Paige Clarifies Comments On Fans Holding Women Back In WWE Before Women's Revolution

By Raj Giri

Paige has been receiving some criticism for comments she made during a recent conference call regarding the current Women's Revolution. While promoting the movie Fighting with My Family, which is based on her life, the former WWE Divas Champion claimed that before the Revolution started, the problem with the progress in women's wrestling was that the fans were not taking them seriously.

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"It was never WWE holding the women back," Paige said, via Gulf News. "It was the fans not taking them seriously. They wanted to see more of the male characters many years ago. It was a male dominated sport."

Since the Attitude Era started in the late 1990's, WWE women's matches were usually relegated to women being stripped down to as little clothing as possible. Bra and panties matches, which were a staple with the company for nearly a decade, ended in 2007 when WWE decided to move in a PG direction. From 2007 until the Women's Revolution was officially coined in 2015, women's matches would rarely be given any time, and were usually not in a prime spot on the show.

"When I first started (in 2014), there were only five women there," Paige said. "It was a struggle but WWE just believed in us. When I got into the ring, I wanted to prove to the fans that girls were capable of having good matches and sometimes, even better. That was kind of my mission from the get go. Now there's obviously a revolution."

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Paige clarified her remarks on Twitter, saying that the blame laid on both the fans and the company, saying that it was "a two way street."

"Fans back then would call us toilet breaks. It was only when the girls, the female superstars took it upon themselves to change the way anyone perceived us. AJ (Lee), the Bellas, myself and the WWE four horsewomen all the superstars wanted to create that change," Paige wrote. "In reality what I said was it's not all on WWE. Up until a few years ago women didn't have the support from a lot of people."

When a user stated that a lot of fans supported the women back then, Paige replied, "Absolutely you guys did. We loved that. But riddle me this, what about when the bra and panties matches were happening? Or when Michelle McCool, Gail Kim etc were busting their asses why wasn't there an uproar then? All I'm saying is.. it's a two way street."

You can check out Paige's tweets below:

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