Bad boy

The bad boy is a cultural archetype, similar to the historic term "rake" or "cad", of a male who behaves badly, especially towards women.

Being a promiscuous rogue may be as successful a reproductive strategy as the strategy of being a reliable provider. Evolutionary psychologist Professor Bill von Hippel claims that women are especially attracted to such bad boys when they are ovulating.^[1] According to an article in The Independent, there is a "dark triad" of personality traits associated with naturally occurring 'bad boys', consisting of narcissism, thrill-seeking, and deceitfulness. The publication observed a correlation between the 'bad boy' archetype and psychopathy.^[2]

Postfeminism

Postfeminists tend to acknowledge (part ruefully, part boastfully) the allure of the bad boy - of 'the irrestible rogue who has the dizzying ability to drive women wild' - and of their 'laissez-faire attitude about life and love'.^[3] Sex-positive feminism, insisting that 'we [are] meant to take what we want from the twenty-first century's kinky candyshop of sex', still accept that at the end of the day many will 'prefer bad and debased over naughty but nice'.^[4]

Some have sought an explanation for such choices in the psychological mechanism of splitting: 'Women tend to split off their detested parts like hate, envy, and bad-girl aspects', so that 'bad-girl parts stay behind closed doors, only to come out to play with bad-boy lovers'.^[5] There is then 'a split between love for men they see as good, dependable and reliable, and desire for men they see as exciting, reckless, and dangerous...bad boys'.^[6]

The choice of the cad may thus be linked to what Freud described as the way 'the curb put upon love by civilization involves a universal tendency to debase sexual objects'.^[7] The reason for what women experience as a tendency to 'split love and desire'^[8] is, in Lacanian terms, 'to be sought rather in some impasse that is constitutive of desire itself';^[9] and the fact that 'women often have bad taste in men (as men in women)'^[10] would seem rooted in a perennial facet of the human condition.

Romantic fiction

The bad boy is a common archetype in romance novels.^[11]

The lure for the reader (as heroine) has been described as 'the challenge!....She has a chance to become a thrill seeker, but can maintain her "good girl" status by saving the hero from himself'.^[12]

See also

• Rake (character)
• Psychopathy

References