Somewhere out there is a guy who once walked up to a professional cage fighter and explained to her why men watch her fight. Melissa Croden remembers it word for word. He asked her, “Did you know that men only watch women’s MMA because they think that they’re hot or whatever?”
Her answer, which she shared in an interview with MMA Canada that BJPenn.com picked up, was perfect: “I don’t think that’s true at all, man.”
That exchange is the whole debate in about 20 seconds. One side has a theory. The other side has evidence. Croden, who is climbing the UFC bantamweight rankings and meets Chelsea Chandler at UFC Edmonton on Oct. 17, has the evidence, and she’s right.
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The Inbox Doesn’t Lie
The guys who insist fans only tune in for the looks love to pretend they’re making some brave, uncomfortable observation about human nature. Croden actually checked. She said fans who have followed her since her amateur days still message her, and she was blunt about what those messages contain: “It has never been suggestive messages. It’s always been encouragement and admiration.”
I’ll take the fighter’s DMs over a random dude’s hunch every single time. The people who believe the hot theory are mostly describing themselves, and Croden basically said so, noting that this is how those people see it and that it doesn’t mean everybody watches the sport that way. Translation: buddy, that one’s on you.
Her opening line in the interview was the one BJPenn.com put in the headline: “I hope people stop s******g on women’s MMA.” She followed it with the argument fans should already know by heart: “I think that the women have more than enough times proved that we’re exciting to watch.” She even gave the haters an out, admitting the sport won’t be for every fan, before adding the line that matters: “there’s still room for us.”
The Red Pill Detour
This is where Croden gets more interesting than your standard fight-week soundbite. She tied the online venom to politics, saying a lot of people are hopping on “the red pill bandwagon” about women and the traditional family unit, “blah, blah, blah.”
Then she did something almost nobody does in these arguments. She conceded ground. “Yeah, I agree with some of those statements,” she said, and called the family unit “a sacred thing.” Her point was that women are simply having families later in life now, the world has changed, and the 1960s housewife you’ve seen on Mad Men reruns has left the building. Her read on the backlash against women’s sports: “Because people are trying to hold on to this world that doesn’t exist anymore.”
You can argue with her politics if you want. You’ll have a harder time arguing with her framing, because she gave the other side its best point and still came out ahead. That’s how you win a scramble.
She also dropped a genuinely great bit about why fierceness and femininity can live in the same body. “why do we call it mother nature? Because it’s beautiful and also destructive,” she said, before apologizing for getting fluffy. No apology needed. The people missing that, in her words, are “just kind of looking at it from a caveman perspective.”
The Promotion Gets Some of This Blame
The interviewer brought up something Liz Carmouche said on Bowks Talking Bouts: that women’s bantamweight stopped being a marquee division because there’s no beautiful woman to market at the top. Croden didn’t dodge it. “I think at the end of the day, it is an entertainment business,” she said.
Fair. That’s also an indictment of the marketing department. If a division that used to headline cards fell off because the company only knew one way to sell it, that’s a promotion treating fans like ATMs who only respond to one type of poster. Build the fighters. Tell their stories. Croden herself noted there are fewer women in the sport, but more women are getting into MMA at a younger age, and she expects the talent to arrive in waves. The pipeline is filling. Somebody has to actually promote what comes out of it.
And the division has stakes right now. BJPenn.com also reported that Croden has her eye on Ailín Pérez and Norma Dumont, ranked No. 2 and No. 3 at 135, after Edmonton. That’s a ranked fighter publicly calling her shot at the top of the ladder. I love that. Call it, then go back it up.
The best rebuttal to the caveman crowd was never going to be an interview anyway. It’s Saturday night in Edmonton, Chelsea Chandler across the cage, and a crowd full of people who bought a ticket to watch two women try to finish each other.
