The Dark Match Editorials – Why I’m Taking My Niece to the Mae Young Classic

Thursday afternoon, I will make my way to the Full Sail Arena in Orlando, Florida for the Mae Young Classic, the WWE’s women’s revolution version of their previous Cruiserweight Classic and United Kingdom Championship series.  That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, I travel a lot for WWE events and I’ve been very vocal in my support of the Women’s Revolution.  But I was actually going to hold off and simply watch the Mae Young Classic on the WWE Network (available for $9.99 a month, and a 30 day free trial if you’ve never used it before) because I don’t get paid to do this website, and the summer season is pretty busy for someone who makes a living in the tree care industry and has limited vacation days.  But something sparked a need for me to not only go to the event but to take my niece, and it was something that she said.

“Sometimes I wish I was a boy, boys get to do more stuff.”

What have we done as a society that a seven year old would have that sort of mentality about her opportunities in the world?  What are we doing wrong that would have already put in her mind that there are things she is incapable of in life because she is a little girl and not a little boy?

I read an article last month about a woman who took her son and daughter to see Wonder Woman, and how she loved the idea of being able to present her daughter with such a positive female role model and show her son the strength and power of a woman.  It was a decent article that also begs the lingering question as to why both of those children needed to be taught any of these lessons in a world where we should not only already know but we’ve seen that women are just as capable of anything as a man is?

“Sometimes I wish I was a boy, boys get to do more stuff.”

It’s heartbreaking to think that there might have been a dream in that child’s head that was stifled already because for some reason she seems to believe that there are things that girls and women are not capable of.

So I bought tickets to the Mae Young Classic.

Does my seven year old niece want to be a professional wrestler?  I don’t know, probably not.  She says she wants to be a scientist, which I already think is amazing and a step in the right direction in a world where the demographics of STEM professionals is so drastically skewed to male supremacy.  I’m not trying to turn her into anything, I’m trying to show her a world where women are not only just as important as men, but they are so deserving of the same opportunities that the world’s largest wrestling promotion is putting on a showcase of these amazing athletes for no reason other than they are amazing athletes who deserve a showcase.

And that’s what this entire thing is about.  32 women (I think, they’re still announcing names) get the opportunity to live their dream in front of a worldwide audience.  It’s not about them being divas or getting in “bra and panties” cat fights.  It’s about women who wanted to be taken seriously, who trained to be taken seriously for years in an industry that has not only been dominated by men since its inception, but probably wasn’t entirely supportive of them along the way.  I’m sure people in their lives have not been entirely supportive of them either (and hopefully they don’t have anything to do with those people anymore), but they have never given up on the dream that they are chasing in a world that for some reason is still convinced that men are superior at not just something, but anything.

My girlfriend has a PhD and makes more money than I do.  There’s a whole segment of society that would look at that and think I should feel like less of a man.  Are you f***ing kidding me?  How many men put in the 10 years of work to get a PhD?  And hell yeah she makes more money than I do because she’s worked her ass off to get everything she has, in the face of that same society that forced her to push boulders up mountains to get there because she’s a she.  I don’t feel like less of a man.  I feel honored and privileged to be a part of her ongoing journey.

We keep perpetuating these archaic ideas of dominance or supremacy of a gender or a race or any other dividing line, and hell some even string along some idea of inferiority, and its utterly ridiculous.  So while my niece may never see this article, I hope by the time this is done she understands the point.  Work hard, dedicate yourself and never give up on anything you want to be in this world because of what anyone else thinks or says.  To quote another dreamer: “The haters gonna hate, hate, hate”.  Shake it off, keep pushing metaphorical boulders up metaphorical mountains and prove anyone who naysays wrong, because for lack of a nicer way to say it, fuck them.  It didn’t slow Mae down in 1939 when she debuted, and it didn’t slow Mae down in the 1990s when she still had matches and took powerbombs through tables from Bubba Ray Dudley on into her seventies.  So go get it kid, the world is yours.