Values Dissonance/Professional Wrestling

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In the 1950s, wrestling matches were commonly won by moves that modern viewers would find incredibly boring, such as the Head Vice, the Abdominal Stretch, and the Airplane Spin. One wrestling gimmick on the recent MTV series Wrestling Society X lampshaded this: Matt Classic (a character portrayed by American wrestler Scott Colton), better known as Colt Cabana, who'd been in suspended animation for five decades and used all three of the above moves as his finishers.
  • Bradshaw (of APA fame) ran afoul of this while performing at a WWE show in Germany in 2004. He jokingly made a Nazi salute (arm pointed diagonally forward with palm rigid). In the United States, this is a funny (if tasteless) bit of whimsy; in Germany, it's illegal (see more at No Swastikas). WWE came under fire for this incident, and they promptly disciplined Bradshaw by....booking him to win the WWE Championship at The Great American Bash.
  • It can be pretty offensive watching WWE's heel Divas go about their slutty antics. But older or conservative viewers are liable to get a dissonant feeling while watching face Divas behave the exact same way. Candice Michelle was particularly guilty of this: even as a face, she would sometimes plant a pseudo-lesbian kiss on other face Divas such as Torrie Wilson, deeply troubling some viewers while inevitably delighting others.
  • Mocked during Jeff Jarrett's heel phase in the late '90s, where he became outrageously sexist and kept shouting at women to literally Stay in the Kitchen, "barefoot and pregnant." It eventually led to a Crowning Moment of Awesome when the entire female roster ran out and kicked his ass.
  • A well-known incident happened between Jimmy Snuka and Roddy Piper during one of the latter's "Piper's Pit" segments, where Piper tried to make Snuka "feel at home" by offering him coconuts and bananas (Snuka, born James Reiher, is of mixed Melanesian and European descent) and calling him a "monkey." It's been referenced many times over the years to the point where the WWE can now comfortably parody it without causing any offence.
    • This is an in-story rather than straight example, since the point of Piper making anti-Melanesian comments was to reinforce the fact that he was a heel.
  • The big issue in recent years has been the furor over unprotected chairshots. Knowing what we know now, any new fans to professional wrestling will probably wince when they go back to look at hardcore matches from the WWF's Attitude Era or, God forbid, ECW.
    • Conversely, many fans of the Attitude Era find today's wrestling to be embarrassingly unrealistic and stopped watching it for this reason. Back then the suspension of disbelief was fine as long as you imagined that, like boxing, they WERE hitting each other hard and it just didn't look like it. These days, punches land about 6 inches away from the opponent and somehow still knock them down.
  • Certain tactics during matches today would earn a DQ from the ref while during the Attitude Era or Ruthless Aggression Era they would only get a small warning. As such, older fans may find these tactics weak finishes to a match. Examples include:
    • Layla El got her partner disqualified by throwing a shoe into the ring. Teddy Long did this in a match between Jazz and Trish Stratus in 2003. All he got was a stern word from the ref.
    • A manager attacking a wrestler during a match today is enough to get a DQ while in the past they would either get a warning or ejected from the match.
    • Physically touching the referee at all.
    • Attacking your opponent after the match (resulting in a "reversed decision" if the heel was the victor, which is just silly).
  • Back in the old days, throwing another wrestler over the top rope was an automatic DQ. WCW actually made an angle out of it, when main eventer Lex Luger threw midcarder Buff Bagwell over the top rope - and Bagwell immediately demanded his win via DQ. He got it, and the rule was afterwards officially removed from the rulebook due to being antiquated.
    • What made this rule particularly absurd is that it's going to happen every time anyway whenever a wrestler gets clotheslined against the ropes, unless he/she "skins the cat."
    • During the "NWA invasion" storyline in the then-WWF, this was among the rules that were in effect in an NWA title match which were known as "NWA Rules." Another one of those rules was that going up on the top turnbuckle would initiate a five-count where afterwards one would be disqualified if the competitor did not come back down.
  • 'Badass' characters in wrestling are often seen drinking beer as part of their gimmick (Stone Cold Steve Austin, the APA, and The Sandman spring to mind). This is because in the US drinking is supposed to be an 'adult' thing and the young audience will assume this indicates the character is rebellious. However, said wrestler is usually drinking Budweiser, which to people in the UK is considered quite a weak beer and would have very little effect on one's personality. This would certainly not be enough to turn you into the fighting machine gimmick writers would have you believe it does. Coupled with the fact that many people in the UK (and Europe) start drinking at home when they are around 13 or 14, the overall effect is of the character trying too hard to be cool.
    • This gimmick might not work anymore in the US either, since a character well known for never drinking alcohol is CM Punk, and he is incredibly cool.
  • Really, the Attitude Era in general (roughly 1998 to 2001) compared to today's WWE, which is still edgy but comes nowhere near the gleeful subversiveness of the Attitude years. Satanic rituals, race angles (including D-Generation X coming out in Blackface), heels (or even faces!) hitting women on purpose and getting cheered for it, etc.
  • Vince McMahon is a fairly hardcore conservative, and whenever a feud even touches politics, he books the conservative as the face (with exceptions of a few dickish rich guys to inspire hatred from the blue-collar part of the audience (which includes Vince McMahon himself), and Right To Censor, which was more a commentary on anti-violence groups that have both liberal and conservative leanings). Problem is, his target audience skews fairly liberal (being primarily middle-class Americans ages 15 to 25), which makes things put things like this [dead link] immediately into the wall banger pile.
    • So, if you're hawkish on foreign policy, two Samoans in hip-hop gear will show up out of nowhere and pummel you?
    • Seriously, though, politics per se hardly ever comes up; usually, it's just a subtext, if that. WWE performers do tend to be conservative, at least in the sense that most of them are quite wealthy and have pro-military views (at least since 9/11); even an avowed left-winger like CM Punk can come off as conservative due to his "straight-edge" lifestyle. But most of the feuds are based on purely personal hatreds. Occasionally a wrestler will condemn a rival's attitudes or beliefs, but it's always a moral accusation rather than a political one.
  • Foreign wrestlers (or American wrestlers playing foreigners) are usually booked as the heels, and nationality was usually played up as part of the gimmick until very recently. Villainous nationalities included German, Russian, Japanese, and - somewhat ironically, as the best technical wrestlers in the world have come from there - Canadian, particularly French-Canadian. However, when these characters would wrestle before crowds in their homelands (or supposed homelands), they would as often as not be booked to win the match, and gain wild applause from the audience despite still being heels! (Jerry Lawler referred to these incidents as "Bizarro World.")
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