A Wench’s Monday Blog: The Fatal Allure of Bad and Therefore Exciting Men

The Bad-Man Syndrome

I can’t help thinking girly thoughts from time to time. And an age-old girly cliché has recently cropped up in connection with someone I hold very dear. Could someone please give me the definitive answer to the question:

‘Why do nice girls fall for bad boys?’

I’m not talking here about hybristophilia, where women in their idiotic droves offer marriage to serial killers but, rather, the allure of the bad boy image. Why was it so believable that the Fonz got more action than Richie Cunningham (Happy Days)? Why did Spike have a bigger fan base than Xander (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)? Do boys engage in deviant behaviour because they believe that it makes them look cooler in the eyes of girls and, thus, more likely to get laid?

Are these just frivolous cultural tropes that have no place in any serious criminological discussion?

Believe it or not, some serious scholarship has gone into an analysis of Spike-appeal (thank heavens I’m not alone in my sad girlyness). Milly Williamson (2005) concludes that it is ‘Spike’s sympathetic, pathos-ridden existence’ and ‘the subcultural reading of the ‘cool bad boy’ vampire as signifying hidden suffering’ that draws such a strong empathic reaction. Hmm, I’m not so sure. There is currently a fierce debate in cyberspace about the relative ‘hotness’ of vampire private investigators, Angel and Mick St John (that's him on the right) – I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about pathos versus Eros.

My 17 year old niece has fallen for someone that her parents think is totally unsuitable.

I was called upon, as an additional stodgy adult voice, to explain to her why (despite all the mistakes my generation made at her age) we want her to drop the boy and focus on her studies.

“It’s because we love you and we want you to have everything; we don’t want you to limit your choices now by getting tied down with some guy” was my first rather feeble attempt. I could tell that she wasn’t convinced. I tried scare tactics instead:

“Look ... we’ve got a duty to get you through these next few years – they’re the most dangerous of your life”.

“Oh, yes, why is that?”, she enquired politely.

“Because you want the freedom, but you don’t have the experience to back it up. We just want to keep the boys alive. You never knew your Uncle Philip – he died at 17 on a motorbike that he shouldn’t have been riding. But as a girl, we’re most scared that you are going to get pregnant”.

All of this had the advantage of being the truth.

But it really got me thinking. What she wanted to do (and what we didn’t want her to do) was the most natural thing in the world.

It seems so strange that we pathologise teenage pregnancy. In fact, the so-called deviant behaviour of some boys reminds me of nothing so much as a mating display. But this is something that research is oddly silent about.

I went on a brief hunt for scholarly articles about human mate selection and deviant behaviour as an extreme form of display. I found only a very few suggestive pieces. Xie et al (2006: 608) tell us that the older children get, the more accepting they are of aggression and deviance; they also found that girls were ‘more acute observers of social status and peer relations in the network’. Kierkus (2008: 3158) felt that there ‘was evidence that sexual activity may be the key risk factor [for delinquency] for males, while mixed gender peer relationships are most salient for females’.

In other words, boys may be motivated to get into trouble by sex and girls may be more highly motivated by pecking order. Boys are busy displaying and girls are busy judging.

I wonder what chemicals are released in the brain of a male bird of paradise to reward it for shaking its tail feathers. Are they the same that are released when a young male human is actively engaged in reckless thrill-seeking behaviour?

Are we handicapped by a religious heritage that insists we are made in God’s image, denying our animal nature as blasphemy?

I had better stop here, now that I have offended all the major religions and every feminist I ever knew.

a Wench

References:

Kierkus, C.A. (2008) ‘Bad influences? Developing an understanding of the link between opposite sex relationships and delinquency, during the adolescent development period’, Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 68(7-A): 3158.

Williamson, M. (2005) ‘Spike, sex and subtext: Intertextual portrayals of the sympathetic vampire on cult television’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8: 289.

Xie, H., Li, Y., Boucher, S.M., Hutchins, B.C. and Cairns, B.D. (2006) ‘What Makes a Girl (or a Boy) Popular (or Unpopular)? African American Children’s Perceptions and Developmental Differences’, Developmental Psychology, 42(4): 599-612.