How I Fell Madly In Lust With My Husband

by Susan Shapiro

Mild, metrosexual men have never done it for me. Maybe it was because my father grew up a Lower East Side street kid who, my mother used to brag, would have been a gangster had she not put him through medical school in the Midwest. Her favorite photograph of him is when he was 16, wearing a black leather jacket, smoking an unfiltered cigarette and looking handsome and menacing. I wondered if she’d cursed me to a life of cads. Then there were my three big, tough brothers, known for yelling “switch to tackle” before landing on top of me in the middle of a touch football game on our lawn. Not surprisingly, I turned into a loudmouth tomboy unafraid to compete with the guys and stick up for myself. When I introduced my junior high best friend, Claire, to a sweet fellow student who’d asked me out, she whispered, “Are you kidding? You have more testosterone than he does.”

At 15, I met David, a wife-beater-wearing, Marlboro-smoking, self-styled James Dean. He was obnoxious and aggressive—even anti-romantic—calling me an “old sea hag,” with “violent eyes” and “breeder’s hips.” When we made out, he rubbed his hands all over me and said his father owned a meat-packing plant where he worked in the summertime, so he was used to slinging sides of beef. Bored by polite West Bloomfield boys who’d ask permission before kissing me, I was a goner. The fact that we were at a B’nai Brith camp convention where I was president of my chapter, and he was a straight A pre-med student from a well-off Ontario family, was incidental. He correctly surmised that since I was such a powerful type-A personality used to being in charge, I needed an arena where I could loosen up and let someone else call the shots. Six turbulent years later it ended in (predictable) disaster after he slept with not one but two of my close girlfriends.

Brad, my first gentile (and thus taboo) bedmate, was also virile and buff; he’d hold me down in bed, talk dirty, and take what he wanted. I assumed all girls went mad for he-men. After all, every bodice-ripping R-rated movie, soap opera and Harlequin romance showed a John Wayne action hero taming the shrew. I saw myself as a tough-talking, chain-smoking femme fatale, albeit from a tony Detroit suburb.

Eventually, I wound up in Manhattan in grad school, where I hung out with a crowd of left-wing, liberal, independent career women. I feared that confessing my craving for being dominated by macho men in bed would mean I’d have to revoke my credentials as a serious, intellectual feminist, so I simply decided to keep quiet about my sexual predilections.