How Female Wrestlers Illuminate Everyday Women

 As a male who has dabbled in writing fiction, I'm always interested the lives of woman -- what is important to them and what they want. Not long ago I published one take on this matter and now here is another.

On Dec. 3, 2020, the Arts section of the New York Times, carried a piece by Scarlett Harris lamenting the apparent premature end of a Netflix series about woman wrestlers entitled "GLOW." It ran for three seasons and was supposed to have one more, but that was cancelled. According to the NYT, Netflix cited production delays as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Harris said she liked the series because, along with women pummeling each other with such things as fly-tackles and face slams, the series dealt with subjects faced by "everyday women."  These, she said, include "motherhood, friendship, queer identity, ambition, reproductive rights, racism and eating disorders."

Racism was apparently one topic the show, created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, both white women, didn't successfully address in the context of putting the series together.

"After the show was cancelled, it was revealed that the principal cast's women of color had asked the producers for more inclusivity, criticizing the show for sidelining their characters and making them feel like check boxes on a list," the NYT article said.  In other words, they wanted bigger roles. 

Well, OK, as Harris said earlier in her article, racism is one of the things contemporary women have to deal with.

On another front, it appeared GLOW didn't actually break much new ground.  Sex sells and the more transgressive, the better. Early in the series, one of the main characters discovers the other, a best friend, is sleeping with her husband. But, thanks to having to trust each other in the ring when both become wrestlers, they get their personal relationship back on track, leading Ms Harris to say that for her, GLOW was at its core a love story between the two women. Well, as we learned above, queer identity is one of the issues "everyday women" currently face.

Lots of ideas for aspiring writers here.

Lesbian Relationships as Overcoming the Patriarchy

My previous post provided a couple of examples of patriarchal behavior in domestic situations, both recently and about 100 years ago. The similarities were far more striking than the differences.

On a related note, here is actress Rachel Weisz' take on overcoming one aspect of the patriarchy, the notion that a man's wife belongs to him and that she should behave accordingly.

Weisz, despite being married to Daniel Craig, an actor who has now stared five times as one of the quintessential alpha males, James Bond, has apparently become a "queer icon" as a result of a number of film roles.

It's sort of like the notion: "you are what you wear."

These films, according to a profile in the 2019 "Greats" issue of T, the New York Times Style Magazine, have depicted Weisz "as someone with the clout to create the kinds of female roles that are rarely seen: women in intense, erotic relationships with other women, without apology or explanation."

Well, actually, Weisz does have an explanation. Later in the same article, she is quoted as saying: "There's something that happens in a scene when a woman is across from another woman. It sounds really pompous, but you are free from this history of ownership -- I mean that. It is really liberating."

In other words, free from the patriarchy.