Pins and submissions in Women’s Professional Wrestling


Most women’s professional wrestling matches feature pins and submissions rules.
That means a wrestlerette can score a win by either pinning her opponent (holding her shoulders down on the mat for the three count) or force her to submit the match via a wrestling hold that causes extreme pain.

Through watching countless women wrestling videos and reading around on the vert pretty much all the time, I’ve seen lady wrestlers discuss the psychology of wrestling. Obviously, they were talking about competitive female wrestling, and not about catfights of even pro matches, but I found that the psychology aspects they covered were just as valid for all female fight genres, at least from the viewer’s and the fan’s perspective.

The difference between a victory attained via a pin or a submission was usually an integral part of these discussions. My conclusion was that women wrestlers generally considered a submission victory much more valuable than one attained via a pin. One of the wrestling girls I discussed the matter with took the idea even further. She said in matches in which she felt she had an obvious edge on her opponent, she would completely toss the idea of a pin aside in favor of a win squeezed out via submission.

Just why do lady wrestlers consider the submission a superior form of dominance? Women wrestling should only be about winning or losing, right? Well, not quite. Women wrestling is a much more complex game of domination and submission, with intricate psychological subtleties.

In the case of a pin, the winner manifests her superiority by knocking the fight completely out of her opponent and by positioning her in a pre-determined posture, against which her opponent cannot is no longer able to retaliate. While the domination element is clear in this instance too, the defeated wrestlerette loses the match on account of not being able to fight back. In a pin finish, the winner is the only active party. The loser suffers passively.

In the case of a submission though, the defeated wrestlerette plays an active part in her own demise. The superiority of her opponent is raised to unquestionable heights through the fact that she forces the loser to become instrumental in her own defeat. The verbal admission of defeat is the fullest and purest form of submission on the part of the defeated girl.

The intensity of a submission is what gives it true entertainment value in women’s pro wrestling. Therefore, to achieve the best possible effect, a submission finish needs to be done properly. Actually seeing the loser’s willpower slowly breaking down and the agony of defeat filling up her eyes is what the viewer is after. A good example of a proper submission finish would be Phantom’s win over the Beach Patrol’s Summer in WOW (check the clip out on youtube).

Of course, one should never abuse the power of the submission. If every single women wrestling match ended in a submission, it would lose its novelty. Pins can be executed in an extremely spectacular manner a well, and proper ones can be just as humiliating as submissions.