Lazy Lexicons: Why WWE and AEW Women’s Promos Desperately Need a Thesaurus
There’s a quiet epidemic sweeping professional wrestling in 2026. Once you notice it, you can’t unhear it. Watch how high-stakes feuds play out on the microphone, and the double standard becomes glaringly obvious:
The Men:“I hate this man with every fiber of my being. We tore the house down in a five-star classic. He’s one of the greatest to ever do it—let’s hear it for him.”
The Women:“You a bitch.”
Tune into WWE Raw, AEW Dynamite, or any marquee women’s segment on any given week. Set a timer.
Within three minutes, someone will drop it. “Bitch” has become the default punctuation mark of modern women’s promos—the ultimate creative crutch used to generate a cheap audience gasp when creative teams don't know how to build real, localized heat.
The Cheap Pop of the TV-14 Era
AEW Women’s World Champion Thekla turned it into signature branding. On the April 15, 2026 episode of Dynamite, she walked through the crowd calling the entire division “dumb bitches.”
By April 29, she was openly explaining why she keeps doing it:
“I would love to stop calling people dumb bitches… but there are simply too many.”
She’s since threatened to turn the entire roster into a “graveyard of dumb bitches” alongside her Triangle of Madness crew. It’s meme-worthy, chaotic, and undeniably overused.
WWE isn’t off the hook, either. Liv Morgan and Stephanie Vaquer traded “you’re mine now, bitch” and “sad excuse of a bitch” shots in the intensive build to their WrestleMania match.
Rhea Ripley and Jade Cargill segments routinely feature plenty of “that bitch” versus “I’m that bitch” flexing.
It’s the exact same pattern across both corporate giants: default to a single word whenever you want a performer to sound edgy, intense, or unscripted. The problem isn’t that the word exists; it’s that it has become audio wallpaper.
When every women’s feud escalates using the exact same linguistic ladder, the vocabulary goes flat. It doesn’t make anyone sound like a badass—it just makes the creative teams look like they haven’t cracked a thesaurus since the Attitude Era.
The Art of Cutting Deeper
The ultimate irony? Wrestling’s most devastating, memorable promos are usually clean—and sometimes much meaner because of it.
Take Becky Lynch. She doesn’t need generic profanity when she can dub her rivals “Corrupt Carr,” “Moody Maxxine,” or “Maxine Dupeepee.”
Those personalized nicknames land harder than a plain swear word ever could because they are specific, petty, and genuinely stinging. It’s backwards genius: the clean promo ends up cutting deeper.
Lyra Valkyria achieves the exact same result through raw intensity and a distinct, focused vocal delivery alone.
These performers prove you can own a segment, draw verbal blood, and captivate an audience without leaning on a three-letter crutch.
Bring Back the “Mewling Quims”
If creative teams are starving for shock value, they could at least get a little more creative with the lexicon. Look at cinema: Tom Hiddleston’s Loki famously called Black Widow a “mewling quim” in The Avengers.
It flew right past the Disney censors because the executives assumed it meant "whining brat." In reality, it was gloriously vulgar, ancient British slang. Nobody clutched their pearls on the corporate level, but the audience instantly felt the sting of the insult.
We’re not asking Jamie Hayter or Rhea Ripley to start dropping Victorian insults on live television—the network standards and practices departments would need immediate defibrillators. But the overarching lesson is clear: real verbal heat comes from specificity, personality, and surprise.
It's time to retire the lazy crutch and let the women cut promos that actually bite.
