Willow Nightingale Responds To Critics Of Women Wrestlers Bleeding and Doing Hardcore Matches

On a recent edition of The Sessions, AEW wrestler Willow Nightingale stopped by. One topic of discussion was the recent street fight featuring Willow and Ruby Soho vs Tay Conti and Anna Jay, and some of the negative online respond towards women wrestlers bleeding and doing hardcore matches. Highlights follow:

On how she felt immediately after the match: “Very emotional. The toughest part for me is I like to uphold my work, and what I do in a wrestling ring, to a certain standard. That includes the way I execute moves, the safety of my opponents, and generally, if I just feel like it clicked. Did it flow well? Did it feel right? At the end of the match, I definitely know that it was something very special. But obviously, one, Ruby was bleeding like crazy! I looked over to her and I was like ‘you look awesome!’ Right in the middle of the match, when I finally saw her covered I was like, you look awesome. What a badass.”

On the botched table spot with Anna Jay: “Before even getting anybody’s response to it, when I walked back through the curtain I was immediately like, where’s Anna? Is she okay? She’s like ‘I’m fine! I’m going to go to the doctor now, cause they have to check me out, but I’m fine!’ Checking in with everybody else, talking with our producer. To me, those are the two things that I was most worried about and it left me very emotional because I was just worried about the other people I was in the ring with. I don’t think that I had upheld the elements that I respect or expect from myself.”

On the discussion had before the hardcore tag match: “We were all honestly very excited to be given the opportunity to do something like this. Anna and Tay have already done this a year ago on television. They had a lot of fun with it. There are limits I guess on how grotesque it’s allowed to be. I can only speak from my experience. I only know the conversations we had. For us, it was one person from each team was allowed to bleed. We all wanted to get our hands dirty, we all wanted to do crazy stuff, but we can’t go overboard. Okay, understood. We didn’t have to worry about it cause Ruby gushed enough for everybody. I thought it was awesome, I thought she looked killer.”

On the double-standard some have about wrestlers bleeding based on gender: “I think that if people are getting panties in a bunch about it, that’s the least of their concerns. We bleed every single month. Nobody talks about that. I’m sure if that had happened or whatever, people would make a big deal about that too. Like if somebody were to bleed through their gear (laughs). That’s a part of life! We bleed the same as men do. We take the same bumps in the ring as they do. We’re at the same risk as they are. So I don’t understand why there has to be a double standard about physically seeing blood.”

On the risks accepted when you become a pro wrestler: “It’s what we signed up for. We were aware of this possibility.”

On criticism specifically levelled against women wrestlers: “I think you touched a really important part in that where you were like… there are people who will comment on you being like ‘I don’t like hearing a woman’s voice.’ Somebody could say this and mean that quite literally. I think that’s a part of the reason I take it to heart so much. I feel like this ‘representative’ for women, for black women at that. For the weird kids, for the fat kids, for anyone who feels like a misfit or an outsider. So anytime I make a misstep I’m like, I let all these people down.”

If using any of the above quotations, please credit The Sessions h/t 411mania for the transcription.