Bad boys

I recently found myself thinking about this trope. Do girls really prefer “bad boys”? What does that mean?

This question has come up twice in the last week in the context of the “father” part of my tagline, up above.

All my life, until… well, until “N” was born, I was a “good boy.” (You know, except for in my secret life, which was a whole ‘nother thing.) I was polite, respectful, egalitarian in all my dealings with women. I didn’t objectify, didn’t command. My first kiss followed my asking permission to kiss her. As did my second, third, fourth, and fifth.

I’ve been thinking about how to discuss this issue as a father with a son. My experience, as a good boy, was always that girls did prefer bad boys – and, in my mind, their badness was associated with two aspects of their interactions with girls: first, they had sex with them. And second, inevitably, they hurt them. Somehow, girls seemed to prefer these boys, the ones who (inevitably) would hurt them, to me. And I, of course, would never hurt a girl.

With a little distance, a little maturity, I can see that I had this all wrong. The boys weren’t “bad.” And the reason they hurt the girls wasn’t because they were malevolent, or uncaring. Rather, it was because these boys became objects of desire for the girls. Dan Savage often says that every relationship we have fails until we have one that doesn’t. This is about right: one of the costs of indulging any sort of attraction is that, like everything else, it ultimately comes to an end. Unless it’s (literally) the one that doesn’t. Teen relationships and those in young adulthood? They all end in hurt. Not because the boys are bad (or because the girls are). But because they’re relationships. And they end.

But how did these boys get in the position to hurt so many girls? My closest friend growing up, whom I mentioned in this post, was one of those bad boys. For every girl I kissed between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, he kissed two. Or three. Or four. And the same ratio continued into young adulthood as the measures of dating “success” evolved. I certainly thought he was “bad,” that the girls’ preference of him reflected some sort of inexplicable shortcoming in the design of the universe. Was he better looking than I? Honestly, no. (Well, maybe a little, but not enough to explain our differing levels of success with girls.) But he had some sort of… chemical? pheromonal? appeal.

And EVERY girl he kissed? Ended up getting hurt. Sometimes multiple times.

Often, they’d come cry on my shoulder. Which was nice. I guess. We’d sit and commiserate – I’d comfort them, “Yes, he can be a dick,” I’d agree. And then? He might go back and re-visit the same girl, breaking her heart again. And she’d be back on my shoulder.

It just didn’t make sense to me. I was so clearly nicer.

But this is the thing: it wasn’t that he was a dick. It’s not that girls prefer “bad” boys. Rather, it’s that “niceness” isn’t sexy. Neither, incidentally, is badness, to girls or women who are healthy. What is sexy is a certain ruthlessness, a confidence in seeking what one wants, without (overmuch) reference to what s/he wants. For my first forty years, I believed that the sexiest thing I could do was to ask a woman what she wanted. It wasn’t until the last few years that I understood that this is dead wrong – the sexiest thing I can do is tell a woman what I want. Or even more, simply to take it (consensually, of course).

Girls don’t prefer bad boys; they prefer boys who know, and take, what they want. And inevitably, that results in pain…. But also? Pleasure.

Now…. how to explain this all to a little boy….

9 comments

  1. Thanks for saving some of us a few years before figuring it out.

    So, how did you learn to become “ruthless”?

    1. Years of suffering. But honestly, I wish someone had just TOLD me. Here’s the thing, though: ultimately, the way I’ve learned it is by having sex with people I don’t love. And, arguably, it’s STILL really fucking hard for me to be ruthless with T, whom I love. That’s the challenge: being ruthless with someone about whom you care deeply. I practiced a lot with women about whom I didn’t care all that much, or all that deeply, but it’s still hard with T.

  2. It is not that girls prefer bad boys. Cave woman, who lives in all women, looks automatically for the strongest meanest warrior she can find. Why/ Because he is supposed to be the strongest protector of herself as well as her offspring. Women will say that they want a man,. who is sensitive, nice,, Just like all those nice guy’s that you are. Then when they find them, they eventually will leave him , because most women still run on instinct, not knowledge. So, they will bypass the nice man, because warriors are not nice. This is also the reason why many women leave the men, they chased after in the beginning. You became the prey, and a prey can’t protect her.

  3. Can’t I have both?! Let me find a guy that can strike the balance between both. Oh wait, I’m not sure he exists.
    As a teen, I was never attracted to the “bad boys” at my school. Sure, all my girlfriends were but I was never interested. They were much too immature for me (the boys) and, well, I was more bothered about my studies than anything else. I always knew it would end in tears. One guy who was renowned in our year for getting up to no good used to tease me constantly. On one occasion he even physically hurt me in pulling a prank on me (of sors) though I don’t think he intended for me to get hurt. Stupid idiot haha. My Maths teacher at the time (whom I had a crush on) went ballistic when he saw what he had done. It was quite funny looking back now but I was truly humiliated back then.
    Anyway, it turns out that this guy fancied me throughout school and only a year after leaving secondary school (I went onto college, he went onto getting ASBO’s haha) he, in his own strange way, confessed he liked me over Facebook chat. He proposed that we should “make love”. Well, didn’t I just burst out laughing when I read what he had said. The bad boy, who broke so many girls hearts, slept around, wanted to make love to me. How bizarre?

    1. I would wager he didn’t want to make love to you. He wanted to fuck you. But he thought he was more likely to get to if he told you he wanted to make love. Just a guess….

      1. It’s probable that that was why he chose to put “make love” instead of “fuck”, or “shag” etc. But that was precisely why I laughed so much. It didn’t make sense to me that a guy like him, at the age he was at the time no less, wanted to make love — even if he was just saying it to stand a better chance at bedding me. Besides, no matter his choice of words, it wasn’t going to happen and I made that abundantly clear to him straight away.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.