Grand Slam Australia Featured Some Pitch-Perfect Intergender Booking

AEW's Grand Slam Australia was a banger of a show. Fortuitously timed after AEW has received unprecedented mainstream coverage, anyone tuning in to AEW for the first time would have seen a cross-section of the company's best: a ferocious 20-minute draw, a great women's tag team title match, a thrilling car crash of a ladder match, and terrific well-paced drama in the main event men's world title tilt. What I want to focus on is the most purely entertaining segment of the show: the mixed hair vs. hair tornado tag match featuring Orange Cassidy and "Timeless" Toni Storm vs. Wheeler Yuta and Marina Shafir, with the loser of the fall getting their head shaved.

Intergender wrestling is tricky to book; everyone realizes this. The story of a pro wrestling match, like the theater in the round it is, is largely based around the perceptions the participants plant in the audience's mind, in the larger context of social, cultural, and political mores of the period. This is all to say that a performance that will inevitably feature men being violent toward women requires a thoughtful touch as it's being laid out. There are power dynamics and audience perceptions to balance. And the mixed tornado tag nailed it, maybe flawlessly.

AEW has been gently sprinkling intergender spots into their shows for some time now, usually in the context of these mixed tornado tag matches. I'd imagine WBD Standards & Practices has been keeping a close eye on how these segments have been produced. While the genders have operated on an even playing field in fantasy for some time now (I'm thinking about how the reboot of Battlestar Galactica or the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had little issue depicting women as powered on an equal level to men), pro wrestling exists in that gray area where it's being presented as a legitimate sporting event, even though the entire audience knows better. So regardless of how anyone feels about it, an intergender match carries with it an inherent power imbalance much of the time (there are, of course, exceptions, and this also isn't unique to intergender wrestling either. I'd imagine that a Brian Cage vs. Thekla match would be booked very similarly to Great Khali vs. Rey Mysterio).

It's certainly deliberate that AEW has dabbled in intergender wrestling through the mixed tornado tag. Mixed tag team matches have a specific rule set: the men wrestle the men, and when one tags out, then the women must wrestle the women. So any crossover is inherently crossing a boundary, and in a match like Wheeler/Shafir vs. Cassidy/Storm, that boundary gets crossed, smartly, by the heel team. In the big heat spot of the match, Wheeler Yuta takes Toni Storm out of the match by piledriving her onto a crew table. The heel beat up on the babyface woman! Boooo! This works in part because Wheeler is a classic weasel-y heel who operates a bit lower in the men's pecking order in AEW, so while there's a perceived power imbalance between the two, Toni Storm has been presented as one of the top women in the company and it's actually not a stretch to think that she might beat Wheeler in a singles match (whereas, if say, Jon Moxley were in this match, him going full Bruiser Brody on Toni would be pretty uncomfortable). Also, the choice of a piledriver is a deliberate story beat for later, which we'll get to.

So with Toni carried to the back to receive medical attention, the remaining babyface, Orange Cassidy, finds himself working from underneath for the next chunk of the match. Now, it's important to note here that Marina Shafir, as a legitimate MMA veteran, is perceived (correctly) as a woman who could likely kick the ass of most men on the roster. This is an interesting gray area because "pro wrestling" is, in kayfabe, a combat sport on the level of boxing, MMA, the kumite, what have you. But everyone knows that's not actually the case, so actual fighters entering a wrestling ring are automatically assigned a legitimacy that most don't receive on day 1. This is a lot of explanation to say that when Orange finds himself in a handicap match against Marina and Wheeler, there's no real perception that the two teams are on equal footing just because Shafir is a woman. No, Orange is in legitimate peril here. In fact, when we come back from a break, Marina is handing Orange his lunch and faux-dancing with him in the ring, mocking the mid-match dance routines that OC and Toni have gotten over with the fans in the last few weeks.

But eventually (and predictably), Toni storms back to the ring – against the advice of the training staff! – to rescue OC (giving Yuta a kick in the dick in the process), which is a delightful subversion of the typical "man saves the damsel in distress" trope. And eventually, when Wheeler makes a critical error and sends Shafir flying out of the ring by accidentally smashing her with his busaiku knee strike, Toni and OC get to exact revenge with some fun double teams. But crucially, at the end of the match, Orange keeps Marina out of the ring while Toni gets to finish Wheeler off by herself. She Gets Her Shit In by smashing him with her hip attack and then scoring on her finisher, Storm Zero – a rapid-fire short piledriver that pays off on the heat generated by Wheeler hitting a piledriver on Toni earlier. The man commits a dastardly act early, and the woman he wronged exacts revenge on her own! Flawless booking that succeeds in depicting cross-gender violence that doesn't make anyone uncomfortable. If there's one complaint I could see people having, it's that Yuta being the one to get his head shaved was overly predictable. But ya know what? Predictability in wrestling can be totally ok, if the journey to the result is entertaining enough. And this was wildly entertaining.

Intergender wrestling is omnipresent on the independent wrestling scene these days, and there is a component of AEW fans who came to the company from that scene, and therefore want that specific brand of wrestling showcased. And I get it! True equality comes from adding "Men's" to "AEW Men's World Championship" and it comes from presenting the genders as true equals. However, I also understand the desire for a level of "believability" in our fake fighting fandom. How much believability is needed in a "sport" that features a move where one person whips another into the ropes, and that person keeps running long after they need to? That's up for debate, and a topic I want to tackle in a future post. All that said – it's absolutely possible to strike the right balance on a nationally televised pro wrestling show. AEW proved that at Grand Slam Australia in what was arguably the most entertaining match of the night...and I didn't even touch on the actual haircut segment, which was chef's kiss beautiful. If only we all had an emotional support Marina to shepherd us through all of life's curveballs.