You can’t have fighting
What irritates me the most about anyone who criticizes women’s fighting (whether that’s boxing of MMA) is the “I love women too much” line of thinking. They say that even though women can fight, we as men just don’t want to see our baby’s momma get mangled (or mangle someone else) in the ring. This sort of baloney chivalry is a complete bag of crap because if men really didn’t want to see women physically beaten to shit day in day out, they’d say something about the rates of men’s violence against women. They’d go all Michael Vick on athletes who beat their wives, not their dogs. They’d beat the shit out of men who rape women. They’d raise awareness to the rates of sexual assault in high school. But do they? If they are, I don’t hear about it.
Gina Carano crushes the nail on the head when she (to paraphrase) says that men can’t have fighting as a gender. If fighting is to be seen as a vocation, a lifestyle, how do you designate that solely to men? Men have been trying to “own” and place their completely bogus stamp on every vocation that is of any worth to people. Men don’t want to be seen as cooks, as women are seen, but they’ll be seen as high paying chefs to the stars. Men don’t want to be seen as teachers, like the elementary school teachers stereotyped as babysitters but they’ll take the high paying, illustrious professor jobs. Men don’t want to be seen as nurses, only doctors, men don’t want to be seen as maids, only janitors, the list goes on and on. The point is this is both a cultural gender stereotype thing and also a money thing. There’s big, growing and young money in MMA and when men say they don’t want women involved (like men’s golf tours, where the biggest paychecks are) it’s another way to disenfranchise women and put them at an economic disadvantage.
If you start to hear men complain and attack women’s fighting, what you’re really hearing is men fearing that they won’t be the high draw with the biggest purse.