NYT: Ronda Rousey’s Next Fight: Body Image in Hollywood

LOS ANGELES — Once, while at a fitting for a television commercial, the mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey received a bit of unwelcome feedback. She had been planning to lose a few pounds before filming, “but because somebody said something really rude to me, I came into the shoot purposely way heavier,” she recalled on a recent afternoon at her home in the beachside neighborhood of Venice, adding a few epithets for emphasis.

Did they dare question her?

“Oh, hell no,” Ms. Rousey said with a grin, “and the campaign ended up being amazing, even though I was heavier just to make a point.”

“I swear to God,” she said, shaking her head, “if anyone calls me fat one more time in my life, I’m going to kill them.”

In August, Ms. Rousey defeated her most recent opponent, Bethe Correia, in 34 seconds in Rio de Janeiro. After the fight, Ms. De Mars got into the ring and told her daughter that she should have finished off Ms. Correia faster.

“She was very mad when I said I was going to draw out the fight,” Ms. Rousey said of her mother.

Here’s another: talking frankly about her weight. Ms. Rousey, who is 5 feet 7 and fights at 135 pounds, weighed 153 on this September day. She feels most attractive around 148. “That’s like my favorite weight,” she said. But she still likes to get a little bigger than that, sometimes, because she has to choose between the look of her abs and breasts. “You can’t have both,” she said.

“We seem to be in this conflicting era for women, where women are doing so amazingly and taking over the athletic world, but we’re also in a time where — — ” Ms. Rousey said, and paused. “How can I really put it? That women without any skills that freeload are being glorified. That’s something I was raised not to be. That you’re supposed to contribute to the world, not consume from it.”