Ronda Rousey wants to be heard, she wants to give women a voice, and she knows how to do it. She broke onto the scene in the summer of 2008, taking the bronze medal at the Olympic games for jujitsu. She became the first women to sign with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in 2012; she has not lost a fight since and is becoming a very influential person for the UFC, and women who want to follow in similar footsteps as Ronda. Ronda isn’t clean cut, polite, or politically correct, and that isn’t a bad thing. She enters fights with an intensity that is almost impossible to match, she wants to destroy you and then tell you about it afterwards, she is a fighter, competitor, and most importantly she is giving a voice to every single women that doesn’t want to follow the social norms that society puts amongst them.
While she is first and foremost dedicated to the UFC, her training, and becoming the most dominate women’s fighter of her time she also has her eyes on other things and knows that her fighting career wont last forever, so she has already started laying the foundation for what she wants to do after that part of her life is over. Not too long ago she abruptly left a lunch meeting with her agent and trainer. She needed to make it to here acting lessons that she signed up for twice a week. She is due to star in the new Entourage movie and has signed on to a couple other pictures that will be shooting soon and released around 2016. She also stars in the newest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, which is something new for female fighters, gladiators essentially. Maybe it isn’t common for women fighters to be displayed in such a manner, maybe they feel like they don’t belong in that “supermodel” category, but Ronda Rousey doesn’t care, she’s breaking down barriers and giving voice to a very important set of people. While people know bits and pieces about her personal life, but when her book My Fight/Your Fight comes out in the following months it will give people and even bigger and more understanding look inside the life of a women’s mixed martial arts fighter/bathing suit model/actor/author, quite an accomplishment for a 28 year old.
Maybe Rousey wont be the definitive voice for a certain women’s generation, maybe she’ll disappear for a while, or maybe she’ll get caught up in legal trouble like so many influential athletes have recently and people will begin to question their trust in her. But, maybe she keeps giving women a voice, and when people see her they see someone that did it her way, wasn’t a perfect role model in todays society, but she’s a perfect role model going forward for women who want to make a splash, be heard, and carry such an innate, beautiful toughness with them. She wants to be more than a one-dimensional fighter, and she is on her way to doing just that.
Capitol Street Chronicles 