Jump to content

The Male Gaze in Women’s MMA - Part 1: Genesis, Gina, and getting past Dana


Recommended Posts

 
The first in a five part series from Bloody Elbow about how the male gaze, gender norms and beauty standards impact the careers of women in MMA.
 

 

“Although girls and women are more accepted than ever in sports, participating in sports is still in many ways a violation of gender norms. Largely because the traits we most value in sports – physicality, aggression, strength, etc. – are traits also associated with masculinity. Because of this disconnect, we often see female athletes objectified as a way to make them appear more feminine. Doing so 'brings things back into balance,' by assuring viewers that the women we see are not violating gender norms, but still are ‘real women’ in that they are feminine and, in many cases, available for sexual consumption.”

 

 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Lauren Murphy, “And when women fight, one of the things they talk about is the way that they look. And I guess, for me, it's been a rude awakening in the last couple of years. To realize that it's not just hard work that is going to make me successful. It's also going to be how many Instagram followers I have, how many Twitter followers I have, how many sexy pictures I have on the internet. How much of my body I'm willing to show to the public. That's really been a rude awakening to me.”

 

Pearl Gonzalez, “MMA is a mostly male dominated sport. There are far more divisions for men so there are more men by default,” she says. “Their opportunities, however, differ due to the fact that sex sells. Women have a greater possibility to earn outside media attention if they choose to allow that. Personally, I have been able to not only compete at the highest level, but I’ve also earned spots on TV shows, movies, and modeling. I’m not afraid of the attention it brings. After MMA, the possibilities are endless!”

 

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Male Gaze in Women’s MMA pt. 4: This looks like an unfair fight

 

Many of the fighters whose voices are in this piece believe that the opportunities to fight in the biggest matches, earn the highest amounts, and receive the most recognition in the sport are closely tied to their appearances and not their actions or abilities. High level athletes living with that belief – that things they can’t control can prevent them getting what they deserve in the sport – find themselves with a fairly unified feeling: ‘It sucks.’

 

 

Prof. Whiteside of the University of Tennessee outlines another adverse effect female fighters live under due to the male gaze: the ‘delegitimization of their athletic prowess.’

 
“If we see a famous golfer depicted on the cover of a golfing magazine topless, for instance, (as was the case with Lexi Thompson on the cover of Golf Digest) we, the viewers, do not see her as an athlete, but as a sexualized object. These images deny the public the opportunity to imagine women as empowered, active subjects, but instead only as objects. Thus, it becomes easy to dismiss women as legitimate athletes, which happens quite frequently in sporting conversations.”

 

 

 

The focus on looks has also had an adverse affects on some female fighters in the form of abuse they have suffered online. Kedzie – who has received numerous rape threats – agrees the abuse is a symptom of the male entitlement that is rampant in society as a whole, not just limited to MMA fans.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Male Gaze and Women’s MMA pt. 5: Doing something about it

 

Individual interviewees in this article say that the male gaze affects the marketing, promotion, and match-making in MMA to a degree that the best fights aren’t being made and that athletes suffer missed opportunities. Some have emphasized the great deal of pressure for fighters to be someone they are not, as well as stress over the fear that their best efforts won’t be enough to help them achieve their goals (or decent earnings) in a sport they love.

 
They admit that the added stress might have affected performances or even their desire to remain in the sport.
 
This small sample group were asked whether big promotions like the UFC or Bellator had a responsibility to eliminate some of the issues discussed so far. And they were near unanimous in saying that promotions did not bear any responsibility to change what they are doing, as these organizations are independent companies who can act as they please. Though, many added that they would love to see promotions choose to act in a way that treats female fighters like male fighters, who succeed based on what they do and not who they are.

 

 

Shannon Knapp says her own promotion, Invicta FC, “absolutely” has a responsibility to give fighters the best opportunities based on their performances.

 
“As Invicita, and as females, we just have to continue to fight the good fight. Because, we can't tell people how they have to react or how they should run their businesses. They're not going to listen to us. We just have to keep standing strong and show that there's more to women’s MMA than pretty faces. There's depth, there's talent, and that deserves recognition.”
 
Regarding other promotions, Knapp says, “You can't tell them what they need to be doing or should be doing. But I think companies have a responsibility to put on great fights. That's the commitment they’ve made.”

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

There are some major promotions that will turn down very skilled female fighters because they don't fit the mold of traditional beauty standards, and they'll tell the managers that this is exactly why they are declining to sign the athlete. Professional fighting in America is an odd blend of athletics and entertainment in many cases. It's martial arts entertainment.

 

While there are some promotions that encourage individual self-expression among athletes and don't penalize them for it (Invicta is one of these), the landscape for an athlete who chooses to use her sexuality versus one who chooses not to is quite different. This is something I noticed as a fighter, but seeing the extent of it from the other side now has lead to a bit of disillusionment on my part. 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

While there are some promotions that encourage individual self-expression among athletes and don't penalize them for it (Invicta is one of these), the landscape for an athlete who chooses to use her sexuality versus one who chooses not to is quite different. This is something I noticed as a fighter, but seeing the extent of it from the other side now has lead to a bit of disillusionment on my part. 

 

Perhaps the answer to this impassible union between marketing and sexuality is to embrace that there are so many sexualities that can be expressed by fighting women, that the "sexy" isn't just a glossy Swimsuit sexuality, but that there are gritty, or ardent, or geeky, or "x" sexualities, that can intensify marketability. Yeah, it would be awesome if it was just a question of "skills", but in the marketing of fighting there may always be a dimension of "sex" that is never left behind. You see this in men too, in a way. There was even a kind of Boss Hog aura of attractiveness being pushed in someone like Big Country. Perhaps this is the thin line which could create more inclusion.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I like what you say, Kevin but I also totally identify with the bummed out feeling Kaitlin describes.  In my work career, I have been on both sides of this coin and I'll take people doubting my talent and thinking I got ahead on my looks any time over being ignored cause, fuck it.  That little "glam" career push is a very very tight window though (even tighter in fighting, witness the gorgeous Felice Herrig crying at a press conference last year over the reality that at 33 she is "too old" for the UFC to promote.  Such an ugly story and she is a champ for being open about it).  I take heart in Amanda Nunes' point of view.  She's just like "whatever, that's how it is"and goes about her business.  I LOVE HER FOR THAT.  Acceptance and refocus on what matters to her (to me too).

 

https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2017/11/26/16702114/amanda-nunes-ufc-wants-her-to-lose-bantamweight-title-mma-news

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I like what you say, Kevin but I also totally identify with the bummed out feeling Kaitlin describes.  In my work career, I have been on both sides of this coin and I'll take people doubting my talent and thinking I got ahead on my looks any time over being ignored cause, fuck it.  That little "glam" career push is a very very tight window though (even tighter in fighting, witness the gorgeous Felice Herrig crying at a press conference last year over the reality that at 33 she is "too old" for the UFC to promote.  Such an ugly story and she is a champ for being open about it).  I take heart in Amanda Nunes' point of view.  She's just like "whatever, that's how it is"and goes about her business.  I LOVE HER FOR THAT.  Acceptance and refocus on what matters to her (to me too).

 

https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2017/11/26/16702114/amanda-nunes-ufc-wants-her-to-lose-bantamweight-title-mma-news

 

I don't know if Natalie ever told you, but --- if I remember correctly --- when she lost a close decision she felt she had won to Julie Kitchen the ref (was it Big John McCarthy, or am I inventing that part of the memory) told her afterwards, something to the order: "Because of your look, you can't expect a win." Sorry for totally screwing up the memory of what she told us a long while ago, but it is was something along those lines. Incredible. The way Natalie told it it was almost as if the guy was telling her this as a consolation.

 

nataie-fuz-01.jpg

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know if Natalie ever told you, but --- if I remember correctly --- when she lost a close decision she felt she had won to Julie Kitchen the ref (was it Big John McCarthy, or am I inventing that part of the memory) told her afterwards, something to the order: "Because of your look, you can't expect a win." Sorry for totally screwing up the memory of what she told us a long while ago, but it is was something along those lines. Incredible. The way Natalie told it it was almost as if the guy was telling her this as a consolation.

 

nataie-fuz-01.jpg

Jesus.  That pisses me off.  I was talking with a straight fighter about that thing where "you" (he) watch a female fight and "cannot help but root for the more attractive fighter".  What?  WHAT?!!  This is a person I adore and respect.  I was truly shocked.  You mean you really cannot see the fight?  At all?  wtf.  I mean he didn't say he could not see the fight; I believe he could score it correctly were he a judge but silly me, I had no idea men watched women fight in that way.  I'm so naive sometimes.  I knew about tv and UFC and all that shit but the day to day, person to person reality of it always shocks me.  I watched all Nat's fights with JK.  BTW Natalie is a gorgeous lesbian superstar in my opinion. Just a full on rock star in the NYC 90's gay world.  Its so weird that the "look" doesn't translate.  I am a little steaming mad at the moment.  Stupid.  Gonna rewatch the fights for fun now though :) .

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Most Recent Topics

  • Latest Comments

    • Some notes on the predividual (from Simondon), from a side conversation I've been having, specifically about how Philosophies of Immanence, because they tend to flatten causation, have lost the sense of debt or respect to that which has made you. One of the interesting questions in the ethical dimension, once we move away from representationalist thinking, is our relationship to causation.   In Spinoza there is a certain implicit reverence for that to which you are immanent to. That which gave "birth" to you and your individuation. The "crystal" would be reverent to the superstaturated solution and the germ (and I guess, the beaker). This is an ancient thought.   Once we introduce concepts of novelness, and its valorization, along with notions of various breaks and revolutions, this sense of reverence is diminished, if not outright eliminated. "I" (or whatever superject of what I am doing) am novel, I break from from that which I come from. Every "new" thing is a revolution, of a kind. No longer is a new thing an expression of its preindividual, in the ethical/moral sense.   Sometimes there are turns, like in DnG, where there is a sort of vitalism of a sacred. I'm not an expression of a particular preindividual, but rather an expression of Becoming..a becoming that is forever being held back by what has already become. And perhaps there is some value in this spiritualization. It's in Hegel for sure. But, what is missing, I believe, is the respect for one's actual preindividual, the very things that materially and historically made "you" (however qualified)...   I think this is where Spinoza's concept of immanent cause and its ethical traction is really interesting. Yes, he forever seems to be reaching beyond his moment in history into an Eternity, but because we are always coming out of something, expressing something, we have a certain debt to that. Concepts of revolution or valorized novelty really undercut this notion of debt, which is a very old human concept which probably has animated much of human culture.   And, you can see this notion of immanent debt in Ecological thought. It still is there.   The ecosystem is what gave birth to you, you have debt to it. Of course we have this sense with children and parents, echo'd there.   But...as Deleuze (and maybe Simondon?) flatten out causation, the crystal just comes out of metastable soup. It is standing there sui generis. It is forever in folds of becoming and assemblages, to be sure, but I think the sense of hierarchy and debt becomes obscured. We are "progressing" from the "primitive".   This may be a good thing, but I suspect that its not.   I do appreciate how you focus on that you cannot just presume the "individual", and that this points to the preindividual. Yes...but is there not a hierarchy of the preindividual that has been effaced, the loss of an ethos.   I think we get something of this in the notion of the mute and the dumb preindividual, which culminates in the human, thinking, speaking, acting individuation. A certain teleology that is somehow complicit, even in non-teleological pictures.   I think this all can boil down to one question: Do we have debt to what we come from?   ...and, if so, what is the nature of that debt?   I think Philosophies of Immanence kind of struggle with this question, because they have reframed.   ...and some of this is the Cult of the New. 3:01 PM Today at 4:56 AM   Hmmmm yeah. Important to be in the middle ground here I suspect. Enabled by the past, not determined by it. Of course inheritance is rather a big deal in evolutionary thought - the bequest of the lineage, as I often put it. This can be overdone, just as a sense of Progress in evolution can be overdone - sometimes we need to escape our past, sometimes we need to recover it, revere it, re-present it. As always, things must be nuanced, the middle ground must be occupied. 4:56 AM   Yes...but I think there is a sense of debt, or possibly reverence, that is missing. You can have a sense of debt or reverence and NOT be reactive, and bring change. Just as a Native American Indian can have reverence for a deer he kills, a debt. You can kill your past, what you have come from, what you are an expression of...but, in a deep way.   Instead "progress" is seen as breaking from, erasing, denying. Radical departure.   The very concept of "the new" holds this.   this sense of rupture.   And pictures of "Becoming" are often pictures of constant rupture.   new, new, new, new, new, new...   ...with obvious parallels in commodification, iterations of the iphone, etc.   In my view, this means that the debt to the preindividual should be substantive. And the art of creating individuation means the art of creating preindividuals. DnG get some of this with their concept of the BwOs.   They are creating a preindividual.   But the sense of debt is really missing from almost all Immanence Philosophy.   The preindividual becomes something like "soup" or intensities, or molecular bouncings.   Nothing really that you would have debt to. 12:54 PM   Fantasies of rupture and "new" are exactly what bring the shadow in its various avatars with you, unconsciously.     This lack of respect or debt to the preindividual also has vast consequences for some of Simondon's own imaginations. He pictures "trade" or "craft" knowledge as that of a childhood of a kind, and is quite good in this. And...he imagines that it can become synthesized with his abstracted "encyclopedic" knowledge (Hegel, again)...but this would only work, he adds, if the child is added back in...because the child (and childhood apprenticeships) were core to the original craft knowledge. But...you can't just "add children" to the new synthesis, because what made craft knowledge so deep and intense was the very predindividual that created it (the entire social matrix, of Smithing, or hunting, or shepherding)...if you have altered that social matrix, that "preindividual" for knowledge, you have radically altered what can even be known...even though you have supplemented with abstract encyclopedic knowledge. This is something that Muay Thai faces today. The "preindividual" has been lost, and no amount of abstraction, and no about of "teaching children" (without the original preindividual) will result in the same capacities. In short, there is no "progressive" escalation of knowledge. Now, not everything more many things are like a fighting art, Muay Thai...but, the absence of the respect and debt to preindividuality still shows itself across knowledge. There are trends of course trying to harness creativity, many of which amount to kind of trying to workshop preindividuality, horizontal buisness plan and build structures, ways of setting up desks or lounge chairs, its endless. But...you can't really "engineer" knowledge in this way...at least not in the way that you are intending to. The preindividual comes out of the culture in an organic way, when we are attending to the kinds of deeper knowledge efficacies we sometimes reach for.
    • "He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitel sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other."   A beautiful analogy by Simone Weil (Waiting for God), which especially in the last sentence communicates how hard it is to discuss Muay Thai with those who don't know how to "read" its sentences. Yes, I see the effort. Yes, I see the power. Yes, I even see the "technique"...but this is like talking about the color of sentences written out at times.
    • from Reddit discussing shin pain and toughening of the shins: There are several factors, and people create theories on this based on pictures of Muay Thai, but honestly from my wife's direct experience they go some what numb and hard from lots of kicking bags and pads, and fighting (in Thailand some bags could get quite hard, almost cement like in places). Within a year in Thailand Sylvie was fighting every 10 or 12 days and it really was not a problem, seldom feeling much pain, especially if you treat them properly after damage, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztzTmHfae-k and then more advanced, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcWtd00U7oQ And they keep getting harder. After a few years or so Sylvie felt like she would win any shin clash in any fight, they just became incredible hard. In this video she is talking about 2 years in about how and why she thought her shins had gotten so hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXCmZVXeGE she shows in the vid how her shins became kind of permanently serrated, with divots and dings. As she discusses only 2 years in (now she's 13 years of fighting in) very experienced Thais have incredibly hard shins, like iron. Yes, there are ideas about fighting hard or not, but that really isn't the determining factor from our experience with Sylvie coming up on 300 fights and being around a lot of old fighters. They just can get incredibly tough. The cycles of damage and repair just really change the shin (people in the internet like to talk about microfractures and whatnot). Over time Sylvie eventually didn't really need the heat treatment anymore after fights, now she seldom uses it. She's even has several times in the last couple of years split her skin open on checks without even feeling much contact. Just looked down and there was blood.  
  • The Latest From Open Topics Forum

    • Hi all, Does anyone know of any suppliers for blanks (Plain items to design and print a logo on) that are a good quality? Or put me in the right direction? thanks all  
    • The first fight between Poot Lorlek and Posai Sittiboonlert was recently uploaded to youtube. Posai is one of the earliest great Muay Khao fighters and influential to Dieselnoi, but there's very little footage of him. Poot is one of the GOATs and one of Posai's best wins, it's really cool to see how Posai's style looked against another elite fighter.
    • Yeah, this is certainly possible. Thanks! I just like the idea of a training camp pre-fight because of focus and getting more "locked in".. Do you know of any high level gyms in europe you would recommend? 
    • You could just pick a high-level gym in a European city, just live and train there for however long you want (a month?). Lots of gyms have morning and evening classes.
    • Hi, i have a general question concerning Muay-Thai training camps, are there any serious ones in Europe at all? I know there are some for kickboxing in the Netherlands, but that's not interesting to me or what i aim for. I have found some regarding Muay-Thai in google searches, but what iv'e found seem to be only "retreats" with Muay-Thai on a level compareable to fitness-boxing, yoga or mindfullness.. So what i look for, but can't seem to find anywhere, are camps similar to those in Thailand. Grueling, high-intensity workouts with trainers who have actually fought and don't just do this as a hobby/fitness regime. A place where you can actually grow, improve technique and build strength and gas-tank with high intensity, not a vacation... No hate whatsoever to those who do fitness-boxing and attend retreats like these, i just find it VERY ODD that there ain't any training camps like those in Thailand out there, or perhaps i haven't looked good enough?..  Appericiate all responses, thank you! 
  • Forum Statistics

    • Total Topics
      1.4k
    • Total Posts
      11.5k
×
×
  • Create New...