People like myself have been pushing, competing, and promoting female MMA for a long time, and to see the fans accept a female division in the UFC so quickly is vindication that all that hard work amounted to something.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Every single woman that fights MMA has done just as much work as Ronda has; we just haven't gotten as much turnaround. Those women who came before her haven't been on magazine covers. They weren't plastered everywhere by the UFC. They didn't get the same reward back.
I think we've broken a lot of barriers and kind of shattered our glass ceiling that was there for women. There are so many great fighters, and we've proved a lot of people wrong. A lot of the times, our fights are the best fights on the card.
I'm a woman who's been in a man's sport since the age of 15, and to see people finally seeing what I saw right from the start, that female fighters are just as good 'pound-for-pound' as our male counterparts.
I think that if you do want to be a fighter, then you need to work harder than everybody else and make sure that you surround yourself with good people, especially if you're a woman. You've got to find a team that takes you seriously as a female fighter and is not going to rush you into the ring before you're ready.
There are so many ridiculous arguments that MMA is somehow anti-woman.
I'd love to have a chance to fight in the World Series Boxing for women, but nothing has been done about that.
I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.
Women boxers prefer to focus on the win rather than the bravado. We've come a long way. In the '90s, you only ever saw women parading in heels and a bikini holding a scorecard. Now we're owning it; we should get some male models in Speedos to do the ring walk.
When I looked at the state of women's MMA, what I saw was that it was missing rivalries or anything theatrical about it. Everybody was trying to be Miss America, unwilling to go under any kind of criticism, and taking the safe answers. I thought I needed to do whatever I could to get attention.
There are certain things that I always dreamed of, like fighting in the UFC. There's just certain things that I feel like haven't been accomplished there. There's such great women coming up in the sport; seems like a wonderful time to be in women's MMA.