When Miesha “Cupcake” Tate walks into the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on the night of December 28, she is wearing a pink skort and singing along to Katy Perry’s “Roar.” She’s about to enter the arena to fight her rival, Ronda “Rowdy” Rousey, in the 168th Ultimate Fighting Championship event. Then, Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” starts to blare over the speakers, and the camera switches focus to Rousey. She’s wearing all black and she looks like she wants to knock somebody out. Which is, you know, the plan.
Seeing female fighters walk into an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event is a new phenomenon. Since its inception, UFC has been intensely male-dominated. Their viewership and referees are majority male; their president, Dana White, is male; and most importantly, until late 2012, all of their fighters were male, and the most visible women in the UFC were the bikini-clad ring girls.
But now the UFC has a women’s division, in which Rousey and Tate are the superstars. And the introduction of female fighters raised a critical question: In a franchise built on testosterone and machismo, how do you market women?
Before every event, the UFC creates lengthy promo videos in which they interview fighters, highlight rivalries, and build hype for the fight. The pre-fight video for the Rousey/Tate fight is seventeen minutes of Rousey and Tate talking shit about each other. That’s pretty standard, and the rivalry between Rousey and Tate is intense and well-known. But what made this advertising stand out was the gendered nature of much of the women’s commentary. It seems the UFC found an answer to their question: to sell a Pay-Per-View with female fighters, you combine bravado with petty jealousy and slut-shaming.
Though much of the video discusses the women’s plans for the fight, the abuses they hurl at each other aren’t all skill-based. Rousey insults Tate by saying “she’s got a picture of herself in booty shorts” and mentions a time on The Ultimate Fighter – the UFC reality TV show in which they were both coaches – when “Miesha was looking at her reflection in the glass in the sauna, trying to fix her hair and makeup.”
Dressed in grey, hair down, Rousey is portrayed as the less feminine of the two – despite being more conventionally beautiful. (A nearly nude Rousey has graced the covers of ESPN Magazine and Maxim.) Maybe that’s because she’s not nice. “Fuck you, bitch,” she spits after Tate congratulates her on a good fight. Her brusque, unblinking meanness in the video is so over-the-top it’s almost impressive. Ronda Rousey represents the bad girl fantasy: the sexy bro-woman, the girl who goes shot-for-shot with the guys and calls other women bitches, but who will also take her top off for your entertainment.
“Cupcake Tate,” in return, describes her “ecstatic” reaction to the news that she had beaten Ronda in a fan voting contest that decided who would be on the cover of the UFC video game. “For so long, Ronda’s been the popular one, the queen of MMA, All-American perfect, champion, and now people are getting to see the real Ronda. And it’s been nice, I feel like she’s been kind of exposed,” Tate says. And earlier: “Every time I would see her face on a magazine cover I was filled with jealousy and resentment.” Tate represents the good girl stereotype: the sweet one, eager to please, unfairly bullied and hurt by the popular bitch.
This piece of advertising reduces the rivalry between the two women to middle-school gossip and petty silliness. Their rivalry is real and will result in a real fight, but here, it is minimized, laughable.
Using gendered stereotypes to market fighters is nothing new for the UFC. The pre-fight promotions for male fighters are chock-full of pride, aggression, and all the other trappings of conventional hyper-masculinity. They make it very clear that these guys are defending their honor like men, and damn anybody who gets in their way. As we know, though, patriarchy has reinforced the idea that masculine is powerful and feminine is weak. Masculinity can be over-the-top, because there’s no such thing as too strong.
That hyper-masculinity is not absent from the Rousey/Tate video. They match the guys punch-for-punch, so to speak, in swagger and unsmiling threats. The women’s promotional video also includes an equal amount of skill-based discussion: there’s plenty of serious talk about each other’s training regimens, armbars, and ground games. But those comments about makeup and magazine covers are impossible to ignore.
When the UFC works these feminine stereotypes into the fabric of their promotion, it serves to make Rousey and Tate less intimidating. They must be scary enough to be taken seriously as athletes, so the sexists in the audience don’t dismiss them. But they must also be weak enough for the same audience to remember that they are, ultimately, women, entangled in trifling feminine spectacle. They have to fit enough stereotypes for that sexist viewer to be able to see them as lesser. After all, the UFC never wants to be a place where a man feels his masculinity is threatened.
Must every encounter between two female fighters look like name-calling and hair-pulling? Or is it possible to create a new path, something that does not rely on gendered stereotypes, before they touch gloves and start to fight? As more and more female fighters enter the arena, the UFC can market these women as strong, multi-faceted role models or foolish, overdramatic girls. Let’s hope they make the right choice.
Tags: feminism, nicole loves ultimate fighting, sports, television, ufc
Nobody has ever gotten rich betting on the UFC to make “the right choice.”
I don’t understand fighting sports. Nevertheless, it’s a shame these women have to acquiesce to this weird spectacle just to do their athletic thing.
I had never given thought to women UFC fighters, but now I do. Thanks, Sarah!
And weirdly related, last night I was watching Nashville, feeling very disappointed in the fact the two original protagonists were now “besties”. Then I asked myself, “why the keen interest in that tired old trope of Madonna (Rayna) vs. Whore (Juliette)?”
Good on you (writer) Khouri for burying the hatchet, so to speak, and focusing the high drama somewhere else for my soapy pleasure.
So now I’m curious: Do these UFC fighters have any control over their personas, or are they dictated to by managers who “know what sells?”. I’m guessing “no” and “yes”.
Enquiring minds want to know!
My sister (Julie Kedzie) was one of the very earliest pioneers of wMMA, and one of the first generation of women invited into the UFC (she’s now retired after something like 30 professional fights). Her approach, and that of many of the other women (Sara Kaufman, Kaitlin Young, and many others) was never to play up sexuality as part of her “persona”. And it didn’t seem to me that the UFC did that on their behalf either, although their femininity (loosely defined) was certainly emphasized in photoshoots and promos. The Rousey-Tait rivalry seems a bit of an aberration in wMMA to me. But every fighter promotes herself a bit differently.
Julie Kedzie is a legend and if The Toast interviewed her I would read the hell out of that tbqh
And I’d really love to hear from female UFC athletes about gender and promotion and the differences in working with other fight organizations!
I’ll get in touch with them, and see if they’d be interested!
Totally interesting, thanks! I don’t know anything about UFC, but the narrative around women athletes fascinates me. I would so love to see someone interview one (or both!) of these women to hear their perspective on what they do, why, and their image.
What’s also interesting to me is the question of audience for women’s sports. From the marketing, it seems like the audience for UFC women is more men than women? I’d love to know more about that.
Related reading, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym. Only a section is devoted to female boxers but she has some mind-bending things to say about the reason why women box vs. why men box and how they fit in with the culture of the gym. And why they were let into Gleason’s the first place (it’s economics, stupid).
I box and I feel welcome at my gym. But it is very interesting how gender is performed there. No one is watching us on TV so it’s not quite the same level of spectacle, but (for me) it’s a weird psychic balance between aggression and passivity and which one I feel I’m ‘supposed to’ express.
That December 28th fight between Rousey and Tate ruled! Their matchup was so much more dynamic than any of the male pairs fighting that night & they just fought head and shoulders above everyone else. That was the first UFC women’s fight I had ever seen & I have to admit, I was totally into Ronda as someone who didn’t feel like she had to be nice or gracious. She reminded me of the girls in my neighborhood growing up (perhaps relevant to Mallory’s recent interest in dirtbags? I was the best/knew the best teen girl dirtbags growing up – I am still in awe of the supreme girl dirtbaggery I had the privilege of bearing witness to). I don’t know, I just get so excited when a girl in the limelight is mean (and not sorry about it) that I totally skipped over the bad girl/good girl binary being set up between Rousey and Tate. I knew it was there, but I was so excited to root for a tough mean girl that I didn’t care.
This is great! I’ve been training muay thai for eight months now & I’m at that point where I’m starting to look for/toward female fighters for inspiration in my training, but it’s really hard to separate the spectacle from the athlete.
Rousey plays the villain, and she’s good at it. I like to watch shows like the Ultimate Fighter, because it gives you a better sense of what’s going through these people’s heads before they go get said heads smashed in the octagon. For what it’s worth, the men are constantly topless and flexing and sweaty; it’s just that society views female bodies as inherently on display for the viewers’ titillation, so it’s perceived as “sexy” because we can see their abs and legs, even if they are just working their asses off at a gym.
Rousey’s a savvy marketer IMO; I think she relishes playing the role of the villain. Personally I prefer athletes who display good sportsmanship, but she knows exactly what she’s doing in creating controversy and she has the skills to back up her verbal game.
Her villainy reminds me somewhat of professional wrestling – she knows exactly what she’s doing. I’m with you in preferring good sportsman(woman)ship regardless of the athlete’s gender. Oh, and Rousey’s badass persona wouldn’t work if she couldn’t back it up, but there’s just no one in her weight class who can challenge her. She’s a machine.
Absolutely! I believe Miesha Tate is the only fighter who’s ever lasted more than one round with her. What I wouldn’t give to see Rousey fight Cyborg Santos.
I like reading her mom’s reactions to what she’s doing in the ring (her mother was/ is also a serious athlete and general badass). Also her blog is a hilarious mix of mom things, judo advice, and self promotion: http://drannmaria.blogspot.com/2013/12/thoughts-o… Basically, whether the verbal game is real or not, she comes by it honestly…
Great article, Sarah! It’s great to finally see a female UFC division but the marketing just makes me sigh heavily. I much prefer to watch fights from Invicta FC, an organization for female MMA fighters that’s created and run by women. I haven’t investigated their marketing and their fighters’ self-promotion that much, but comparing Invicta’s to the UFC’s might be an interesting follow-up article.
There are female fans of the sport, both martial artists and not. But UFC’s audience is pretty much a sausage fest–while figures vary slightly, one report has 80% men in that coveted 18-34 demographic. So unfortunately it follows that marketing targets the stereotypical dudebro. (The kind of guys who show up for introductory MMA and BJJ classes clad head-to-toe in Tapout or Affliction, think they know how to fight because they watch UFC, have issues training with women, etc. etc.)
I do hope UFC alters their marketing eventually, but I’m not too optimistic.
Invicta is the best!
Love this! I interviewed Gina Carano around the time of her first movie, and, in going back and watching her MMA-era interviews to prepare, I was totally floored by the difference in how she had been marketed for MMA versus how her handlers were presenting her for the film. The main one I remember was a reporter asking her what her best feature was, and her cheerfully replying, “My boobs!” whereas her film-related answers were required to be a little less overt (though surely calculated to convey the same idea of ~sexiness~).
“I interviewed Gina Carano around the time of her first movie”
BRB dying of jealousy
I'll get in touch with them, and see if they'd be interested!
I’d just as soon assume that the only difference between MMA and traditional pro graps is whether the in-ring action is a shoot or a work. That is to say, the promo aspects of UFC would be tightly controlled to elicit a desired audience reaction. This Tate / Rousey division is textbook face / heel stuff. But the fights are still shoot fights, so presumably the interpersonal animosity isn’t worked.
I'd just as soon assume that the only difference between MMA and traditional pro graps is whether the in-ring action is a shoot or a work. That is to say, the promo aspects of UFC would be tightly controlled to elicit a desired audience reaction. This Tate / Rousey division is textbook face / heel stuff. But the fights are still shoot fights, so presumably the interpersonal animosity isn't worked.
I haven’t really watched any MMA fights because I don’t really enjoy watching people hit each other in the face, so I appreciated the perspective this article brought to the whole UFC thing. Until they get another judoka in the mix I’ll probably be pro-Rousey on principal- I like seeing the post-fight gifs of all the judo techniques she sneaks in.
Much like many other niche Olympic sports, there aren’t a lot of post-Olympic options for the kind of person who’s aggressive enough and loves fighting enough to medal at the Olympics in judo, so it’s interesting to see Rousey at least trying out a path that isn’t either get a degree + real job or coach for the rest of your life.
The Rousey-Tate thing is an aberration. Both of them are pretty polite to their other opponents. They just really hate each other.
The best female grapplers wear gis..and few people know their names..Where there is gambling and money, there will be twisted facades racing to up the hype..money whores will exploit by all means and capitalize on sexual decimation in the face of true esteemed athletes. Its not about the individual, its about the image we all agree to accept of the individual.
Prematch talk from male boxers isn’t full of name calling and (metaphorical) hair-pulling too?
I’ve been watching different fights than Ms Van Name, obviously. 🙂