Ronda Rousey has a lot of balls. It takes balls to compete in the World Judo Championships and win. It takes balls to walk into a cage and try to maim some psycho with nothing to lose who hasn’t yet coped with childhood abuse and just wants to hurt somebody to make the voices stop. It takes balls to cary the UFC torch and submit yourself to sometimes undue scrutiny. It also takes balls, when the president of that organization decides to give you preferential treatment and custom build you a respectable record by carefully weighing your opponents because he wants a decent looking woman to be a champion for marketing purposes, to not show a bit of humility.
Rousey took the manufactured publicity to her head, which isn’t surprising. She’s an elite athlete, and you don’t become elite through rationalizing your circumstances. Nobody would pedal a bike for twelve hours a day if they analyzed what they were doing. You have to be delusional to get ahead. They once did a study on Olympic athletes vs. regular people and had them tell lies while measuring certain receptors in their brains. It turned out the athletes actually believed the lies.
Rousey seems to have bought into herself like few others, which was slightly more annoying than Floyd Mayweather or Kobe Bryant copping a similar attitude, given her rapid ascent by virtue of a corporate publicity machine, coupled with the fact she was just beating up women. Soon her media portrayal verged on propaganda as casual viewers of SportsCenter were subjected to panel discussions about whether or not Rousey was the best pound for pound fighter in all of MMA. (One word answer: No. Any dude would kill her in the first round. You fools get paid for this? Can we move on?)
The apex of Rousey believing her own bullshit came after she posed in the 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. After it was released, she did an interview with Cosmopolitan and stated that she gained weight on purpose for her appearance in the magazine, and appears to have cast this as a personal stance on body image issues:
“I felt like I was much too small for a magazine that is supposed to be celebrating the epitome of a woman. I wanted to be at my most feminine shape, and I don’t feel my most attractive at 135 pounds, which is the weight I fight at. At 150 pounds. I feel like I’m at my healthiest and my strongest and my most beautiful.”
Notice how her language is pandering to the fat normalization crowd. ‘The epitome of a woman?’ You can’t be thin or small and be a real woman anymore, we get it. The epitome of womanhood is apparently thundering ass cheeks and triceps the size of abalones. I always thought it was having a vagina. In a promo on SI’s website, Rousey again intimates that her appearance in the magazine is either a personal triumph, an attempt to subvert the conventions of the Swimsuit Issue, or a form of activism on behalf of fat people: “There shouldn’t be one cookie cutter body type that everyone is aspiring to be.”
That’s true. It would be completely futile to aspire to be a different body type. How do you train every day to be seven feet tall? Yet, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has always aspired to showcase the most beautiful women they can find, which has traditionally manifested itself as tall thin ones with big tits.
Rousey apparently sees herself as going against the grain, which is why she heroically gained 15 pounds for the shoot. Or did she?
The 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was released on February 9, 2015. Rousey fought on July 5 of the previous year, winning via submission to an under qualified opponent in 16 seconds. She didn’t fight again until February 28, 2015, beating a super athlete in 14 seconds. Between those fights she filmed two movies, did various media appearances, and posed for the SI Swimsuit Issue, which photographed around November of 2015.
Anyone who knows anything about fighting understands that fighters have a fighting weight and a ‘walking around weight’, which is typically around fifteen pounds heavier than what they weigh in at prior to a fight.
It seems worth inferring, to a fairly strong degree, that Rousey didn’t gain fifteen pounds for the purposes of a photo shoot to show the epitome of true womanhood, but gained fifteen pounds because that’s what all fighters do between fights, especially when they aren’t training. Rousey attempted to spin a completely normal process, which took no additional effort on her part, as a form of activism. Yes, please put on some more belly fat Ronda, we don’t know how to feel about ourselves. Activism is best when it takes absolutely zero effort and you get paid a lot.
Again, during this time Rousey was being hyped at all ends of the media, and nobody thought to call attention to her laughably bogus claim. It’s what happens when people become quasi politicized and it’s considered uncouth to criticize their idiotic self serving statements.
The scary thing is Rousey may have actually believed it. Or perhaps she’s just a calculated person who listens to her publicist. Either way, this is what happens when someone’s ego is built up and remains unchecked. It’s delusional boasting, verging on Kim Jong un territory. Assuming this is what she actually thinks, she’s completely psychotic. If she’s just arrogantly babbling incoherent buzzwords, she’s gross.
Rousey may or may not beat Holly Holm in a rematch, but the SI fiasco has shown her true colors. She has no credibility. She deserved to get knocked out. She beats people up, she’s not a role model. She’s dead to me.
I’m off to eat Cheetos for the pandas.