The Erased REAL Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling

Warning: Contains Spoilers for the new Netflix series Glow

The Original GLOW Girls

G.L.O.W., Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling. Those words, and the Ladies who gave the wrestling promotion its name, are immortalized in the hearts and memories of athletes and fans alike. A new Netflix original series, simply titled Glow, has now brought it to the attention of some people who may not have seen it the first time around in the 1980s. Unfortunately the Glow name is the only part to be revived as the series does little to honor the original GLOW girls who broke the glass ceiling in the world’s first all female wrestling promotion.

For those unfamiliar with the original company it was, from 1986 until 1990, America’s first and only all female wrestling promotion, but after leading the way others were to follow. Created as a TV show about wrestlers and wrestling, the show was like a Laugh-In or Hee Haw for wrestling fans. The matches were as real as any in the WWF or NWA at the time, but the show was focused on the charged, funny, sports entertainment industry recognizable to fans today. Matches were cut in cinematic fashion complete with slow motion and filters, and intermixed with comedy bits, storyline, and musical numbers like the GLOW Girls rapping. The show, and more importantly the women on it, were inspirations to female wrestlers of the next decades, and fans as well.

The creators of Glow on Netflix Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch teamed up with showrunner Jenji Kohan to make the new series. These women have an impressive resume of shows which they have produced. Between the three of them they have worked on Orange is the New Black, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Homeland. These impressive credits and a reputation for amazing feminist shows coupled with a love of wrestling would make for an impressive homage to GLOW and the women who lived it. One of the problems is that these women honestly didn’t know anything about wrestling.

In 2012 a documentary was made about GLOW that Flahive and Mensch watched. It told the story of the show’s creation and eventual demise, and of the wrestlers who made it such a hit. Understandably they were impressed by these women and how they not only stood up to the Patriarchy, but gave it a bodyslam. But even this start is a potential problem.

When speaking to former GLOW wrestler Roxy Astor she told me, “I felt like they didn’t reach out to as many girls as they should have,” when the documentary came up. They told a story about GLOW but Roxy felt it wasn’t as informed as it should have been. The creators of the new show were working with partial info to begin with.

Flahive and Mensch have stated in interviews that they knew nothing about wrestling and did research to find out as much as they could but as they told Hazel Cills from Jezebel, “We didn’t even know how a match ended!” As they looked for information about GLOW they did the same thing the Documentary makers did and didn’t talk to enough of the original GLOW girls. In fact they only talked to one, Ursula Hayden who wrestled in GLOW as Babe the Farmer’s Daughter. Her name came up when talking to Roxy as well, “She’s out of the loop for a long time. It’s just the trademark that she owns. Which is why she was the only consultant.” According to Roxy the rights to the individual wrestler’s names and personas still reside with the wrestlers and didn’t go to Hayden when she bought the company name and video rights in 2001.

I reached out to both Netflix and Hayden to try and confirm this fact, but I received no response from Netflix and Hayden told me over email that she was simply too busy to talk to me. I believe that Roxy is correct that the GLOW Girls own the rights to their names and personas as they still use them professionally. This really the root of the problem. Look at the comments on Instagram, Facebook, or any other social media platform where Netflix is advertising the show and you see most people believe that this IS the factual story of GLOW, that these characters on the Netflix show ARE the same names and personas as the real GLOW wrestlers. This is simply not the case.

The show creators tried to set a feminist tale in a historical fiction setting, much like the Amazon Prime original show Good Girls Revolt. That show is about feminist journalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s much like Gloria Steinem. The show pays homage to Steinem as well as Dorothy Pittman-Hughes with characters clearly based on them. The main difference is the show doesn’t proport to tell the story of Steinem and Pittman-Hughes while at the same time removing them from their own story. The other difference is that those women are much more famous and apparently much more important to the feminist movement than the GLOW wrestlers who broke glass ceilings in their own right. I know this because if Good Girls Revolt had tried to remove Steinem and Pittman-Hughes there would have been very justified outrage, but as Roxy Astor told me, “They’ve erased our names from the story.”

If the point of making a feminist show about the women who proved they could be just as successful as men in the wrestling game is to empower women, then removing the women from their story makes no sense. Roxy and many of her sisters of the ring think the idea was just to use the glow name and notoriety to get viewers in the cheapest way possible, “Of course we feel used by this,” Roxy said. She went on to explain, “You’ve got Netflix which is a billion-dollar company…And they didn’t reach out to any of us…And they say they want to make their own characters, and tell their own stories, and if they are doing that than why are there traces of us, actually why even use the name GLOW? … Jenji Kohan and Netflix have a history of making these good shows-If they had just not used the name [Glow] I would have loved it.”

The problems don’t just end with not naming the women in their own story. The Netflix series has a handful of pro wrestlers in cameo roles in its first season, but not one of them a woman wrestler. Again, one must wonder how this is something that happens on a feminist show about women’s wrestling. Roxy Astor weighed in on the lack of cameos as well, focusing on former costars again, “I’m not going to sit here and bash the whole show because it has brought a lot of notoriety to GLOW…But Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling is about more than one girl, It was about all of us, and I look at Mt Fiji in the hospital or Matilda [the Hun] sitting in a wheelchair and I have a real problem with not bringing in even just Matilda for just a cameo to acknowledge us.” She mentioned the scene where Ruth is going in to Planned Parenthood for an abortion as a place where Matilda could easily have been the receptionist.

There is one former female wrestler in the series, although it turns out her being there is an ironic twist. Glow on Netflix is mainly about a struggling actress named Ruth trying to make it in Hollywood as a real actress, but must take a demeaning role as a wrestler instead. Kia Stevens, the actress who plays Tamme in the Netflix show, is an actual former female wrestler who is trying to transition her career to legitimate acting, but her biggest role to date has been on Glow where she plays the demeaning “Welfare Queen.” I hope the irony of this role has not been lost on Stevens, who I am sure is happy for the role ultimately, but must hope to break out of the wrestler mold in her career soon. I did reach out to Stevens, and despite initially consenting to an interview, she later canceled.

Glow on Netflix misses one other important piece of the puzzle as well. GLOW was a phenomenon across the Country, but specifically with members of the LGBTQ community. Transgender people found heroes in big, strong women who broke the rules of femininity and were still seen as sexy. They showed that confidence and muscles could coexist with glitter, big hair, and bold make-up and be gorgeous. The GLOW girls still are popular with those same fans, with appearances at Ru Paul’s DragCon and other events. There are fans like Vanessa, who I had the chance to get to know, who felt empowered and free to be themselves in part thanks to GLOW. On the AfterGlow at Sea cruise where fans get to cruise with some of the former GLOW girls Vanessa felt comfortable being herself, something she had never felt the freedom to do in the past. Netflix not only fails to mention the transgender fans of GLOW, but has no visible LGBTQ characters at all on the show. Online several people have debated the sexuality of one character, but clearly if there is debate he is not visible enough to represent the community. Despite the lack of LGBTQ characters, the show does manage to have Kia Stevens’ Tamme make a gay joke at the expense of a glamorous male wrestler and a minor character used the word “F*ggot.” As someone who has been personally physically assaulted while that word was hurled at me I cannot accept that the writers found room for its inclusion, but no room for LGBTQ characters. I’ll turn to Roxy again to sum it up as well as anyone could, “GLOW changed lives…Helped them come out of the closet…We were empowering them. That’s more important than anything that Netflix will ever touch upon…”

In the end there are minor and major failings of the Netflix show, but the ones I keep coming back to are what seem like the opposite of what a feminist show should be showing, namely sisterhood. Ruth does not ask one of her costars to come along when she goes to Planned Parenthood. She is so removed from the other women that she would rather pick the male director to take her. There are also a few scenes where the wrestlers are all united in these big moments of bonding as a unit, but our two main females wrestlers are not with them, literally. There is a scene where they come together to help the character of Sheila celebrate her birthday, but not our leads. Even the climatic end scene when the Netflix Glow Girls are all in the ring rapping at the end of filming the pilot episode. These raps were a hallmark of the original GLOW show, and it should show them uniting as they finally did it, they made this show together, but Ruth and Debbie are standing apart from their sisters. In the end when I asked Roxy about that sisterhood in the real life GLOW she told me about how when she calls up former GLOW girls to arrange appearances with AfterGlow, or the AfterGlow at Sea they will show up for as little as $100 in pay, or even for free just to work side by side with each other. As she said, “That’s sisterhood, that’s REAL sisterhood.”

For any fans interested, next year’s AfterGlow at Sea cruise is booking now. Details can be found at https://www.facebook.com/AfterGlowAtSea/

Charlemagne Rose Calabrese

Written by

An Egalitarian, Marxist, Genderqueer, Social Justice Warrior and proud of it. Parent, Partner, and friend to everyone who plays nice. Northern Maine expatriate.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade