4 Reasons Why Female MMA Will NEVER Be Popular

Even men’s MMA pulls from wrestling, BJJ, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, Boxing, etc. Most of the advanced wrestlers today in the UFC started competing before the age of 10. Simply put, each sport has an strong foundation to draw talent from. THIS DOES NOT EXIST FOR FEMALE FIGHTERS. Women’s wrestling is almost non-existent. Many females who do BJJ are not likely to make the transition over. And there are no major female boxers or a female K-1 division. Yes, female MMA will draw from these sports, but there just isn’t enough of them happening in order to get a strong enough pool of talent.

Like you said, there are female wrestlers, BJJ practicioners, Thai boxers, kickboxers, and boxers. Since there are currently less spots on cards for women fighters to compete for, the talent pool that they will be drawing from need not be as large as the one for male fighters. Also, they just made women’s boxing an Olympic event for 2012 at 112, 132, and 165. That means that there will be a feeder system, as well as pool of world-class strikers looking to continue their athletic endeavors after concluding their amateur careers. It also means that cultural norms surrounding women punching each other in the face will continue to evolve.

Despite being called a success, the Gina Carano vs. Chris “Cyborg” Title Fight drew a gate of less then $1 Million. It is highly unlikely that an event headlined by females can become a strong PPV attraction or get a huge gate. Even if Gina Carano won, there is no way her name could get people to purchase a $45 PPV, or spend $200 on a ticket.

You know what else didn’t draw a million-dollar gate? Urijah Faber vs. Jens Pulver. I guess we should give up trying to promote Featherweights too, based on the same logic.

In MMA, having a baby is without question a career ender.

Shit! Somebody better tell Rosi Sexton that she’s retired. Bellator’s gonna be PISSED.

If females could be sold to the general public, don’t you think somebody would have figured it out for one of these sports already? As i said before, the only two sports in which female athletes have done solid business are in Tennis and Golf.

So what you’re saying is that, “Other than the sports that CAN be sold to the public and HAVE been proven successful, women’s sports CAN’T be sold to the public and HAVEN’T been proven successful.” Am I following you?

I will start by noting that the largest flaw in your whole argument is that mens MMA itself is not particularly popular. Female MMA, therefore, can really only be expected to be popular relative to male MMA. I am unsure why you are so determined to not only dislike a division of MMA, but also to come up with lists of reasons why no one will ever like it. Nevertheless, I will address your points respectively.

To your first point (and let me pause to note here that having numbered points with bolded titles in all caps was a NICE TOUCH!!! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!): there are in fact a lot of female wrestlers, judoka, and kickboxers. More and more of them will probably be coming into MMA, just as surely as the men have. There aren’t, however, a tremendous amount of American female wrestlers, judoka, and kickboxers, which I suppose is the only population of people you considered.

To your second point, I will echo Cannon Jacques above: Female fighters simply do not have to headline every card or bring in every audience member to be ‘popular.’

Your third point is of questionable bearing on whether or not female MMA could be popular. MMA in North America has been around long enough now for the “pioneering generation” of fighters to phase out (mostly) and the next big wave of stars is currently in decline. Innumerable fighters have come and gone, and it’s really unclear how much this might have hurt the sport. This could conceptually be a reason why female MMA will not be as popular as male MMA, but I think that’s a pretty obvious idea that nobody is arguing in the first place.

 The fact that other women’s sports aren’t popular doesn’t by default doom women’s MMA. As I noted above, MMA in general is not particularly popular. If the community of people who do enjoy MMA are so childish as to dislike women’s MMA in it’s entirety, for perpetuity, then I can only speculate as to exactly how much people actually like MMA.

Furthermore, women’s MMA is quite different than many other female sports, in that they aren’t performing acts that can be compared to the men and simply viewed as inferior. The WNBA looks rather slow and rooted to the ground compared to the NBA, but I don’t see a lot of people complaining about how crappy women’s tennis is. Female martial arts fights look more or less just like the male fights—the most important factor in both being the skill levels of the competitors, both absolute and in relation to each other.

Basically all of your objections are mostly horseshit.

1) The same place all that wrestling infrastructure came from.

2) If I brought in a 1 million gate, I would consider myself popular.

3) Seriously? I think that’s been used to prove that women can’t do anything as well for pretty much everything. It’s called the pill. Women don’t have to have children if they don’t want to, or they can postpone it and start a family instead of doing the Ken Shamrock money-whore phase. All those women you mentioned are recognizable names. Don’t they prove you wrong?

4) Everything had, at one point, not been done before. It didn’t make it impossible. See airplanes, cell phones, and the 5 minute mile.

If you meant to say “as popular as men’s mma”, then yes you are right. But if you mean it will be impossible for women to make careers as professional mma fighters over the long run, I think you are mistaken.

Obviously this guy is an idiot and not educated in some great facts…

1) The talent is out there – we have four divisions with top ten rankings and some great feeder systems….

a) amateur wrestling – Miesha Tate has said when she started wrestling in Washington state there were only 5 women in her division, now there are over 200 in the state alone.

b) Olympians – women compete in freestyle wrestling, tae kwon do, and now boxing in 2012.

c) Tae Boxing has been on the rise for the past decade, and a lot of females have been making the transistion

d) Tuff-n-uff in Vegas had an all female amateur card and nearly sold out the place.

2) The gate isn’t everything – think about the advertising dollars as well. Carano-Young and Carano-Kobold were some of the hightest rated mma fights in tv history. And their fight segments was the highest quarter hour during the show. Showtime is already raving about the viewer numbers, and the attendance beat expectations – over 13,000 attended the Cynorg-Carano fight live (rough $750,000 gate).

3) I refer you to Kathy Long – a 41 year old multiple time Kickboxing world champion who just won her first mma fight this weekend. I have just written an article about a fight having a kid and coming back to training a few months ago. Plus LaTasha Marzolla, who had a kid last year, is competing in mma. As it comes to injuries, they aren’t as much susceptible than a guy is. If anything they are more flexible.

4) MMA just started 15 years ago if you think about it. It’s very young considering other sports where women compete. It took a couple hundred years for women’s boxing to be considered a legitimate sport. I again turn to the ratings he forgot to look up. Women’s mma has a lot of great role models and they have been living up to their billings.

I hate it when ignorant people don’t do their research.