People like myself have been pushing, competing, and promoting female MMA for a long time, and to see the fans accept a female division in the UFC so quickly is vindication that all that hard work amounted to something.

I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.

I think we've broken a lot of barriers and kind of shattered our glass ceiling that was there for women. There are so many great fighters, and we've proved a lot of people wrong. A lot of the times, our fights are the best fights on the card.

There's a lot of girls in the division I really like, but I always feel like there's this underlying sense of a potential matchup, potential competition. It adds a different element.

Really, if you get in the ring and box with someone for real, I don't think it is a sport. As far as professional fighters, you are literally putting your life on the line.

Players should get the best deals for themselves whenever they can. Football is a relatively short career.

There's nothing masculine about being competitive. There's nothing masculine about trying to be the best at everything you do, nor is there anything wrong with it. I don't know why a female athlete has to defend her femininity just because she chooses to play sports.

Football is generally a working-class sport, and because of the fact I went to private school and was brought up slightly differently, people think that makes me a different person.