10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Women's Wrestling

2. Trish Stratus' Early Career

As mentioned in the Lita entry, the Trish Stratus/Lita feud is often brought up as some sort of golden era for women's wrestling. Trish gets more plaudits than most, and in truth they are generally deserved. She was hired as a model and trained her butt off to become a more than cromulent professional wrestler, the model who became the anchor for the division. This can't be denied, and Trish deserves all the credit in the world for making it a reality.

What WWE would like you to forget is that they frequently did all they could to make sure Trish was viewed as the sum of her parts only. She made her debut in the company as the manager of the team of Test & Albert, T & A. Chortle chortle. She managed Val Venis, and was mostly utilised as a hot character on screen for men to gawp at.

She would eventually become involved in an angle where she became involved with Vince McMahon himself. The angle essentially involved degrading Stratus on a weekly basis. After losing to Stephanie McMahon and William Regal in a tag match (she was teaming with Vince), the duo poured sewage over Trish. This led to Vince referring to Trish as a "toy".

The next week Trish was forced to strip down to her underwear and made to bark like a dog. It has gone down in history as one of the most distasteful, insulting, and downright heinous segments in company history. Women's rights groups were appalled, and the segment came back to haunt the McMahons during Linda McMahon's senate run.

WWE wants you to remember tearful Trish celebrating her Women's Championship and retirement, but it would prefer you forget how she was portrayed for the majority of her career.