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.

Something about fighting for a living attracts a certain kind of girl, and don’t kid yourself, you know the girl I’m talking about. She has on way too much makeup. She has a tattoo above her ass (commonly known as the “tramp stamp”), maybe one on her ankle too. She may or may not have glitter on her breasts, but even if she doesn’t she has developed some clever scheme to make her cleavage the centerpiece of her personality. In short, she’s the type of girl who, if she hasn’t at least dabbled in porn, has seriously though about it, or at least considers the girls in Playboy to be role models of the highest sort.

I realize I’m being a little harsh on these women, but I don’t mean to be. It just seems surprisingly consistent. What is it about fighters and these girls? Sure, I’ve known some who had normal wives or girlfriends, but they were the exception. Is it that they share a love of self-destructive behavior? Is it that they just happen to know the same kind of sleazy people with the same creepy mustaches? Is it that neither is the type who, judging by the things they do to their bodies, plans on living all that long?

I have no idea, but I find it fascinating. Then again, look at me. I’m a writer. My girlfriend is a writer. We sit around and read books together. We have pale skin from staying indoors all the time. Neither one of us has ever been paid (to the best of my knowledge) to beat someone up or screw on camera. Do we seem equally strange and/or boring to fighters and their halter-topped bedecked soul mates?

I think we do. But you know something? I think that’s probably just about perfect. Even if I can’t fathom what Tito and Jenna might possibly talk about when they’re alone (although my best guess is something along the lines of, “Baby, are we all out of that rash cream again?”), it does seem like no accident that these kinds of people keep finding one another, over and over again.

And God bless them. God bless them in their tribal tattoos and bleached blonde hair and Affliction t-shirts and nine inch stiletto heels. Whatever the rest of us might say about them, love has been built on frailer ground.