Why do many women seem to have such a negative view of Mixed Martial Arts and the guys who practice them?

Just because it is not artificially choreographed to look graceful, like some tournament style martial arts?

I thought that women would like to date a guy who could protect them. MMA is one of the few martial arts that is actually practical for self defense (depending on how it is taught).

Do they?

I only dabbled in MMA for a short amount of time – I boxed in my teenage years, wrastled through high school, and then when i was about 20, one summer I started training for an MMA fight, but my opponent got hurt while training, I couldn’t find a new one in enough time, and I just got too preoccupied after that.

I didn’t know that women really had a negative view of it, or of violent sports in general. I think most women (in my experience at least) found it to be an attractive quality – they were turned on that I was a boxer/football player. However, I also wasn’t the stereotypical guy competing in those events – I’m intelligent, don’t have cauliflower ears, and my face doesn’t look like it’s been run over with a steamroller. They typically came away impressed that someone who was kind and well-spoken could also have a violent/competitive side.

Of course, typically, I didn’t bring up the boxing right away – it was something that I talked about in passing (although in college, it was harder to hide the fact that I was a football player). Occasionally I would run into the woman who would find out that I boxed, and then debate the psychology and/or ethics of it, but it rarely was taken as being a negative aspect, especially since I could easily ease the concerns of these types of people with an intelligent debate.