ABSTRACT
Women’s MMA had a breakthrough moment when the UFC introduced a women’s bantamweight division in 2012. UFC President Dana White had previously (and famously) declared that women would never compete in the organization. Though women have clearly proved their skill as fighters, there remains a certain background ambivalence about the sight of women hurting each other in public. This chapter considers some puzzles about our society’s relationship to women’s pain that are raised by this. After all, we do not tend to feel squeamish about Wonder Woman beating up Nazis – so women have long been shown causing pain. Similarly, the line-up of any number of police procedurals and horror movies featuring variously victimized women suggests that we tolerate a great many portrayals of women in pain. Yet the list of popular media portrayals of women whose pain or bodily damage is the result of activities in which they are enthusiastic or wholehearted participants is very short. This chapter shows how our social ambivalence about women in fighting sports is in fact continuous with other writing in bioethics, particularly about pregnancy, about the ways in which women’s bodies are seen primarily as instrumental.
