MY husband has a crush on another woman.

I find this threatening, but not because she's 25, or blonde, or happily poses with few clothes on to show off her perfect body. It's nothing to do with her enormous career success, or the fact that she's about to smash a glass ceiling for women in sport.

It's because she likes to break other women's arms.

Ronda Rousey is the first woman to be admitted to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the corporate empire that all but owns the multi-billion-dollar sport of mixed martial arts. She is a brassy trash-talker who usually beats her opponents in the first round with an "armbar", a judo technique that involves bending the arm back to the point of snapping (she has not actually snapped one).

This is a woman who wants to beat up "glorified porn star" Kim Kardashian because she's a bad role model for women, and who sledged swimmer Michael Phelps for his preciousness at the Olympics, where she represented the United States in judo. "All you do is swim," she said. "If someone slapped you every single time you jumped in the pool, I'd have a little more respect."

She's not quite the kind of woman I'd have expected my husband to fancy, and mixed martial arts is not exactly the kind of sport. Sometimes, when I see two people punching, wrestling and trying to pull each other's limbs off, with blood all over the canvas and awful tattoos across their backs, I wish I was one of those women who complain about their partner watching too much rugby.

But the reality is mixed martial arts is here to stay, and not just in my lounge room. Turns out my cousins love it, too. So does my personal trainer. Every teenaged boy I know is a fan, and I heard two middle-aged men in suits discussing it over macchiatos last week. Visiting a juvenile detention facility recently, a young offender had a poster of Rousey on his wall.

It's not just huge in Australia and the US, where it is nipping at the heels of the "big three" sports, gridiron, basketball and baseball. It's also massive in South America and China. As boxing continues to weaken, MMA gets stronger.

So, as it became clear I could not avoid the UFC, I decided to try to understand it. And turns out I even found a little crush of my own.

I can reassure worried wives, girlfriends and mothers that UFC is not as brutal as it looks. Yes, there's often blood from cuts. And yes, fighters emerge from five rounds looking like they've been caught between a train and a truck. But serious injuries are rare (in 17 years of UFC, the worst injury has been a broken arm, a spokesman says) and the bloodthirstiness is more hype than reality. I have more often been bored than repelled.

When it comes to death and brain injury, your loved one would be safer in a mixed martial arts fight than on the rugby field.

Those willing to invest a bit of time might even get interested despite themselves. UFC bosses understand marketing, and have a massive budget to spend on it (the company is said to be worth $2 billion). They know - as too few sporting bosses in Australia do - that sport is as much about human drama as what actually happens during game time, and they do their best to create it.

Many of the characters are larger than life; one is almost a parody of himself, a fighter and occasional Hollywood action hero who wears a chain and howls at the moon. Unusually for the US, many are also non-English speakers - many of the sport's biggest champions are from South America. There are a few fighters from Australia, although none is terribly successful.

One of the UFC's marketing lines is that the fighters are modern-day warriors. They are pitched as brave heroes willing to put themselves on the line for honour (that element is exploited by the US marines, which sponsors the sport in America).

These lofty ideals are a long way from the street fighter thuggery many people associate with mixed martial arts. Street fighting definitely taints the sport's image, but the corporate behemoth that is the UFC has done its utmost to distance itself. The good guys, the humble, brave, gracious ones, are lauded and the bad guys, the rule-breakers, excuse-makers and trash talkers, become villains, in a kind of Star Wars-style battle between good and evil.

Which brings me to my personal crush. The ultimate goodie in the UFC is a French Canadian called Georges St Pierre, or GSP. He is calm and thoughtful, rather like a Jedi master. He's all humility and honour and handsomeness. "People often say, 'Ah, ultimate fighting is so violent,' but it's rooted in martial arts," St Pierre once said in his sexy Quebecois accent. "Martial arts incarnate respect."

Unfortunately handsome zen masters such as Georges St Pierre are not the norm; fighters and fans can be a little rough around the edges. I went to a fight in Sydney last year - its tickets were the fastest-selling in the history of the UFC, they sold out in 22 minutes - and felt many in the crowd could have done with a little less time paying tribute to their heroes at the tattoo parlour and a little more time emulating them at the gym. But it was a diverse crowd; among the macho Gen Y lads in Tapout T-shirts (the merchandiser of choice) there were middle-aged businessmen, stylish young women, and couples, like us, enjoying the theatre of it all.

It wasn't a particularly female-friendly environment - the macho crowd didn't mind a good perv at the card girls, for example, (a similar leer at Rousey would result in a punch in the head). Nevertheless, the sport is attracting female fans; the roll-call of female celebrities that have attended fights in the US includes model Cindy Crawford, actress Mandy Moore and Australia's Sophie Monk.

The organisation is also about to strike a blow for women's rights, although not one that would appeal to every feminist.

After declaring last year that women would never fight in the UFC, it has now bowed to Rousey's enormous popularity and signed her. So confident is it of her appeal, she is also likely to be the headline act on a Pay-Per-View event early next year, meaning the UFC expects she will be able to draw the tens of millions of viewers around the world that typically watch a main event fight. Her winnings plus her popularity with sponsors put her among the most highly paid sportswomen in the world. Of course, there's still controversy about women fighting at all, even in the US, which has shown female boxing events on Pay-Per-View for years (Australia is much more conservative - NSW only recently agreed to let women box and mixed martial arts fights are still banned altogether in Victoria). Some male fighters have questioned women's introduction; St Pierre says he has "a hard time watching girls fighting". Marshall Zelaznik, the UFC's managing director of international development, dismisses the criticism: "Is it a place where you would expect to see women? Depending on how forward thinking you are, yes."

Most of those who watch Rousey's first fight will be men, but they'll be there because they like her style of combat, not just because she's attractive. "I think she's got a level of grittiness and aggressiveness in her style that appeals to fans of combat sport," Zelaznik says. "Ronda is a big star in the US. She definitely has something inside her that switches and she turns into one of the most aggressive fighters in the sport."

With hundreds of thousands of men thinking as my husband does, I can hardly begrudge him his crush. (I'm also comforted by the fact Rousey would make mincemeat of him within seconds.) I must admit, I'm warming to Rousey, too. She might like to solve problems with a belting, but she's courageous, and a pioneer.For my part, I haven't quite become a fan of UFC, although I have begun to understand it. I'll continue to read a book while it's on television in our house, but I'll put the book down for Rousey and St Pierre.

Follow Jordan Baker on Twitter @jordsbaker