Maybe this is a hot take but the gendered segregation of bloodsports is just as pants-on-head ridiculous as the gendered segregation of any other sport.
Like. This is a fucking game. Two boxers fighting one another in a ring are two gamers playing a game together. I cannot stress the extent to which boxing, MMA, et al are games created and pursued primarily for idle amusement. Just because the game is happening in a ring as opposed to on a pitch doesn't make it less of a game. We are Playing Toys when we glove up and clobber each other. It is For Fun. They're dangerous games, to be sure, but the danger is the chief source of amusement for the participants and the audience. The boxers wouldn't be boxing if they hated boxing.
"If we did co-ed boxing there would be Men Beating Up Women 😡" Last time I checked a fight requires at least 2 active participants unless you're just beating up on yourself alone like Edward Norton in that movie. And as I said above, I presume nobody would pursue a career in boxing if they didn't like doing the boxing.
And moreover, maybe I'm just a hashtag 90s kid but I grew up being constantly innundated with messages about how girls are just as tough as boys and can do anything boys can do. "Fight like a girl" was an inescapably popular slogan. And it was all very nice and heartwarming and inspirational. So I take serious umbrage with the notion that competing in a co-ed fight league equates to "men beating up women" because, here in the real world, the women would lay out the men just as often as the reverse, and this implicit assumption that women are by majority soft, delicate, helpless creatures simply unfit for participation in physical culture has got to be one of the least feminist things I've ever heard.
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