craveonline

By Ben Fowlkes

Hey there fight fans, can we talk frankly here for a minute? Can we just drop the pretenses and lay it all on the line? There’s this thing that’s been going through my mind for a while now. I’ve been holding it in because, well, it’s not exactly about fighting. It’s about fighters. More to the point, it’s about the women who fighters seem to pair off with, and how strikingly similar they all are.

The breaking point for me was this week when Tito Ortiz and his girlfriend, Jenna Jameson, appeared together on the Howard Stern show. Isn’t it weird, I thought to myself, that a pretty famous athlete is dating the most notorious porn star in the world? He’s in an at least somewhat monogamous relationship with a woman who we’ve all seen performing numerous sex acts on numerous people, a woman whose oral sex techniques have become common knowledge. Isn’t that strange?

But then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how strange it wasn’t, and how that was strange. It seemed completely normal and almost predictable that Tito Ortiz – a world famous MMA fighter – would be shacked up with a porn star. And why? Because he’s a fighter, and because fighters seem to gravitate toward a certain type of woman.

Before I go any further, let me say that I’m not judging. Porn is a legitimate industry and, let’s be honest, it provides a useful social service. Everyone sells what they have in this capitalist society, whether that something is business acumen or the ability to convincingly fake an orgasm in the midst of a meandering plotline.

But a woman doesn’t necessarily have to be in the porn industry to be an MMA fighter girlfriend or wife. In my time covering this sport, I’ve been to enough events in enough different cities to know how consistent this stereotype is. From Portland to Las Vegas to Houston to Ohio, if you go to even a remotely big time MMA event and look around you’ll start to wonder if they aren’t passing out halter tops at the door.