Lana says her adultery/entrapment angle with Enzo Amore from Raw is an anti-slut shaming lesson for kids

Monday night’s episode-long tale of Lana & Rusev getting revenge on Enzo Amore has drawn a wide variety of reactions from Raw viewers.

It was the pay-off (for now) of a three week story that started when Big Cass locked Zo out of the showers, leading to Lana seeing him naked. The Realest Guys used that as comedy material the following week, including claiming when Lana saw Enzo in the buff it was the luckiest moment of her life.

On this week’s episode (Dec. 5), the Ravishing Russian and her husband Rusev staged an argument in front of Enzo & Cass in order to elicit sympathy from Amore so Lana could proposition him for a hotel room fling. While his conscience caused him to change his mind at the last minute, he did end up in the suite Lana was sharing with the former United States champion. The Bulgarian Brute finally emerged from his hiding spot in the bathroom and attacked Zo, leaving him lying in the hallway while the married couple “celebrated” their successful plot behind closed doors.

So... you can see where reactions would range from “this is sexist” to “it made me uncomfortable” to “this whole thing is dumb” to “I love it when wrestlers get beat up in hotel rooms!” (personally, I had all four of those over the course of Raw’s three hours).

Lana, for her part, is on social media spinning it as a lesson for children about how boys shouldn’t use sex to shame or generally make disrespectful jokes about girls:

Which is a good message, and one this story does send.

But it again raises questions about WWE’s portrayals of heroes and villains. Zo & Cass are not only popular, they’re supposed to babyfaces. Rusev & Lana may be providing a good lesson to children, but they also solved their problem with a lot of physical violence.

There’s long been talk of wrestling moving away from faces and heels towards “shades of gray” storytelling, but this doesn’t seem like a good application of that idea. The angle is still going to presumably end with either the Rusevs or Cass & Zo “winning the argument” in a wrestling ring, which isn’t how most teachable moments resolve themselves.

We could dimiss Lana’s Tweets and Instagram posts as not part of the story, but that line is blurry, too. WWE pushes fans to social media and uses it as part of angles when it suits them; that we should selectively ignore posts they don’t call attention to is a big ask. But even if we do discard everything that hasn’t appeared on Raw, the antagonist/protagonist roles are already tough to discern just with what we’ve been shown on screen.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with this angle. Nor do I really have an answer as to what WWE should do with it going forward (other than maybe ask Xavier Woods for his refridgerator box/time machine to go back and prevent it from starting).

What do you think, Cagesiders?