Welcome to the league of dystopian sports, where beating up women who are in no way trained to fight is now considered entertainment. Three OnlyFans models were recently pitted against two male MMA fighters in Romania’s Real Xtreme Fighting (RXF), and it went about as well as you’d think it would. The models strutted in with their heads held high, but the fight was an utter disaster.
Ok, so first off, we want to know… who the hell signed off on this madness? How was this event approved? Does RXF have nary a PR professional on staff? RXF is known for bizarre matchups; it’s kind of their thing. But this? This was a new low. Was it supposed to be entertaining to watch women who earn a living selling access to their beauty online get pummeled by trained fighters? Because “entertaining” is the last thing it was.
Violence against women isn’t a cute little game that you turn on for your own entertainment, it’s a real and ongoing problem. Domestic violence kills a large number of women globally every year. Women are frequently attacked by men they don’t even know when they don’t respond to street harassment in a way that the harasser finds pleasing—and that’s not even touching on the fact that street harassment is, in itself, also a form of violence against women. Women are on the receiving end of unwanted aggression all the time, and now we’re adding cage fights to the list? It would be one thing if the women were trained fighters, but this was the equivalent of watching wolves being unleashed upon sheep. The producers of RXF may play into “shock value” to market most of their fights, but in this instance, that shock value is a flimsy mask for the very real danger that women everywhere face.
OnlyFans models and sex workers already face enough violence due to societal stigma against their careers. When you have a group of women who are already living with a higher threat of violence than most women—who are also living under an elevated threat of violence simply due to their status as women—why would glorifying violence against them be deemed a good idea? Studies show that sex workers experience disproportionately high levels of physical and sexual violence, so why would show coordinators choose to knowingly create a spectacle out of their pain for an audience to gawk at?
Well, it turns out that I’m not the only one who was disgusted when they heard about the fight, because even fans of the show have been quick to express their disgust at the event. RXF has been shown no mercy in the court of public opinion, with people calling the so-called fight “sick” and “shameful.” Even in the Wild West of combat sports, someone with a brain that hasn’t been subjected to traumatic injury should be in the room when deciding who squares up against whom.
