Not For Girls is a personal essay series about my life so far in the world of pro wrestling. Part One focuses on the time before I entered wrestling media.
People told me wrestling was ‘not for girls’ a lot when I was growing up. It was something I heard frequently before I’d even hit double digits.
This idea was implanted in me so early on that it accidentally became the lens through which I viewed wrestling. Just not in the way it was meant to.
As a child, I was what you would have called a 'girly girl'. I wore pretty dresses, played with Barbies, and my room was pink. But then there was the wrestling.
My love for wrestling was often seen as a dirty stain on my party dress, one which wouldn't come out. I'd be told to always cover it up. So that's what I did, I kept it hidden.
But being told wrestling was ‘not for girls’ never stopped me from watching. All it did was make me resent being a girl, or what ‘being a girl’ was meant to be. The expectations, the limitations, and other people projecting their ideas of what you’re supposed to be onto you.
People struggled to understand the contrast between the ‘girliness’ they saw on the outside and my wrestling obsession. No one even knew how my fandom started.
I just found wrestling or it found me. But once we got together we were inseparable.
I’m not even sure what it was about wrestling that I loved so much. The first time I ever saw it on television I was about five years old. I’m not sure who was wrestling, or what show it was. I just have a memory of me standing in my kitchen in front of the television completely transfixed and unable to move.
Then, maybe a year later, I found out how I could watch it every week, and after that, there was no turning back.
Hiding my wrestling stain meant that when the boys in school were playing Austin vs Undertaker, I made up dance routines with the popular girls.
But even though I tried so hard to keep my stain hidden, on occasions my mouth would betray me and the smallest bit of WWE dirt would spit out.
One day in class (when I was about 10) we played a game where the teacher let us quiz each other on random trivia.
A boy asked the class: “Who is the WWE champion?”
“Steve Austin,” one boy shouted. “The Rock,” said another.
Inside my head, I was screaming; “It's The Undertaker!” Then the words weren't just in my head anymore. I had said it out loud. The class acted as if I'd just explained an abstract equation. I hadn't. I'd just been watching Raw.
As high school came around, life landed me with a bigger stain to hide. My father passed away in my last year of primary school.
All my old classmates knew but months later I started a new school. Now I had a new stain but this one was visible for everyone to see, even if no one could work out what caused it.
After he died my days of making up dance routines with the popular girls were over. I had grown up in a way that no one else around me had experienced. I couldn't relate to anyone. Well, anyone in my school. I could relate to The Undertaker and I wanted to emulate him in every way.
The pink was out, the Barbies were binned, and the dresses were now black lace or velvet. I was the freak, the weirdo, the goth, and the wrestling fan.
Being a WWE fan out in the open didn't bring me a new set of friends. It alienated me from the girls and, as for the boys, because wrestling was 'not for girls,’ they didn't want me ruining the fun. But by this point, I was way past caring what anyone thought.
As I grew older and never grew out of wrestling, I heard it was 'not for girls' less and less at home. It had become clear, that this girl wasn't listening. But even though I knew it was for me, deep down, in the back of my mind, I knew some of it really wasn't ‘for girls’.
Pro wrestling has a messy history when it comes to female representation. Growing up I saw Evening Gown matches, bikini contests, and mud wrestling, long before I was even allowed to watch Friends on TV.
I knew, even then, these parts of wrestling weren’t ‘for girls’. But they were another secret I kept, out of the fear of wrestling being taken away from me.
But I never held the misogyny I saw on screen as a child against wrestling. I can look back now in disgust at some of the things I watched. But I always forgave wrestling, because of what it did for me.
Wrestling was always there for me no matter what. It was my escape and more than anything I wanted to climb into my TV and live in its world.
As early as I can remember watching wrestling, I dreamt of being a part of it. First I wanted to be Sherri Martel or Woman. I never saw myself getting in a ring and wrestling, I knew I wasn't athletic enough.
As the years went on Paul Heyman became the person I wanted to be. I'd eat up every piece of footage of him I could find, whether he was Paul E. in ECW or as a WWE commentator. I didn't want to be a 'Paul Heyman Guy' I wanted to be Paul Heyman.
Of course, I had some major things working against me. I lived in Belfast (and a letter in Power Slam magazine once scared me into thinking wrestling success wasn't possible if you were from this side of the world) plus managers had kind of died out.
After school, I ended up going to university in London where I studied journalism and history and I put the wrestling dream aside. Until one day, I signed up for a wrestling school.
"Why not?” I thought. After all, the best managers can take a good bump and this would at least be an entry point into the business.
So on Sundays, I started making the trek from my uni halls to a wrestling school that was a train, a bus, and a long walk away.
Some weeks there were two women in the class, some weeks three but this was long before WWE's 'Women's Revolution'.
I was young, short, blonde, shy, and desperate for acceptance. I did the drills, I ran until all the air had been sucked out of me and I needed to throw up. I learnt to lock up and even some basic holds.
I climbed to the top turnbuckle once and, because some of the boys were too scared to, I was used as an example of bravery. I was so proud of myself. I was better than them. I loved wrestling more.
But even as I stood on the turnbuckle, ready to leap into the squared circle, I was far from one of the boys.
The first time I was taught how I could body slam someone much bigger than me I thought I picked it up pretty quickly.
So quickly that the trainer made me repeat it over and over again while the boys in the class looked on. I wasn't sure why everyone was laughing, I guess I thought it was just the sight of this short blonde picking up a much bigger man that was so funny.
But soon I finally caught on to the joke.
They were laughing because every time I was doing the move on him I was touching his crotch. Where he'd placed my hand.
When I finally realised I was humiliated. How stupid was I to not even understand what was happening?
I don't know what I did when I realised what was going on but I know I didn't do anything. I should have kicked him in the crotch and introduced the class to the art of shoot fighting. Or told the head coach. But I didn't.
Instead of feeling angry or violated, I remembered just feeling sad, dirty and stained. I was ‘the girl’ and I didn’t belong there.
This wouldn’t be the last time I’d think I was getting attention for doing good work only to realise I was nothing more than a sex object or a toy.
Not long after that incident, the man in question was relieved of his duties at the school. I never found out why.
I kept going to classes for a while longer until one day I was dropped from a height by a boy who said he ‘panicked’ because he didn't want to hurt ‘the girl’. I landed straight on my ankle, it hurt like hell but luckily it wasn't broken.
But as I sat at home with a swollen ankle I knew I couldn’t go back. I was too embarrassed. The whole experience had shown me that, no matter how hard I tried to fit in, no matter how many, “Did you see Raw?” conversations I had, I couldn't escape being ‘the girl'.
Here, ‘the girl' was a joke to some, a toy to others, and an object to many. She wasn't strong, smart, or serious, she wasn't even really a person. She was a novelty.
So with a sore ankle, a bruised ego, and the stain of a sweaty, old man's crotch on my hand, my first experience in wrestling had come to an end.
Little did I know this was just the beginning and the 'novelty' of me was never going to wear off.
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