The Ladies’ Room

By Aliya Hollub

2023 · Revised 2026

Folded into a stadium seat, I try to make five feet of woman less obstructive.

At the center of the Octagon, blood collects over the neon-green Monster logo. A man dressed entirely in black crosses the cage with a mop, dragging it into a wider, paler smear. The gray strands come up pink at the tips.

Thousands of men scream.

This helps. My anxiety needs a little quiet to get organized, and here it never gets the chance.

“I’m gonna get a drink,” I tell my boyfriend.

“Better hurry.”

I make it one step before he catches me by a belt loop and pulls me backward.

Finally. He sees me. He knows I’m scared.

He slides his cobalt-blue Chase card into my back pocket.

“Get me something too.”

We have split every meal for two years. This building has had him for forty minutes.

I turn sideways and shimmy toward the aisle. One by one, each man in our row gets a few seconds of my curls instead of the fight. At this point, the only untamed thing about me.

“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

In the concourse, I see her.

A circle balanced on a triangle.

The universal woman.

No face. No hands. No feet, really. Just a head and a dress.

I follow her.

Around the corner, I go wide, bracing for the line.

There isn’t one.

I don’t even have to pee, but an empty women’s bathroom in a sold-out arena feels like a loophole. It would be stupid not to use it.

Inside, a woman has both hands down the front of her dress. She lifts one breast, then the other, studies the result, and does it again. Beside her, another woman bares her teeth at the mirror and scrapes a streak of mauve lipstick off an incisor with her pinkie.

I look at the woman on the door.

She has been a woman for decades without so much as a pore.

I go into a stall.

I still don’t have to pee.

I pee anyway.

Outside, a line has formed. I get behind the last man.

I sneeze, a full-body production that somehow leaves my mouth as the squeak of a dog toy. Several men turn around. One keeps looking.

“What are you doing here?”

“What, girls can’t buy beer?”

He points toward the front of the line.

“This is the bathroom line.”

I look again.

I have never seen a men’s bathroom line. I wasn’t entirely sure men waited for bathrooms. I had assumed they simply approached one and entered, like elevators. The women’s bathroom line, meanwhile, had always seemed less like a design flaw than biological destiny.

But here they are. Hundreds of men with full bladders, shifting from foot to foot like little boys who waited too long to tell their mothers.

I feel fantastic.

I step out of line. The bar is to the left.

I go right.

Past the men’s room. Past the entire line.

Slowly.

A few of them look at me.

I let them.

For once, the triangle is getting me somewhere faster.

Then I double back for the beers.

When I return, two surprisingly slight men are entering the Octagon.

“Those are the fighters?”

“They’re featherweights.”

I nod as if this clears things up.

Between rounds, a woman in a bikini enters holding a card above her head. She has the tan of a woman who schedules it. She walks the perimeter of the cage, smiling in every direction.

I watch the entire lap.

I could not tell you who is winning.

I think, briefly and correctly, that this is degrading.

Then I think about her arms.

I wonder what she does for them.

She finishes the lap and covers herself immediately. Not one second on display longer than she is paid for.

I admire the precision.

If a room full of men is going to look at you, there should at least be a clock running.

The featherweights start hitting each other again.

I learn the rules mostly by watching the men around me. A fist lands; they stand. Someone goes down; they lean forward. Thirty seconds pass without visible damage and somebody starts booing.

My boyfriend tries to explain grappling.

I watch a man press another man’s face into the floor.

“Got it,” I say.

Two fights later, two women walk toward the cage.

“Finally,” my boyfriend says. “Something for you.”

Lauren “Lucky” Murphy and Miesha “Cupcake” Tate.

I choose Cupcake immediately.

Long highlighted hair. Clear skin. Tiny waist. A nickname you could frost.

Before the fight, Cupcake bends toward a little girl at the rail and kisses her.

I look around for the girl’s mother.

Cupcake is the mother.

This bothers me immediately.

She brought her daughter here?

To watch this?

The bell rings.

“Come on, Cupcake!”

Lucky hits her.

“Come on, Cupcake!”

Cupcake lands one.

I am on my feet.

My concern for the child has lasted approximately thirty seconds.

Soon, though, I stop watching Cupcake.

I watch the little girl watch her mother.

Her mother gets hit.

The girl watches.

Her mother hits back.

The girl watches that too.

A male fighter kisses his daughter before climbing into a cage and it is tender. Look what he’s fighting for.

A mother does it and my first instinct is to locate another woman.

Who is taking care of the child?

It does not occur to me until then that the answer might be the woman getting punched in the face.

I can’t decide what I want the girl protected from.

Seeing her mother hurt?

Seeing her mother hurt someone?

Learning that mothers can bleed?

Learning that they can make other people bleed?

Maybe I just don’t like motherhood and violence occupying the same body.

The men behind me are deciding which woman they’d rather fuck.

I’m deciding which woman I’d rather be.

Which is obviously much more evolved.

Lucky wins.

Between fights, the woman with the card comes back.

Except she doesn’t.

The first woman is still sitting beside the cage in a robe.

I look at her.

Then at the woman holding the card.

Back at her.

Oh.

There are two.

I had filed them both under Bikini.

The second woman finishes her lap and puts on her robe.

The men start hitting each other again.

By the main event, the men beside us have put a thousand dollars on Brian Ortega. They tell my boyfriend this with the relaxed confidence of men discussing money they assume they will see again.

The fight can last five rounds.

It lasts four minutes and eleven seconds.

Yair Rodriguez catches Ortega’s arm. Ortega pulls free and his shoulder comes out. The referee stops the fight.

For one second, the arena is silent.

Then the booing starts.

Nothing has landed. They are standing.

Brian Ortega’s shoulder is no longer where shoulders traditionally go.

The men beside us have lost their thousand dollars.

Nobody mentions the shoulder.

All afternoon, the men around me have seemed to know exactly when pain counts. They know which punch matters, which hold is dangerous, which body part has bent farther than it should.

Now a shoulder has left its assigned location and somehow this does not qualify.

Rodriguez stops hitting Ortega before the referee reaches them.

It is the gentlest thing I have seen all day.

My boyfriend reaches for my hand.

I think he wants to leave.

Then I look at him.

A tear has made it halfway down his cheek.

In two years together, I have seen him cry once before, when a relative died.

I look back at the cage.

Ortega is holding his arm against his body. Rodriguez is waiting nearby. Thousands of men are booing because the violence has ended too soon.

My boyfriend squeezes my hand.

I don’t ask him why he’s crying.