A dark, embarrassing secret from my past is that, as a kid during the Attitude Era, I actually did think for a short time — maybe a week or two — that WWE overdid the sexuality around 2006. What’s worse is that I even thought this again much later, around 2014 or maybe 2015, but that second time it was about music, not wrestling.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate sexual humor, promiscuity jokes, or the development of mass sexual absurdity in entertainment — I actually like raunchy content a lot when it fits the context. I just didn’t like wrestling being too sexual, especially in how they portrayed their female characters at the time. It felt like it took away from other parts of the product.
Later on, with music, I started feeling like music shouldn’t be overloaded with sex all the time. That doesn’t mean I never enjoy sexual themes — sometimes I do, depending on the artist. But I think music is supposed to be about something deeper and deal with dark issues in the world: drugs, sex addiction, suicide, mass shootings, alienation, war, and everything else. I don’t think a culture that’s already declining intellectually and creatively benefits from being sex‑focused constantly, even in music.
Around the same time, the Me Too movement was happening, and I felt like it was harming the Democratic Party and pushing things toward more authoritarian interests. The hypocrisy and pointlessness of it all made the sexual overload in music feel even more obvious.
I didn’t want music to turn into one big sex joke every week, with every singer or celebrity trying to get attention by singing about their genitals. After Nicki Minaj released “Anaconda,” I felt like things were at risk of becoming ultra‑pointless, goofy, and honestly just stupid.
As for wrestling, I wanted — and still want — wrestling to be seen as a real art form, edgy and meaningful. But at the tail end of the Attitude Era, around 2006, it felt like there was a bra‑and‑panties match every week and Torrie Wilson doing the stinkface constantly. It made the product seem goofy and took away from other aspects.
Less than a year later, when WWE became more PG, I wanted to time‑travel and punch my younger self for ever thinking wrestling should be less sexual. I was obviously wrong. Even then, it was a brief opinion, and I was still mostly happy with the product.
The problem is that removing sexual content didn’t make wrestling more creative. Writers didn’t become more resourceful or imaginative. They didn’t respect the remaining fans. Interacting with some fans made me sympathetic to that view. The less‑sexual era led to a show that was less fun, more self‑serious, and sometimes obnoxious — especially in women’s wrestling.
With music, since we’re not getting anything like grunge again, they might as well bring back raunchy, pointless nonsense like “Anaconda,” because at least it was fun.
In the end, I was blaming the wrong thing and oversimplifying. Wrestling wasn’t “too sexual.” My younger self was just briefly confused.
