Women who love mixed martial arts.
Think MMA and UFC are just for men? Think again
There are things their friends, and even their families, may not know about them.
Lisa Anderson, for example, an Edmonton educator-cum-author and mother of four, has bungee-jumped before. She has also gone skydiving. She speaks fluent French, and can operate a combine.
Genevieve Gouin is a 42-yearold mother of three from Montreal with an appreciation for theatre and the arts. She always bakes her children’s birthday cakes and is known for her specialty desserts, particularly tarte tatin. She’s also an avid gardener, photographer and cross-country skier.
Joan Chang, 29, is a journalist who works for CBC radio in Toronto, a self-described “girlie-girl” with an eye for fashion.
None of these women know the others, but each share an abiding passion for mixed martial arts, a sport that’s often been characterized as brutal and violent. For these women, the Ultimate Fighting Championship — the top MMA circuit in the world — is a legitimate sporting entity, a breathtaking spectacle of skill and athleticism put on by modern-day gladiators.
“I don’t know if my friends know (that I’m a fan of UFC),” says Anderson, 44. “Some may, some may not. I don’t really care. I do think, though, that there are a lot more women who are fans than people think — and who don’t necessarily fit the stereotype people have. ” She laughs. “I don’t have any tattoos, for instance.”
Just as there are stereotypes about UFC, so, too, are there stereotypes about their fans, particularly women.
The majority of fans are men, of course, but there are women, too, who are equally passionate about the sport as well as being knowledgeable and savvy.
Anderson comes from a family of wrestlers; her brother was one, and so was her husband. UFC is a natural extension of that. She attends MMA bouts in Edmonton, and watches UFC pay-for-view events at home or at the neighbourhood pub with her husband. She follows the Ultimate Fighter reality series on Spike TV. She even travelled to Las Vegas for UFC 98 to watch Edmonton fighter Tim Hague win his UFC debut.
She would happily be part of the crowd at Winnipeg’s MTS Centre for UFC 161 Saturday night were it not for a dizzying schedule of family obligations.
Winnipeg is the fifth city in Canada to host the popular mixed martial arts competition, joining Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. The event was sold out almost as soon as it was announced. The 11-bout card — which includes a women’s bantamweight tilt — will be shown on pay-per-view to 140 countries in 28 languages, giving the city arguably the biggest international exposure of any sports event it has ever hosted.
It’s just a matter of time before UFC comes to Edmonton, Anderson says, and she intends to be there when it does.
Tom Wright, for his part, was taken aback — but pleasantly so — by the sheer number of women he saw at UFC events when he became its director of Canadian operations three years ago.
“I always made a point of speaking to people about their experience, and I was amazed by how many of them were women,” says Wright, then laughs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been, though. I have three daughters; they’re all fans.”
Wright is the former commissioner of the Canadian Football League. He says Canadian-specific research conducted last year for the UFC shows that women make up 37 per cent of the country’s fan base.
“That’s a little more than a third of our fans,” he says.
More women than men follow the UFC on Facebook, and are likely to “share” related information and events with friends. They also cite the “pureness” of the sport as one of its biggest draws. And while there’s no genderspecific research, Wright says, in general, UFC fans in Canada over-index in education and in household income, meaning they exceed the national average of the population in both of those areas.
Samantha Lawrence did her own research about female MMA fans in 2009. Now 31, she was a sociology grad at Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan University at the time and a passionate consumer of everything MMA. She undertook the research as part of her honours thesis.
“My professor (Joanne Minaker) was a big fan, too, so (the thesis) seemed like a natural fit,” says Lawrence.
She says while female fans of mixed martial arts events were always “highly visible,” not much was known about who they were. She went in search of answers. She developed a questionnaire and posted it online, and also distributed it to venues around the city, including mixed martial arts facilities and sports bars and lounges which regularly offered pay-per-view events to its patrons.
“I was interested in the ages of the women in this study,” she says. “I wanted to explore whether the majority of women who ‘consumed’ mixed martial arts were in the 18-to-34 age range, similar to the target male demographic for the UFC.”
In the end, the women who responded were between 19 and 43. They were also welleducated; half had a highschool diploma, nearly 30 per cent had a university degree, and one woman even had a master’s degree.
Perhaps most surprising, though, was the respondents’ reluctance to share their passion with others, particularly those close to them. Lawrence says when she asked the women whether the people who knew them best — family and friends — were aware of their passion for the sport, several said ‘no.’
“I think the women perceived that they were violating gendered scripts of what was appropriate feminine behaviour and experience,” says Lawrence. “They felt judged, and that likely had to do with the hyper-masculine ethos of the sport and its highly combative nature. Women are made to feel as though they’re violating appropriate feminine behaviour.”
Gouin admits there are probably only a handful of friends and colleagues who know of her fandom. Fewer still would be aware she attended UFC 154 at Montreal’s Bell Centre last November, no surprise when you consider her professional life as a director for an organization that promotes dance, theatre and arts companies touring abroad.
“I’m more accustomed to working with people who perform on a stage, not in a cage, that’s for sure,” she says with a laugh. “So it’s not something I tend to talk about too much, because generally, people are repulsed by the whole idea of MMA. They see it more as ultimate fighting. I see it as a sport, as a discipline, and I see the athletes who practice it as being very disciplined people.”
She was exposed to UFC by an odd set of circumstances that found her at a bar in Montreal in December 2010 for a friend’s birthday celebration. She was about to leave when she glanced up at one of the many TV screens showing the main event between UFC superstar George St. Pierre and Josh Koscheck.
“I was just captivated by the whole thing,” she recalls. “I had to watch. I was so impressed by their skills and their techniques. I knew about ultimate fighting, and the whole connotation of it being a very bloody and macho world where there were no rules. But when you look beyond the packaging of it, you discover these men are true athletes, people who are extremely skilled and who show a lot of techniques. It’s a mix of so many disciplines — wrestling, boxing, muay thai, Brazilian ju-jitsu — and you see a bit of all of it.”
Chang agrees. Her appreciation for mixed martial arts began when she met her husband, a lifelong martial artist whose disciplines include karate and Brazilian ju-jitsu. He was a UFC fan from Day 1, of course, but she wasn’t far behind. She was hooked almost immediately, by the skill set of the fighters, but by their stories, too, and their personalities.
“The more I got to know the fighters, the more I cared, and the more I got into,” she says.
She says there are many misconceptions about UFC, chief among them that fights are barbaric free-for-alls, the fighters little more than goons. In truth, she says, UFC is a highly-regulated, legitimate sport, the fights overseen by trained referees armed with manuals thick with rules.
“When you understand the subtleties of the sport, and the strategies that are being employed, it’s quite fascinating,” says Chang. “It’s not just two guys punching each other in the face — it’s like watching a chess match.”
She’ll happily tell anyone who will listen about her passion for UFC and always enjoys the reaction when she does.
“I think people stereotype me a bit,” she says. “Here I am this petite, quiet Asian woman who works in public radio and loves watching the fights.
“They’re always very taken aback. I love it.”