10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Goldust

These days, WWE likes to claim that it is at the vanguard of the movement for gender equality on television - and perhaps there's an element of truth to that too: few other sports, after all, afford the same level of coverage to women.

But you don't have to go very far back in the company's history for an example of a moment in which they were perhaps guilty of propagating - or, at the very least, indulging - social attitudes that belonged to another century.

We refer here specifically to the time Jerry Lawler basically encouraged fans to be homophobic during his brief feud with Goldust in the late 1990s, referring to Dusty Rhodes' son with an ugly three-letter word whose use in a WWE ring today would probably result in an immediate dismissal.

Suffice it to say, this is exactly the kind of thing that Vince and his boardroom would rather everyone forgot about. It's just not going to fly in today's world, regardless of how much you try and dress it up as pantomime and entertainment.