Women In MMA

On my personal blog I once wrote an entry about women who box and do other martial arts (in summary, i think that whether or not women fight is none of your damn business). At that time, there were quite a few high-profile female boxers (Laila Ali, Christy Martin, Lucia Rijker), but only a couple of women in MMA with any recognition at all. I think there is still significantly less support among men for the idea of women participating in MMA, but it's happening anyway. The premiere issue of Fight magazine not only has a profile on Gina Carano, but also lists her fight vs. Julie Kedzie at Elite XC in February as one of the "10 Fights That Made MMA".

I think that the resistance to women in fighting, especially MMA, comes more from the fighting fan base than from the fighters. Across the country there are plenty of gyms with women training, and plenty of willing trainers. In general, women who work hard and take the sport seriously are eventually treated with respect. There seems to be a fairly substantial base of female fans of sport fighting also, but i think the mainstream fan still tends to be young to middle-age males for whom being a fight spectator is some sort of manhood ritual in itself. Recently, when Dana White announced that it was hard for him to bring Fedor Emelianenko into the UFC because the mainstream fan didn't know who he was, i was surprised. But he may be right. The casual fan may want the fighters to just bleed. Apparently there's an audience for the so-called "tough man" competitions, which are ugly, unskilled brawls.

Of course, White himself is on the record as a non-fan of female fighting, and there's a significant percentage of educated fans who simply don't want to see women fight for whatever reason. One of the oft-stated reasons is because the women are less technically skilled or less physically gifted than their male counterparts. I'm not sure either is true. The depth of talent is certainly less, but one of the good things about sport fighting is that it matches up opponents of similar size. The skill evident in womens' boxing matches and even the kick-boxing style of something like the World Combat League has increased dramatically in recent years. I think this evolution will happen even faster in MMA, if only because grappling and wrestling are such technical sports.

Some percentage of fans, both sophisticated and otherwise, simply don't want to see women get beat up, even by other women. I can understand that. Men at least seem to be able to treat violence against other men more abstractly, so that a broken nose or a submission is simply part of the game. But as i said in my entry on boxing, i think the desire to fight is a human urge, not just a male urge. As the skill level elevates and the passion for competing becomes evident, i think male fans will get past that instinct.