On the baffling beauty-first approach of the UFC's 'TUF 20' ads

So I’m sitting at home on Tuesday morning, having just returned from a vacation in the wilds of Maine, and I’m catching up on my DVR’d MMA. I’ve got some Bellator MMA, some UFC, plus Invicta FC waiting on the laptop whenever I’m ready. Throw in a cup of coffee, and you have yourself a pretty perfect weekday morning, at least by my standards.

Then I start seeing the ads for Season 20 of “The Ultimate Fighter,” which premieres tonight on FOX Sports 1 (10 p.m. ET), and I’ve got to tell you, I’m bummed. Not about this season of “TUF,” which might be the first season I actually watch all the way through since… I don’t know. (Which one was it where Matt Mitrione pretended to hear voices? That one.)

But this one, it seems like it’ll be worth watching. Not only is it the first time the show has featured all female fighters, but it will also be the first time the reality show season ends with the guaranteed crowning of a new champion in a new division. That feels important. That feels like it’s worth watching. So why is the UFC just trying to tell me how pretty these women are? Why is that, in fact, the very first thing these ads stress?

“Heartbreaker,” says the ad, showing a glammed-up and glowering Bec Hyatt. “Bonebreaker,” it adds, showing her looking more like a professional athlete.

Which is to say, more like the way the UFC has portrayed its male fighters on literally every other season of the show. It won’t even throw the guys in some nice suits for the purposes of pre-show hype. It’s only the women who are made to look like they’re auditioning for “America’s Next Top Model.”

In case you haven’t noticed, the UFC and FOX have decided to make the contrast between feminine beauty and organized violence kind of the theme for the marketing of this historic, uncommonly meaningful season of the long-running reality show.

“Jaw-dropping,” says another ad, right before contrasting it with “jaw-breaking.”

It stresses that these women are “easy on the eyes, and hard on the face.” That’s why, apparently, it’ll be, “Love at first fight.”

Imagine, just for a second, male fighters being presented this way. Imagine how laughable it would be, how bizarre to be told that not only is Robbie Lawler a sexy, sexy hunk of man meat, but – get this! – he’s also a gifted athlete.

That’s the thing about these ads, is that they invite the viewer to see these women first as sex objects, then add, as if you’re supposed to be surprised, “… but they can fight!!!” They also attempt to lure us with the promise not that some of the best women in the world will fight for a title, but that the best pretty women in the world will fight for a title. Here’s where the discerning viewer might ask, but what about the applicants who didn’t fit that mold?

But the women don’t mind, or so I’m told. The women in the ads are cool with it. They like to dress up and look nice, so it’s all perfectly fine. Never mind what conclusions the fans who see it – be they male or female, interested in heartbreaking or bone-breaking or both – might draw.

Of course, if the fighters didn’t like it, what then? Could they say so? Could they voice a dissenting opinion without fear of reprisal from the UFC, which, as anyone who’s been paying attention already knows, is a company that’s been known to be a little reprisal-happy when it comes to disgruntled employees independent contractors?

See, that’s the tricky part. If you talk to female fighters (and not just the ones currently employed by the UFC), one concern you hear over and over again is that they’ll be forced to present themselves this way, to “pander to the penis,” as former UFC and Strikeforce fighter turned Invicta FC matchmaker Julie Kedzie put it when I spoke to her for this Invicta story back in 2012.

Some women might be fine using their looks to get ahead in this sport, Kedzie explained back then, “and that’s fine, but it’s not my comfort zone, and I don’t think I should ever be forced into that just to be a fighter.”

Women’s MMA pioneer Tara LaRosa echoed that sentiment before her bout at Invicta FC 3, saying, “I like being promoted as an athlete, like they do for women in the Olympics. They’re promoted as athletes, not sex symbols or women doing something that usually only men do. That’s something I fought for from the beginning. I didn’t want to be differentiated as a female fighter. Like, ‘Oh, she’s good for a girl.’ No, I didn’t want that. I wanted people to respect my skill and athleticism and not be judged by what I looked like or how many articles of clothing I took off.”

It’s a reasonable request. It’s also pretty much the exact opposite of what you see in those “TUF 20? ads.

The hell of it is, the UFC and FOX don’t need to do that here. This is maybe the first “TUF” season in half a decade that sells itself, just on athletic importance alone. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with pointing out that those athletes are also conventionally attractive women who break molds and defy stereotypes, but when you employ nothing but stereotypes and gender cliches to make that point, it suggests to me that you don’t understand why fans are excited about this season in the first place.

And that’s why it’s a bummer, really. That the people involved in marketing “TUF 20? to fans think that beauty should come first, with fighting ability serving as the surprising twist at the end, it makes me wonder how they really view the women’s side of this sport. It also makes me wonder how they view us, the people – men and women – who enjoy it.

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