According to Netflix, 74 million viewers worldwide watched Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano’s rematch last November. The two fighters reportedly made more than $14 million combined for the bout.

From the audience size to the paychecks to the pure thrills – Taylor-Serrano II was the most entertaining women’s scrap since, well, Taylor-Serrano I – that rematch last fall in Arlington, Texas represented the apex moment in the history of women’s boxing.

At least so far.

Taylor and Serrano are fighting for a third time on July 11, again on Netflix, at Madison Square Garden, site of their first fight, headlining an all-women’s card instead of playing warm-up to Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. By the time Taylor-Serrano III is over, women’s boxing may have a new moment to identify as its peak.

It’s not only Taylor and Serrano making this era stand out, of course.

This Saturday night, Mikaela Mayer-Sandy Ryan II is the headliner on an ESPN card, the two ladies ring-walking following a major men’s title fight that has been relegated to co-feature status.

Pound-for-pound queen Claressa Shields is running around calling herself the Greatest Woman of All-Time, and within the boxing sphere, there’s little disputing that she is just that.

We are, without question, living through the golden age (so far) of women’s boxing. And we should enjoy this moment. We should celebrate it.

But we should also be wary of what the future holds.

It’s something nobody wants to think about, but those first two Taylor-Serrano fights delivered as much two-way brutality as any major women’s boxing match ever. There is a price they may both eventually pay for the way they’ve entertained fans, elevated their sport, and ballooned their bank accounts.

There is a chance – a realistic chance given the number of rounds they’ve each fought and the heart they’ve shown along the way – that we someday look on in horror, in shame, in plain sadness over the damage they did to each other.

Elsewhere in women’s boxing, it’s already started. Last December, recently retired Heather Hardy said in an interview, “I’m the First Lady of brain damage.”

Since her career ended with a brutal loss to Serrano in August 2023, when Hardy was 41 years old and badly overmatched, she’s spoken with several journalists about her “dead brain” and vision problems. Boxing didn’t necessarily cause all of it – Hardy also absorbed shots in MMA and has acknowledged an affinity for alcohol – but she still stands out as a once-prominent female boxer who was left in a diminished state. She exists as a foreboding glimpse at what may become more common when this wave of elite women’s boxers retires.

And Hardy can’t say she didn’t see it coming. All the way back in 2012, she said in an interview with New York Public Radio regarding spending time at Brooklyn’s Gleason’s Gym, “I see these punchy boxers come in all day – can’t talk, their speech is slurred. And it’s not because anything other than they’ve been hit in the head too much.”

Hardy was talking about seeing punchy men at the gym. That’s a sight boxing fans have, unfortunately, grown used to. Not comfortable with, necessarily, but somewhat conditioned to accept.

The question is whether society is going to react more harshly when it sees women walking on their heels and hears them slurring their words.

“I remember Muhammad Ali, he came to England to Ricky Hatton’s gym [in 2012], and the feeling, seeing him in his condition, it was just so awful,” recalled British boxing pioneer Jane Couch, a 2024 inductee of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. “If that was a woman, you would probably feel 10 times worse. Especially men would feel that way, because a man’s thing is to protect a woman, isn’t it? It’s just as bad for a man to have brain damage as it is for a woman, of course. But a lot of people would be much more uncomfortable, I think, seeing a woman like that.”

And boxing is not exactly approaching this likely looming era from a position of power. The sport already had countless strikes against it long before anyone was claiming to be “the First Lady of brain damage.”

As Dr. Nitin Sethi, a board certified neurologist, certified ringside physician, and the chief medical officer of the New York State Athletic Commission, said, “I tell this to every ringside physician I talk to: You cannot defend boxing if you’re a responsible physician. It is not good for the brain, whether you’re male or female, adult or child. You may want to defend boxing by saying it’s great for athleticism, for keeping someone off the streets, or building character, and I completely agree with all that. But we all have to understand that boxing is not good for the brain.

“Boxing is a niche sport, and the reason it’s a niche sport is because we also have to acknowledge that a lot of people find boxing repulsive. Your wife or your girlfriend might have no interest in boxing and might say, ‘I don’t know what you see in this.’ My expertise is not in the societal aspects of this, but it’s a significant thing to consider — whether society’s view of women boxers struggling with chronic neurological injuries would differ from how they view a male boxer.”

The sport itself treats women differently from men in two significant ways (not counting vast differences in the pay scale, multi-millionaires Serrano and Taylor aside): female Olympic boxers still wear headgear whereas male Olympians do not; and, with occasional exceptions, professional women box two-minute rounds, one minute shorter than the men’s rounds.

Headgear and round length are each topics that have been debated for many years.

There are studies and hypotheses that suggest headgear does not make boxing any safer, and its only real benefit lies in diminishing the chance of suffering cuts.

As for shorter rounds, yes, they lead to fewer KOs, but we all know it’s the prolonged beatings, not the quick knockouts, that tend to cause the most damage. So if women fought three-minute rounds and that resulted in more stoppages, that actually might translate to less punishment overall. On this topic, we could spin in a circle of points and counterpoints endlessly, as conflicting interests compete to see who can yell, “yeah, but” the loudest.

In the end, without conclusive evidence that shorter rounds are better for long-term health or that headgear is better for long-term health, one can’t help but wonder if these different rules exist purely for purposes of aesthetics. It looks like we’re being more careful with women, which is as important to some stewards of the sport as actually making it safer.

Then again, maybe the stewards of the sport do need to be more careful with women’s brains. As Scientific American wrote in 2021, “Studies from U.S. collegiate sports have shown that female athletes are 1.9 times more likely to develop a sports-related concussion than are their male contemporaries in comparable sports. … A review of 25 studies of sport-related concussion suggests that female athletes are not only more susceptible to concussion than are males, but also sustain more-severe concussions.”

There are all sorts of theories associated with this, including one cited by Connecticut’s Chief Ringside Physician Dr. Michael Schwartz, who wrote in the January 2021 edition of the Association of Ringside Physicians’ Journal of Combat Sports Medicine about studies suggesting higher estrogen levels could make a woman more concussion-prone — and where a fight falls in her menstrual cycle could alter her risk. Dr. Schwartz also repeated speculation that the thickness and strength of someone’s neck can impact their vulnerability to concussions, with women typically having smaller necks than men.

Notably, as it pertains to the round-length debate, Schwartz wrote that in MMA, “women fight a minimum of three (3) five-minute rounds while some even fight five (5) five-minute rounds. Thus far, anecdotal evidence suggests no obvious increase in concussion rates.”

In MMA, the length of the rounds is the same regardless of gender. That’s not the case in boxing, and Dr. Sethi says, “Let science give us the answer” – but notes we don’t have enough data yet to reach conclusions.

“There’s some data which shows the woman’s brain is more susceptible to head injury, more susceptible to a concussion than a man’s brain,” said Sethi. “But, solid data is missing, good control studies are missing.”

Sethi also pointed out that the long-term damage caused by boxing doesn’t get as much attention as the worst-case scenario that sometimes plays out in the very immediate term.

“We all care about when, unfortunately, a boxer dies in the ring because of a subdural hematoma, but what we also should be caring about are the long-term neurological insults which follow years of shots to the head. These boxers in their late 30s, early 40s, when they’re retiring, they’re having chronic headaches, chronic dizziness, chronic post-concussion syndrome, things like Parkinsonism, dementia, punch drunk syndrome, CTE. And the problem is that these things don’t come to light so often because they happen after the boxer has retired and nobody cares.”

The 56-year-old Couch last fought in 2007, so she’s nearly two decades into that post-boxing phase. She seems to have gotten out relatively healthy, but she’s plagued by worry and uncertainty.

“I’ve got arthritis in my spine, but mostly I’m not too bad – but you do get your down days,” she said. “Sometimes, I forget things. But then you think, well, anybody my age would forget things. Is it connected to the boxing? I don’t know. Would I be feeling these things anyway if I didn’t box? Or am I getting CTE? You do think about that when you retire.

“The thing is, I never really thought about it when I was fighting. You don’t want it to overtake your mind while you’re trying to make it in boxing. I sparred with men, because there was no women about.

“I once did an interview and I said, ‘Oh, I’d die for boxing.’ And probably at the time I would have. But now, I wouldn’t. I don’t know why I said that, because I wouldn’t. Once you know the dangers and you’ve met the people that are struggling, it’s just awful.”

Though she comes at it from a unique perspective as a Hall of Fame ex-fighter, Couch, just like everyone else watching – those who’ve taken punches and those who haven’t — marveled at the first two Taylor-Serrano fights.

“Amanda and Katie, they were really knocking lumps out of each other,” Couch said. “But if you said to both of them now, while they’re fighting, that they need to be worried about the future, they wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t have cared. I’d be like, ‘Well, it’s my choice and that’s what I want to do.’”

Indeed, in this golden age of women’s boxing, the fighters and the fans are living in the moment. For the boxers, it’s about soaking in the glory while you can, making the money – in the case of Serrano and Taylor, seven-figure purses they waited their whole careers for – while you can, and just hoping you get out before it’s too late.

And hoping it isn’t already too late for them.

Studies suggest women are more susceptible to concussions and brain damage than men; could we ever get to a point where the studies are so conclusive and so overwhelming that the support for women’s boxing erodes completely?

Men’s boxing has continued on in various forms for centuries, enduring despite frequent calls for the sport to be banned, so it’s hard to imagine women’s boxing ever going away entirely.

Perhaps, however, the greatest threat to women’s boxing will be when the day comes that we are all confronted with empirical evidence in the form of the female fighters who were once the best at what they did, who were once on top of the world, living as damaged ex-boxers.

We all hope they avoid this fate. But logic, and the long history of men doing this, dictate that some of them won’t.

And that will be complicated for a lot of people to process. People have certain gender norms in their minds, and punch-drunk women don’t align with anyone’s perception of “normal.”

Now is definitely not the time to knock women’s boxing. Now is the time to celebrate a sport in ascent, reaching new highs with every major fight. But now is also the time to begin to confront the potential aftermath. You’re always better off if you’re able to brace for impact. It’s the punches you don’t see coming that lay you out.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.