The UFC and MMA as a whole can be confidently categorized as a stereotypically male dominated sport and space. The images of baying crowds of disaffected, often right wing men shouting and screaming as a couple of rippling alpha males punch, kick and elbow one another is a pervasive one. I myself have been guilty of sitting in my living room with a bunch of men yelling ‘ohhhhhh’ when someone with a family, hope and dreams gets put to sleep in a brutal fashion.
So in such a perceived masculine space, how have women carved out an identity, specifically in the sports biggest promotion, the UFC?
Of course for as long as Mixed Martial Arts has been a sport there have been women participating at a high level. Self defense classes began in the early 1900’s as part of the wider suffragette movement. In what was brilliantly termed ‘Suffrajitsu’, they used methods to defend from the police while protesting. For a long time however women were marginalized and sidelined in martial arts, as they were in many sports throughout the 20th century. With the first women receiving a black belt in Jiu Jitsu only in 1990.
Even when MMA emerged in the early 1990’s women were more of a sideshow to the main event. The original form of the UFC had no women’s divisions, meaning that female martial artists had to rely on promotions in Japan. The first MMA fight between women in the United States was in 1997 when Becky Levi beat Betty Fagan in an IFC tournament. While an important milestone neither of these women had celebrated, famous careers, women’s MMA was still ultimately a curiosity in the mainstream.
The first major promotion to have women’s divisions was Strikeforce in 2009 and after a few years of publicity, Dana White and the UFC expanded to include women.
The reason that the UFC decided 2013 was a good time to expand was mainly due to the personal popularity of Ronda Rousey, a strikeforce champion, her brutal victories and trash-talking had made her more famous than any female MMA fighter ever and had turned Dana White’s head, even though in 2011 he had said that women would never fight in the UFC. ‘Rowdy’ Rousey as she named herself then went on to dominate women’s UFC for the next 3 years becoming immensely popular. She was a great personality and completely dominant, making her a perfect fit for White to advertise to what is safe to say is a majority conservative audience.
Ronda Rousey was invaluable for establishing the role of women in MMA, as an ambassador she was perfect but in my opinion she lacked the unclean, unpolished nature of the greatest MMA fighters. The most memorable, most brilliant fighters are not perfect humans, this is a strange sport full of strange people, something that isn’t reflected in Rousey, a woman that went to Hollywood soon after she started losing.
I believe that more light should be shone on women like Cris ‘Cyborg’, fighters who while never finding Rousey’s fame pushed the sport forward just as much. Cyborg, a brazilian with fantastic muay thai, never had the appeal and charm of Rousey, she was never gifted a huge UFC contract she had to fight for everything she achieved. Winning a famous victory against Gina Carano (now an actress turned right-wing grifter) in Strikeforce in the first ever event headlined by a women’s fight. The fight brought in 576,000 viewers, which eclipsed any other Strikeforce event up to that point in 2009, viewers were intrigued by the concept of this masculine, peculiar (Cyborg had choked out an interviewer in the buildup who asked her how long it would take her) Brazilian fighting the glamorous Carano. She however was seemingly kept out of the UFC even as Ronda flourished.
White had long avoided her, at one point saying she looked like ‘Wanderlei Silva (a Brazilian middleweight known as ‘The Axe Murderer’) in a dress and heels’. Fans however wanted to see her fight Rousey, even though Ronda fought at 135 lbs and Cris at 145. When she did join the UFC in 2016 she struggled to get to even 140 lbs so the UFC made a Featherweight division just for her leading to a dominant title run, until Amanda Nunes came up a weight and immediately destroyed her. A potential rematch caused an argument between her and White, with Cris’s team publishing a weird doctored video of White saying she would get a rematch. The ordeal soured White even more and ended with Cyborg being dropped from the UFC with Dana simply stating ‘We are out of the Cyborg business’.
This mess led to her to go to different promotions but continue to dominate even as she aged showing the spirit of a true great of the sport. Ultimately she wasn’t charming enough to be White’s female figurehead like Rousey was, she was brutal and slightly strange like so many great male champions. She was herself and that undeniably frightened many of the UFC faithful, who had slowly become accustomed to a more commercialised brand of violence that White had begun to push in the early 2010’s. I think being problematic for brands and advertisers yet being so unbelievably good that you force your way to the top is incredibly admirable and more impressive than what Rousey represents. Cyborg is a true MMA legend and it’s a shame that the division she founded in the UFC no longer even exists and she has been all but scrubbed from the record, only being mentioned once in a UFC report on 10 years of women in the UFC.
Women in the UFC today are more popular than ever with stars like Amanda Nunes and Valentina Shevchenko dominating. They have carved out their own niche inside of the UFC and have become valuable members of the roster, with many of these women being directly inspired by Rousey and Cyborg’s success in a sport that for so many years was actively hostile to women’s participation unless they were a ring girl.
Surviving in the cutthroat world of MMA and under Dana White’s often openly misogynistic leadership is an impressive task, and what is even more impressive is that many of these women stay undeniably themselves, carving out a place in the most violent and masculine of sports. While they have not achieved parity in popularity and payment, women have made an undeniable mark in the sport of MMA and the UFC.
