10 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics For WWE In Saudi Arabia
4. Saudi Arabia: Bastion Of Progress For Women
In 2015, WWE launched a long overdue initiative to elevate women’s wrestling, promoting some of NXT’s top stars to the main roster and beginning to highlight their female superstars as capable performers on an equal footing with their male counterparts.
Just three years later, WWE booked a major “WrestleMania-sized event” in a country where women wrestlers were not allowed to perform, leaving their female superstars at home. Even when women were permitted to wrestle on the shows, they were forced to wear more modest, skin-covering outfits rather than their usual gear.
Worse yet, during the first Saudi show in the partnership (Greatest Royal Rumble), WWE aired a propaganda video that praised Saudi Arabia for its efforts to modernize kingdom rules regarding women, highlighting that women could now drive(!), get an education, and attend the show (albeit if accompanied by a male guardian).
The notion that WWE went out of its way to air such blatant propaganda was embarrassing, especially as they were trying as a company to promote parity between men and women and had to act as if a kingdom loosening its grip on women’s rights ever so slightly was praiseworthy.