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

4. Playboy Or Pink Slip

Lita Eric Bischoff
WWE.com

I'm not entirely sure why, but the Trish Stratus/Lita era of women's wrestling has been brought up frequently during the Women's Revolution as some sort of Golden Time. Aside from one RAW main event the duo weren't hugely respected throughout their careers if I remember correctly, and women's wrestling was treated as shamefully then as it was at any other time during that era.

Lita was the victim in one of the most distasteful angles during WWE's Ruthless Aggression period. Then-RAW GM Eric Bischoff was pushing for Lita to pose nude in Playboy, as a response to SmackDown's Torrie Wilson doing so. Lita refused, and in story Eric Bischoff fired her for refusing to get her clothes off.

Again, this was surely done to garner heel heat for Bischoff, but was it necessary? Lita had turned down Playboy in real life, and it felt more like petty grievances being played out on camera than anything else. It reinforced the feeling in the company that women were there to take their clothes off and not much else.

The Golden Era of Women's Wrestling, ladies and gentlemen.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.