Everyone wanted to know from Dana if there was a Ronda type of person in the house who would make the strawweight division as fun to watch as the bantamweight one. After filming, Dana told the press that yes, there was a Ronda type of person in the house: Someone who was beautiful and unbeatable, though he wouldn’t say who.

He could have been talking about Angela, who spoke only in inflammatory (albeit circuitous and long-winded) sound bites. He could have been talking about Felice, who has a big fan following. But he was probably talking about Rose Namajunas, who is beautiful and also extremely gifted. Her show nickname is Thug, which is maybe funny because she is tall and lanky, dimpled and Slavic-looking like a supermodel, and not funny at all because she could kill you with her bare hands.

Rose was up for the semifinal fights on that last day in the house. She sat on the patio with me, hydrating hydrating hydrating, ready to be done with the place.

Rose grew up around a lot of violence; MMA fighting saved her life. She is the first of only three people I’d encounter throughout this entire story who would indicate that I wasn’t so crazy myself to think that this was not just like tennis (the others were an MMA reporter and a Christian missionary). “I think we all have an ugly past and I feel like maybe this is a lot for us some kind of therapy, some type of emotional scarring of our past.” It had been a long six weeks for Rose, and she was missing Pat Barry, her longtime boyfriend, also a fighter, but she had done well in the house, kept her head down and her cornrows in place and focused only on her goals, won every fight in front of her. This was the only thing she wanted, and she would get it. She is, without a doubt, the next big female star of the UFC.

“I think we’re all just a little bit crazy, to be honest,” she told me. “We all have something deep-rooted inside of us that enjoys getting punched in the face or punching other people in the face.”

Now, at the end, as every woman I interviewed privately broke into tears on that patio after the same question — “How’re you doing?” — there was no détente, no regret, no way could this have gone differently. There was just a bunch of women, either crazy from the start or made crazy by these circumstances, who all felt very entitled to their behavior and their justifications.

All athletics require some sort of aggression to win, but despite how often I was corrected when I called someone a fighter — “Please, they’re athletes” — that’s just part of a fiction that MMA has created that cage fighting is not fighting at all: It’s sport, like soccer or squash. “Martial arts is all about discipline,” people tell me, and encourage me to enroll my young sons in karate. But when people talk about it as discipline and sport, they’re depriving MMA of its true nature, which is to cause someone pain until they are either unconscious or unwilling to endure any more.

When it gets to the ground, where most MMA fights end up, cage fighting looks more like a lovely Mummenschanz than anything else: strange, slow movements, intimate embrace, arms and legs intertwined, squeezing. It looks like love, to see a woman with a leg wrapped around her neck have a hand delicately adjacent to the other ankle of her aggressor, caressing it inadvertently from time to time. It’s almost elegant until you see the faces up close, what pain is being withstood. When you first see it it fills you — me — with a panic: Won’t anyone stop this? That panic wears away sooner than you think or hope it will and eventually you are someone who could casually check your phone while the pain is being experienced really close by in your proximity. You — I — glance up from time to reaffirm that the pain is still going on, stopping to admire that there might be something about being so involved and so focused before attending back to your phone. It makes you — me — wonder when the last time you were so wrapped up and focused in something, when was the last time you were so physical and full of your own body like that. The utter biology of it is striking, the pounding so frequent that your ears can’t even keep their shape, and still you would want this. Pain might be a part of other sports. But I have watched these fights closely enough to have fighter sweat and spit on my face. Here, pain is the goal.

And who is to say that they’re wrong? Who is to say that it is me who is using my body correctly — me, sitting there, lumpen, eating room-service steaks at Caesars as I hunch over a keyboard for the ninth hour of a day and try to get 5,000 steps from my Fitbit, getting unsolicited diet hints from female fighters, who genuinely seem to want to help me. Who is to say that I should not be wrapping legs and arms around necks and waists, absorbing another woman into my pores, as an expression of how alive I am? Who is to say that I shouldn’t be devoting more time to hydration, that maybe it is at my wateriest that I will be at my finest? Who of us knows what a body is for in the first place anyway?

I will tell you this: After watching a full card of bouts during International Fight Week, I went back to my hotel and stood in an elevator on an endless ride with a woman who was applying her lipstick, readying herself for her night to begin, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what it might be like to punch her in her fucking face.

International Fight Week ended on a Saturday night, and very, very slowly, through many undercard fights, the Mandalay Bay arena filled.

Earlier that day at the expo, which had been erected for vendors selling ice and warm packs in the shape of a face, with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, and Topps cards that featured UFC fighters, I found myself at a booth for a T-shirt company called Jesus Didn’t Tap. But Jesus was never put in an armbar, or a flying armbar, or a rear naked choke, was he? He was never flipped on his back, his trachea being crushed because someone forgot to put a rule in about that. I asked the man at the booth if maybe Jesus, whom I’m not that familiar with, an Old Testament type am I, would have approved of all of this. Then again, Jesus’ death was gruesome. Maybe Jesus should have tapped?

“Think of it this way,” the man told me. “A lot of these people have a violence in them. This gives them the opportunity to channel it into something productive.” Agree to disagree on what productive means, but I see the point. Someone handed me a sample of TapouT, which I tried in a flavor I didn’t recognize but whose color was MRI green, and I quickly sought and found a bottle of trusty old NOS — now in new Carburetor! — to burn the layer of my mouth off that had been affected.

I met a middle-aged woman who wore a message shirt that said, “I’m the boss, that’s who,” attended by her two grade-school-aged sons. I asked her if she was concerned about exposing them to such violence, how perhaps there was a connection between all of this and, say, adult crime. She couldn’t hear my question because in back of her, an expo cage that featured two men with calf tattoos (in this story, there are always calf tattoos) had just had some sort of Big Event happen and people said, “OOOOOOF!” I repeated the question and she regarded me with disgust.

“No, this is about discipline and learning. This isn’t violence. This is a sport.”

She picked up her kids’ hands like now I was some sort of threat and sneered at me and my implications and walked away quickly because she’s the boss, that’s who.

And finally, it was time for fight night. There are many kinds of women in the UFC universe. There are the fighters, who hydrate and starve and carb. There are executives, who are smart and funny and interesting and are tired of being told they work in a misogynistic sport. But some of my favorite are the Octagon girls, who are grown, spray-tanned, short-shorted women who hold up cards and walk around the cage between rounds, around and around, never quite getting anywhere but where they started. Cageside they are tended to by a glamorous woman older than they are; in my memory she licks them the way a mother deer licks her daughters. Between rounds, the undercard fighters gripped the cage, leaning on it, panting and sweating and spitting, and one of the three golden Octagon girls walked by holding a card and if you’d just landed on the planet you wouldn’t believe that they were the same species.

There, in the big arena, at a moment when the TUF girls were still getting acquainted, their role model Ronda Rousey met poor Alexis Davis in the cage. The other day, poor Alexis Davis, in her platform sandals and flat-ironed hair and a green pedicure, her biceps filling her tie-dyed shirt, had told reporters that she was “being herself, enjoying the fight,” when maybe her goal should have been just to win the fight, not enjoy it so much, not so much be herself as be someone who could beat Ronda Rousey. Poor Alexis Davis has chosen for her walkout song “Royals” by Lorde, and when she entered the arena, she was walking slowly, all Zen, bobbing her head and smiling.

Ronda, of course, entered to “Bad Reputation,” as she always does, scrunched-up angry Zellweger face, black hoodie up around her face, pounding into the arena, where the fuck is she, let me at her. Ronda got into the cage and bounced up and down like an ape in captivity who sees prey but knows she can’t yet have it. She wore little buns in her hair that looked like antennae, which made her all the more incongruously adorable.

The referee let the fight begin, and there were about 10 seconds of striking. Ronda’s never been a great striker, but she’s evolved to the point where she can take a great striker down, and when she did, that’s when Ronda held poor Alexis head in the crook of her arm and just punched away, wham wham wham wham, no mercy, no acknowledgement of humanity, no wondering if this is what we were given bodies for, to hurt them, to break them, to test their limits. She kept going until a referee stopped her, since she herself had no notion of when too much pain was too much pain.

In a flurry of tragic torso tattoos, it was over, a 16-second fight that was later distilled in full to a gif that is somewhere on the internet still playing over and over and over. Ronda got up and poor Alexis, knocked out, gripped Ronda’s waist out of some horrible survival reflex. Ronda shooed her away and threw her arms up in victory and cried, Alexis being roused like “Huh? What happened?” Dana, in the Octagon to rebelt Ronda, looked at me through the cage and mouthed these words: “Holy shit.”

At the press conference following the fight, poor Alexis Davis was puffy from being beaten in the face, but also perhaps from crying. She looked bewildered, perhaps violated by the fact that we all knew what had been done to her and she had somewhere along the line lost consciousness. Or maybe she was just as confused as any of us: This isn’t how this is supposed to play out. Ronda Rousey is the Billy Zabka character, not the wholesome Daniel-san that we all are, that poor Alexis thought she was. Billy doesn’t win. And yet, here we are.

It was maybe then that Alexis learned the thing that makes you a true women’s UFC fighter. That this isn’t a sports movie, and the good guys don’t win however much we want them to, just the strong ones do, just the ones who want it the most, whatever that means. She learned what Angela knows, which is that there will always be favor toward those who scream to be heard, and that when you are heard, you’d better be appealing to everyone’s worst sides so that at least they’ll remember you. And maybe finally poor Alexis learned what Rose knows, which is that this isn’t just a sport like any, this is a place for fucked-up people to play out their fucked-up anguish. Yes, poor Alexis learned what all the beautiful, strong women of TUF 20 know now, which is that the entire show is a false construct. Despite your team and your flag and your coaches and your boyfriend and your contract and your body-fat percentage and your Squor followers, despite all that, when you get into that cage you are on your own. In the UFC, no matter how much you want it, you are totally and utterly alone.

But what are you going to do? The girls are crazy, after all. I took a drink of water, and a yellow-gold woman in a bikini lifted up a card, hoisted it high over her head, and set out to take another lap around the cage.

This story was written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, edited by Mark Lotto, fact-checked by Emily Loftis, and copy-edited by Lawrence Levi, with photo-illustrations by Devin Washburn.

Image sources, from top: Composite 1: John Locher/AP; Image Source/Getty. Animation 1: Jeff Bottari/Getty. Composite 2: Adrianna Williams/Corbis; Jupiterimages/Getty. Animation 2–5: Josh Hedges/Getty. Composite 3: John Rensten/Corbis; Kallista Images/Getty. Composite 4: Andreas Kuehn/Getty; Jupiterimages/Getty. Composite 5: Jonathan Knowles/Getty; John Rensten/Corbis.