on that.”

These are the nuanced unpackings of modern masculinity and racial identity in America that current mainstream depictions of wrestling only wish they could pull off. During our conversation, Kwak and I talk about how GLOW, Friday Night Lights and Ted Lasso succeed in being about subcultures that viewers don’t necessarily have to be interested in “because there’s so much about the humanity of the characters so that you care” about them rather than the pretense, Kwak says. 

Parallels can be drawn, too, with Reservation Dogs and the Native students Ricky mentors, which is both ironic given the aforementioned revelation about his ethnic background but is also inspired by Kwak’s work with Gateway to College. 

“I really wanted to write a midwestern book…,” says Kwak, who was born and raised in Nebraska, where he still lives and teaches at the University of Nebraska. “I always wanted the book to be about a character addressing his whiteness, so I had to make him confront that head on. It’s such a commonplace thing for a lot of white Americans to grow up with [a lore of having Native American ancestry in their genetic background] as part of their family history. Even Elizabeth Warren, who’s a very intelligent person, just heard it in a family story and ran with that narrative and never cared to look into it.”  

Despite the sophisticated identity politics that Go Home, Ricky! traverses, it is absolutely a book for wrestling fans. Kwak cites his inspiration as growing up as a wrestling fan in the heyday of the ’80s and ’90s, a time when both wrestling and the literary canon were both full of straight, white men “careening through the world, almost oblivious to the people they’re hurting or affecting,” he says. The inside baseball terminology of Kwak’s writing—listing off men who’ve sacrificed their bodies for wrestling that reads like an episode log of Dark Side of the Ring, for example—will satisfy the most hardcore fans, while laypeople won’t feel alienated.

While tastes seem to have ebbed back towards men’s wrestling for the time being, Go Home, Ricky! shows that this doesn’t have to mean that the stories just have to be about straight, white, cisgender men. As we wait for the flow towards a more equitable version of professional wrestling, it’s an ethos that other pop cultural products about wrestling and, indeed, wrestling proper could use much more of.

Why is Asuka the Second Fiddle of the Women’s Division?

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This post originally appeared on FanFyte.

Asuka stared down champions Charlotte Flair and Alexa Bliss. Who would she choose to face for their title at WrestleMania 34, an honor she had just earned by winning the first ever women’s Royal Rumble match in 2018. As she considered the two competitors in front of her, the strains of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” came over the sound system at the Wells Fargo arena in Philadelphia and Ronda Rousey made her much anticipated first appearance as a wrestler under contract to WWE.

It could have been worse: Rousey could have made her in-ring debut in the match, which the internet was going gangbusters with rumors of. But in stealing Asuka’s thunder as the winner of the first women’s Royal Rumble match, Rousey became the embodiment of how WWE would consistently undercut the momentum of the wrestler formerly known as Kana.

Up until her match at WrestleMania 34, in which she ended up challenging Charlotte Flair for her SmackDown Women’s Championship, Asuka was enjoying a 914-day undefeated streak throughout her tenure in NXT and during her move to the main roster in late 2017. She made quick work of every opponent put in front of her, from Bayley to Mickie James to Nikki Cross to Ember Moon, so much so that a viable usurper seemed unfathomable. It seemed that NXT agreed, opting to have Asuka forfeit the women’s championship, which she held for 522 days, rather than make her look like anything less than the killer she is by losing it in a match, the exception to the rule of NXT’s female babyface booking. While I don’t hate the end of the streak as much as others (I’d rather Charlotte end it than Rousey), WWE has only diminished Asuka’s fearsomeness since the end of the streak, portraying lesser wrestlers such as Carmella and Alexa Bliss as viable challengers.

Asuka continued to languish on the main roster for the next couple of years or so, playing second fiddle to Charlotte and her feud with Becky Lynch and Ronda Rousey, winning the SmackDown title in late 2018 during a Tables Ladders and Chairs match in which she seemed like an afterthought. This theme has carried on today, with Asuka seeming to be the sidekick—despite being the champion!—to other women’s stories. But more on that later.

The most egregious example of Asuka’s fleecing, to my mind, is the lead up to WrestleMania 35. Everyone was excited for the first women’s main event of the “Super Bowl of wrestling”, including myself. It was a no brainer ever since Becky Lynch got her face busted open and went viral while getting the better of Rousey several months before during what was supposed to be their first meeting at Survivor Series in late 2018. But WWE did what WWE is wont to do and severely fucked with the booking, adding Charlotte and the SmackDown women’s championship—which Charlotte had won from Asuka two weeks before—to the match, making it a winner-take-all stipulation. This resulted in Asuka and the rest of the women’s division (bar an equally-as-messy eight-woman tag team championship match) being pushed off the main card and into the women’s battle royal on the pre-show. It was later revealed that Asuka was supposed to defend the title against the winner of an advertised match between Carmella, Sonya Deville, Naomi or Mandy Rose, but that was scrapped in favor of beefing up the women’s main event to make it more meaningful. As if the first women’s main event wasn’t meaningful enough on its own, without all the additional bells and whistles.

Asuka’s propulsion as a singles star was further thwarted by putting her into the racistly-named Kabuki Warriors tag team with Kairi Sane, inexplicably managed for the first half of their run by Paige. Asuka’s Japanese heritage has always been a big part of her character, but in foisting her into a team with the only other Japanese woman on the main roster and having a white woman as their mouthpiece (Asuka and Sane leaned heavily on their native Japanese dialect during their time together), felt hollow at first, solidifying the argument that WWE doesn’t know what to do with wrestlers of color apart from lumping them together. Despite this, the team got themselves over and saw success, going on to hold the Women’s Tag Team Championships for the longest reign as of this writing.

With Sane leaving WWE, freeing Asuka up to get back into singles competition, it seemed like 2020 would finally be Asuka’s year. Along with Sasha Banks and Bayley, Asuka carried WWE through its audience-less pandemic year, and she was rewarded for it by being crowned the Raw women’s champion for its majority. But for those who care to see smell it *raised hand emoji* the same stench that has permeated the rest of Asuka’s main roster run was evident.

She may have won the women’s Money in the Bank match but, like in the two years prior (which make up 75% of total women’s MITB cash ins since the inception of the women’s version of the match in 2017; a dismal track record), the briefcase that usually contains a championship contract was cracked open within 24 hours to reveal that Asuka had actually won Becky Lynch’s Raw women’s title due to Lynch’s pregnancy. 

Surprisingly, this was not the only time that an Asuka storyline was foiled by a pregnancy: save for a brief period in mid-2020 when Asuka lost the title to Sasha Banks due to shenanigans, Asuka seldom defended it. When she did, especially in the latter part of 2020 and into 2021, it was secondary to another feud, namely Lana being bullied by the entire Raw women’s division, a returning Charlotte teaming up with Asuka to challenge tag team champions Shayna Baszler and Nia Jax, and Charlotte’s beef with her father, Ric Flair, and Lacey Evans, whose aforementioned pregnancy led to Evan’s match with Asuka being called off with nothing to replace it. As recently as three weeks prior to this year’s WrestleMania, Asuka did not have an opponent. Rhea Ripley made her main roster debut to challenge Asuka for the title on the grandest stage of them all, and their storyline consisted of… feuding with Baszler and Jax, just as the SmackDown women’s title contenders Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair had been doing, because although the introduction of the tag titles was supposed to provide more storylines to the women apparently WWE can’t think of any.

Poor writing and lack of opportunity have plagued WWE’s women’s division for a long time, resulting in social media movements such as #GiveDivasAChance in 2015. The muddled booking in recent months—on Raw in particular, where Asuka resides—have led to murmurings of another #GiveWomenSuperstarsAChance campaign. After orbiting Ripley and Flair in their feud for Asuka’s former title, which she lost to Ripley in their WrestleMania match, Asuka has been off TV since Money in the Bank in July addressing health concerns. Granted, at least Asuka is still under contract which is more than I can say for the spate of women wrestlers who have been let go. 

Sure, Asuka’s treatment is symptomatic of booking problems in WWE more broadly, but when it’s all laid out here, it’s plain for anyone to see that WWE has an Asuka problem.

Scream 3 & the Me Too Movement.

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This article originally appeared in We Are Horror.

Everyone agrees that the original 1996 installment in what has become the five-part horror anthology of Scream is the best. It’s the proceeding four sequels (the fifth doesn’t come out til 2022) that cause consternation. I’m partial to the youth, technology and burgeoning social media commentary of Scream 4 or Scre4m (2011), and believe that 1997’s follow up is the weakest, however it’s the turn of the millennium’s Scream 3 that gets many horror fans in a tizzy.

The film is set three years after the second massacre that has beseeched protagonist Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), this time at her university that left her boyfriend Derek (Jerry O’Connell) and friend Randy (Jamie Kennedy) dead at the hands of fellow student Mickey (Timothy Olyphant) and original killer and Sidney’s ex Billy’s (Skeet Ulrich) mom, Debbie (Laurie Metcalf). Phew! Sidney has isolated herself on a ranch where her only company is her golden retriever and the traumatized survivors she anonymously counsels via phone. “You can’t kill what you can’t find,” she reasons of her self-imposed exile.

Everyone except Sidney has managed to prolong their fifteen minutes of infamy into the periphery of Hollywood. Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) is Gale Weathersing, while Dewey (David Arquette) acts as a bodyguard to the actress who plays Gale, Jennifer (Parker Posey), in the Stab trilogy, based on the crimes exacted against our core triumvirate that are being reenacted both in front of and behind the camera.

It’s all painfully meta, but the meta narrative ended up foreshadowing a Hollywood scandal almost twenty years ahead of its time: #MeToo. 

The action takes place primarily on the Hollywood backlot where Stab 3 is being filmed, allowing a cameo from Hollywood mainstay who has seen it all, Carrie Fisher, in a role as a studio archivist whom she acknowledges “look[s] just like her.”

“I was up for Princess Leia,” she says. “But you know who got it? The one who slept with George Lucas.”

Disposable and disappeared women is the theme of Scream 3, with the memory of the one who started it all, Sidney’s mother Maureen (Lynn McRee), returning to haunt Sidney’s subconscious. Through Gale and Gale Lite’s sleuthing, they uncover that Maureen was in fact a Hollywood ingenue in the late seventies, before returning to Woodsboro and settling down to have Sidney. Maureen was a victim of the infamous “casting couch.” 

This hearkens back to Fisher’s comments and foreshadows the revelation that the same thing happened to the novice playing Sidney in Stab 3, Angelina (Emily Mortimer). The fact that both of these women ended up murdered by Ghostface further emphasises their disposability.

Their proximity to the ultimate Final Girl Sidney is no coincidence, given the reveal of who dons the Ghostface mask this time around: Sidney’s half-brother as a result of said casting couch, it is inferred, Roman Bridgers (Scott Foley), director of Stab 3 and, indeed, of all of the in-text inspiration for the Stab franchise leading up to this point. Playing into the Freudian and Hitchcockian tropes of it being all mommy’s fault, the lasting legacy that Scream 3 leaves is an indictment of Hollywood’s treatment of women.

Of course Scream prided itself on flaying open the medium of the horror movie and turning it back on itself. As ultimate horror buff and the audiences’ guide to just how Scream did this, Randy, explains in a posthumous video, “true trilogies are about going back to the beginning and discovering something that you thought was true but wasn’t.” Who could have foretold that the producer of Scream 3 would have been accused of, charged with and jailed for similar crimes to those committed by Stab 3 producer, John Milton (Lance Henriksen)?

“You have made millions off the story of [Maureen’s] murder,” Gale admonishes Milton, a clear stand in for Harvey Weinstein, head of Dimension Films, which distributed all four Scream movies thus far.

“Nothing happened to her that she didn’t invite one way or another, no matter what she said afterwards,” Milton defended himself.

It’s a similar catchcry to that which has been levelled against the 90 women who accused Weinstein of sexual assault, harassment, and messing with their careers if they rejected his advances and, indeed, many survivors who’ve spoken up. While those brave enough to do so have become the figureheads of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, Scream 3 asks us to consider those who chose to recoil from the industries in which they faced abuse because the alternative was just too damn hard.

Of course Weinstein was not the first Hollywood power player to use his influence to coerce young actresses to do things they didn’t want to. Host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This Karina Longworth wrote in her book Seduction: Sex, Lies & Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood that “Hughes would move from pursuing top female stars to pursuing young (sometimes very young) women whose careers had not yet gotten very far off the ground.” And we all know about horror master Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with his leading ladies. This is not to say that Hughes and Hitchcock committed the same sins as Weinstein, however they used their influence and control over these young women’s careers to get them to do what they wanted, just like Milton did to Maureen, Angelina and countless others in between.

Scream 3 was made over twenty years ago and, despite the franchise’s heavy incorporation of the technology of the times, it has managed to stay timeless not only for being genuinely good but, unfortunately, for being an all-too-relevant portrayal of women in Hollywood and horror.

The Charmed Reboot is Low-Key Better Than the Original.

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A version of this post originally appeared on Ten Daily.

The show follows Latinx sisters Mel (Melonie Diaz) and Maggie Vera (Sarah Jeffery) and Macy Vaughn (Madeleine Mantock) as they simultaneously discover their familial ties and their witchy powers.

There was some consternation about the modern reimagining when it was announced early last year by original stars Ayssa Milano and Holly Marie Combs. 

“… [D]on’t even think of capitalizing on our hard work. Charmed belongs to the 4 [sic] of us, our vast amount of writers, crews and predominantly the fans. FYI you will not fool them by owning a title/stamp. So bye,” Combs tweeted at the time.

“I think that [the remake] ruined the possibility of [having the original stars cameo] by the way in which the reboot came down. Like, the fact that we weren’t included from the very beginning. It just felt really disrespectful, you know?” Milano told US Weekly. Rose McGowan gave the remake her blessing while Shannon Doherty is enjoying a renaissance of her own on the recent 90210 reboot.

I am a big fan of the original Charmed, owning all seasons on DVD box set and having rewatched them multiple times. I can even remember some of the spells verbatim and the outrageous outfits hold a special place in my heart.

But the remake, which centres witches of colour and deals with things such as identity politics and the #MeToo movement, is for these reasons low-key better than the original.

For example, Mel is a lesbian while Macy isbegins the series as a rare older virgin. These sexual identities are important to each sisters’ storyline and character, but they don’t define them. When Macy has sex for the first time with her boyfriend, Galvin (Ser’Darius Blain), Charmed doesn’t dwell on it, nor does Macy herself. It’s just a thing that happened.

Each sister works at the university in their college town: Macy as a research fellow, Mel is a gender studies lecturer and Maggie is a student. It is for this reason thatTherefore many of the storylines focus on campus sexual assault and predatory professors. 

There’s also storyline in season one where Maggie, who grew up believing she was Mel’s fully biological sister, discovers that it’s actually she and Macy, who was raised separately from her sisters and only connects with them in the pilot, who have the same biological parents. Maggie is forced to reckon with her new-found African American heritage and struggles with whether she’s “black enough” to join the black student union.

Though there was controversy over the casting of non-Latinx actresses (Mantock is Afro-Carribean and Jeffery is African American), the original Charmed could never delve into the issues that the remake does because the only non-white cast member was Darryl, the Charmed Ones’ cop friend who covered for them when their supernatural cases intersected with criminal ones. This time around Darryl’s equivalent is Mel’s ex Niko (Ellen Tamaki), who is also a queer woman of colour. Many of theCharmed 1.0’s guest characters were white, too, limiting the problems Charmed 1.0it could address through magic.

Additionally, the new version was reimagined by Jane the Virgin creator Jennie Snyder Urman, who has chops when it comes to accurate representation of Latinx families on screen. (It is worth mentioning that Snyder Urman is white.)Nostalgia is a powerful force: one only has to look at the copious reboots gracing our screens in the last couple of years. The new Charmed has a lot to live up to, but while the original introduced a generation of mostly white girls to witchcraft and kick-ass heroines, the modern reimagining empowers today’s queer girls and girls of colour to see themselves represented.

World Wrestling Entertainment is Relying on Has-Beens to Pack Out the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

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This post originally appeared on Ten Daily.

Sixteen years after World Wrestling Entertainment returned Down Under with their Global Warning tour in 2002, WWE looks to set attendance records again for their biggest event ever in Australia, Super Show-Down, next Saturday at the MCG.

Super Show-Down will be headlined by your childhood wrestling idols, The Undertaker VS. Triple H, in a match marketed as “the last time ever” these two will ever meet in a ring. Apparently the previous time they wrestled at WrestleMania 28 in a Hell in a Cell match which was billed as “The End of an Era” actually wasn’t.

Similarly, ’Taker, as he is affectionately known to fans, effectively “retired” in a match against Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 34 a year and a half ago. But like the Dead Man persona he takes on, he was resurrected at this year’s WrestleMania to defeat John Cena in what was also dubbed a once-in-a-lifetime event. But at 53 years old, The Undertaker is far from the supernatural hero of yore. He has appeared visibly fatigued in the occasional match he wrestles for at least the last five years, if not longer, and given the high rates of early deaths in the industry, I would prefer not to witness him literally die in the ring next weekend.

His opponent, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, is not exactly a spring chicken himself. At 49, he currently spends most of his time in a suit as WWE’s Executive Vice-President of Talent, Creative and Live Events. So I guess we can thank him for WWE’s continued reliance on stars from his heyday.

But we also have Levesque to thank for NXT, WWE’s minor league where many of its current and future stars are built, including the Australian wrestlers who will show up on Saturday, such as “The IIconics” Billie Kay and Peyton Royce, from Sydney, and Melbourne’s own Buddy Murphy, formerly known as Matt Silva in local promotion MCW.

Also wrestling at Super Show-Down will be Universal champion Roman Reigns. Heir to the The Undertaker’s throne, as well as those of fellow household names like Cena and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Reigns’ cousin), Reigns is WWE’s shaky attempt at building a new star. Internet pundits will complain that WWE doesn’t promote enough younger talent as I am doing here, but in the case of Reigns, we complain that his ascension was too prescriptive and inorganic. In the age of the anti-hero, we love to hate on the good guy or, in wrestling parlance, the babyface. Perhaps in an attempt to combat the inevitable boos that will echo from the MCG on Saturday, WWE has aligned Reigns with his old Shield teammates—a three-man vigilante group decked out in tactical gear and billed as “The Hounds of Justice” that was adored for much of the mid-2010s—Intercontinental champion Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose, who has recently returned from injury. 

On the other hand, self-made notorious UFC fighter-turned-wrestler Ronda Rousey, who returns to the site of her first and most crushing defeat for Super Show-Down, has (rightly) drawn criticism not just for her transphobia and school shooting skepticism but for not having “paid her dues” in wrestling, winning the women’s championship in August after only a handful of matches.

And that’s the problem with WWE and their reliance on big names who are arguably past their prime: by the time a wrestler has paid off this arbitrary debt, honing their craft on the independent wrestling scene, toiling away in NXT, then being embroiled in a series of meaningless feuds and matches in WWE proper, they are oftentimes into their late thirties and early forties before they catch their big WWE break, if ever. (This usually only applies to male wrestlers. It’s rare to see a female wrestler stay active in the ring after her mid-thirties and/or motherhood, which is another problem in itself.) Given the high injury rate of WWE Superstars, coupled with the above mentioned propensity for early death, younger wrestlers are naturally more resilient so at the very least it seems like a poor business model to hinge your product on unpredictable older wrestlers.With the 41-year-old John Cena, WWE’s biggest mainstream star in the last 15 years who will also be at Super Show-Down, spending more time in Hollywood, and the disdain for Reigns and souring to Rousey, there is an argument for WWE wanting to shy away from building new stars. But now is the time they should be leaning into it, trying new things with more wrestlers to see what sticks.

“I Lived Like Carrie Bradshaw for a Year & Wow, It Wasn’t Cheap.”

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This post originally appeared in Whimn in 2018.

“I Quit Shopping After an Apartment Fire Took Everything I Owned,” reads the headline of an article Ko Im wrote about her former materialistic lifestyle, influenced by a love for Sex & the City. “I would watch [Carrie Bradshaw] doing all these fun things in the city, dating, and being a published writer and having this sense of style and self and I definitely think I aspired to that. It didn’t bother me that she put her shoes in her oven because I thought that’s what I would do,” Ko tells me via phone from New York City, where she lives and works as a branded content creator for CBS and a yoga teacher. 

What Ko, 32, didn’t think she’d be doing was sharing a bed with a model friend to help pay the rent. “The universe decided for me” that she needed to change her lifestyle, first with the co-sleeping and secondly the fire, which happened when thankfully she was not at home. This resulted in Ko parting ways with a lot of her designer clothes, including the pink Carrie-esque tutu that Ko posed in on the cover of her e-book about her unsustainable lifestyle, Broke Not Broken.

Though an actual fire didn’t snap me out of my materialism, it was the realisation about four years ago that faced with the hypothetical threat of a fire, the only things I would grab when fleeing it were my dog and my laptop.

Unlike Ko and the other women I spoke to for this article, I never spent money I didn’t have trying to emulate the lavish lifestyle peddled to me by such shows as Sex & the City and, later, Gossip Girl and Younger. But for years I lived paycheck-to-paycheck, spending my study allowance on fast fashion, none of which is still in my clothing rotation. The only investment item I’ve kept from that time in my life is a $900 multicolour Louis Vuitton monogrammed wallet, a holdover from Carrie’s contemporary celebrity influencers such as Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson.

Claire Sefchik, 33, a writer for a magazine in the British Virgin Islands, also has an investment item from her time living beyond her means as a young writer in pre-financial crisis New York in 2007. An infertile couple paid Claire $8000 for her eggs and with that money she bought a Marc Jacobs bag. “I still have to this day… It’s held up really well and it still looks good so I guess there’s that,” she says dryly.

Coming from a poor family, which probably influenced my period of spendthriftiness, I never built the financial skills to save money and keep to a budget. I just spent my money until it was gone and would worry about it later. Even after having moved home for two years to save, not for a house but for an extended period emulating the life of Carrie and co. in New York, I’ve come to understand that I still need to work on money management: being able to save when you have no expenses is a lot different than saving money amidst the cost of daily life, even for those without expensive taste.

Sex & the City has long come under fire for Carrie being able to subsist on one freelance column per week, which supposedly bankrolled her unrealistic lifestyle consisting of cosmos, couture and a spacious Upper East Side apartment, and launched thousands of young women to New York to try to emulate that lifestyle.

Stepfanie Romine, 37, a health and wellness writer and yoga teacher, relates to being unable to manage her finances as a young cosmopolitan with a taste for cosmopolitans. Though she worked as a copy editor for a daily newspaper in a smaller U.S. city, Columbus, Ohio, “I felt so glamorous because I lived in an apartment downtown and I spent way too much money on fancy cocktails and clothes and shoes that I didn’t need,” Stepfanie says. 

“I remember one time I spent almost $200 on a pair of Prada heels, which was a steal at some discount store, but they didn’t fit well [and] they hurt my feet with every single step but I didn’t care because they were Prada and they were purple,” evoking the Sex & the City scene in which Carrie finds herself destitute in the face of her expensive and ill-fitting shoe habit. At the time Stepfanie thought, “this is what women do, this is the lifestyle. If I want to be glamorous I have to suffer.”

During our ten-minute conversation Stepfanie mentions “glamour” and its derivative “glamorous” eight times. “This is the lifestyle I deserve, something glamorous,” she says of her mindset in 2003, the height of Carrie fever. Claire, too, made reference to the glamour inherent in the Sex & the City lifestyle. I couldn’t help but wonder about how often this word comes up in discussions about the kind of existence modern women should have, from Real Housewives to Fergie lyrics. Similarly, “deserve” is common reality TV parlance to justify lavish spending and the accumulation of things.

I, too, lusted over designer branded t-shirts and keychains, because they were the only things with the logo I could afford. I bought dozens of fashion magazines a month, and plastered the luxurious ads and fashion shoots across my walls and school books. I’m human so I’m not immune to the allure of pretty things, but now I know my happiness and self-worth doesn’t hinge on them. Now I try to buy better quality, more ethical and, yes, more expensive items less often, and I like to focus more on experiences than stuff.

As much as Sex & the City devolved into a materialistic shitshow in its later seasons, and especially the subsequent movies, it was about having experiences, namely sexual, but also developing female friendships and making it in the big city. Claire agrees that the show still has value. “Sex & the City is still one of my favourite shows… because of the stories they tell about women and friendships and relationships, [which] were not something that I’d seen before. Those are still stories worth telling.”

So does Ko. “Part of me thinks every girl needs to go [broke] just like every girl needs to go through heartbreak,” she says. “It was a big personal growth period but not a financial growth period.” 

Stepfanie, who moved to South Korea to teach English and get out of debt “because I wasn’t going to change my habits in my current environment”, says her “lifestyle has done pretty much a 180. I live a very simple life in the mountains of North Carolina and my life is nothing like it was then. I’m up at 5am, I go to bed early and I’m more likely to be wearing Birkenstocks than Manolo Blahniks. 

“It’s funny that back in my early 20s I so wanted to be glamorous. I thought that that was my personality. But we all change throughout life.”

Having moved back in with her parents for a few years after the egg donation debacle, Claire is in a better place, too. “I’m living the life that I wanted to, just in a different way. The cost of living [in the British Virgin Islands] isn’t as much and… there’s not all this pressure to be rich and beautiful. It’s fun and glamorous in a different way.”

My life doesn’t have all the designer trappings I thought it might when I, too, was trapped in the Sex & the City materialism matrix but I think it looks pretty good, with many of the markers of a successful young woman making her way in the a big city.After doing the New York hustle for a few years after the fire, Ko has also “landed at a really good place now.” With help from her parents, like Carrie had help from her chosen family, Ko bought a studio apartment in Manhattan. “I have my own bed… even though it’s a Murphy bed!”

A Literal Battle of the Sexes: Is Mixed-Gender Wrestling Making a Comeback?

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This piece originally appeared in Playboy in 2018 prior to allegations of sexual assault against Joey Ryan.

World Wrestling Entertainment’s Mixed Match Challenge (MMC), a mixed-gender tag team tournament, premieres on Facebook Live on 16th January. The weekly competition pits twelve male-and-female partnerships against each other in what could mark WWE’s latest foray into testing the waters for a full blown intergender wrestling renaissance.

Intergender wrestling, which involves a woman wrestling a man, enjoyed some popularity in WWE in the late 1990s and early 2000s and sees continued success on the independent wrestling scene, with Princess Kimber Lee (now known as Abbey Laith in WWE) and Sexy Star winning male titles in their respective promotions. The World’s Cutest Tag Team, consisting of Joey Ryan and Candice LeRae, even have a line of intergender merchandise currently being sold at select Hot Topic stores.

Intergender wrestling has largely fallen by the wayside in WWE in the last decade or so as the company marketed itself as a family-friendly product. Though the MMC will not officially involve any male-on-female contact (the definition of a mixed match is that when an opponent of another gender tags into the match, they must only wrestle a member of their same gender), WWE has slowly been flirting with the idea, through their “Women’s Evolution”, that men and women are equal now and can therefore face off against each other in the wrestling ring.

At last year’s WrestleMania event, John Cena and Nikki Bella wrestled The Miz and Maryse in a mixed tag team match, so while Nikki was not technically allowed to touch her male opponent Miz, that didn’t stop her from taking a suicide dive out of the ring and onto him.

It wasn’t until this past November that the first official intergender match in five years took place on WWE programming, though. In a storyline that simmered for the better part of 2017, James Ellsworth (who actually won a women’s match by collecting a briefcase suspended from above the ring and giving it to woman wrestler Carmella) finally faced Becky Lynch on SmackDown on the USA network, a match that Lynch won. 

In the lead up to the aforementioned WrestleMania match, Bella performed her finishing move on male wrestler Tyler Breeze, which caused her to injure her surgically repaired neck. In that respect, the argument can be made that women are genetically weaker than men and shouldn’t be competing against them. To take it a step further, then, intergender wrestling perpetuates and normalizes gendered violence, which is a debate that rages on wrestling Twitter every other week.

But professional wrestling is fake or, to placate my fellow wrestling fans, I’ll use another term: pre-determined. This means that the match outcomes and much of the rest of the in-ring performance have been decided ahead of time. When two or more wrestlers get in the ring together, they’ve agreed to the simulated violence that takes place therein. In other words, intergender wrestling—and all professional wrestling, for that matter—is about consent, whereas domestic, intimate partner and gendered violence is most definitely not.

Woman wrestler Mia Yim, also known as Jade in TNA Wrestling, has been very vocal about being both an intergender wrestler and an intimate partner abuse survivor. In a 2016 interview with The Huffington Post, Yim details her abuse at the hands of her male then-partner, also a wrestler whom she had faced in intergender matches. “We choose to get in the ring. We’re trained to keep ourselves and our opponents safe. But when someone brings it back home, that’s not wrestling anymore. That is not entertainment. That is just straight abuse,” she said of the difference between consensual and non-consensual violence.  

In an article on their website about the upcoming first ever women’s Royal Rumble match (a 30-person battle royal where the winner gets a title match at WrestleMania, the men’s version of which has been running for thirty one years), WWE wrote that, “Oftentimes, men’s and women’s sports have slightly different regulations…. However… the first-ever Women’s Royal Rumble Match will feature no such alterations to its rules.” This is a marked departure from their previous attempts to position wrestling as a legitimate sport, perhaps the only way they can make intergender rules mesh with their family-friendly brand.

Though spectacular athletes, in this way WWE wrestlers are more like superheroes or stunt performers than sportspeople. Plenty of pop cultural products that feature equal opportunity violence manage to maintain a PG rating. “True equality is intergender wrestling,” Joey Ryan tells Playboy. “TV and movies don’t shy away from intergender scripted fighting so WWE should catch up with the rest of the entertainment industry.”

WWE has seemingly been trying to do this for the past several years but, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and everything his downfall hath wrought, it can no longer afford to be content with a “Women’s Evolution” that is little more than a hashtag. The MMC needs to directly lead into intergender wrestling in order for WWE to maintain its relevance in this brand new world.