Damian Reilly

Is men fighting women really a new sport?

  • From Spectator Life

Last weekend, the first formal inter-gender mixed martial arts cagefighting contest – post Enlightenment, at least – took place in front of a paying audience in the city of Czestochowa, in Poland.

Remarkably, the fight went to a second round. Many well aimed blows were landed by Piotrek Lisowski on his female opponent Ula Siekacz. But the referee eventually called things off when he had her pinned helplessly to the floor with his knees and was thumping her in the face.

A second fight, between Michal Przybylowicz and Wiktoria Domzlaska was stopped in the first round when the female fighter had no answer to a vicious early Przybylowicz onslaught.

If the playing field isn’t level, then what’s being served up isn’t anything like sport

Is this really the way we want sport to go? Or, better question: as we become increasingly culturally squeamish about noticing there are, er, differences between the sexes – not least, inherent physiological differences – is there anything we can do to stop sport going this way?

The grotesque fights described above were truly ‘cis’ battles of the sexes. That is to say, both competitors were born in the gender in which they took to the cage. This wasn’t a case of a man-turned-woman besting a less strong woman competitor. It was a straightforward case of a man pummelling a woman for entertainment.

A great deal of nonsense has been talked over the years, in pubs mainly, by men, about what sport actually is. Is darts a sport, or is it a hobby? And what is golf, or snooker? If you’re not required to run around and be physically fit to play well, can a pursuit really qualify as a sport? My answer has always been an unequivocal yes. Absolutely anything – from the 100 metres dash to a game of tiddlywinks – qualifies as sport if two or more people want the same thing badly enough and, crucially, the playing field is level.

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