All of them have described “bad boys” who are bad in the sense of being rebellious or unconventional, not abusive or otherwise morally “bad”. If your point is that some women like men who have long hair and tattoos and ride motorcyles then I’m not only in complete agreement, I beat you to saying it.
*I don’t believe anyone said that no woman in the history of womankind has ever liked a “bad boy”. I certainly didn’t. That gross oversimplification seems to be your own invention.
However, what this thread is also not about is one particular woman or a small group of women, but women in general. If we’re dealing with generalities here then I have to say that I do not believe it is true that women in general prefer men who are “bad” in the moral sense to men who are “good” in the moral sense. Many do prefer men who are “bad” in the rebellious motorcycle-riding sense, but that’s another issue. Men like that may be called “bad boys”, but they aren’t necessarily bad men.
*Of course women don’t like jerks. A woman might well like a man you think is a jerk, she might like a man who she doesn’t realize is a jerk, or she might even like a man who she believes can be a jerk sometimes, but if she thinks he is an unqualified jerk through and through then she doesn’t like him by definition. Claiming that women like jerks makes as much sense as saying women think ugly men are good-looking. Eye of the beholder, baby.
What kind of “bad boys” do they find attractive? I mean, there are so many ways to be bad. One man could be a drunk and a drug addict, but otherwise harmless and inoffensive; another could be a violent brute; another could be a rampant womanizer; another could be dishonest grifter or even a thief; another could be dishonest and manipulative in dealing with women, without ever breaking the law; and another could just be a lazy, useless parasite. (Hard to imagine any woman finding the last kind fascinating, but you never know.) And of course, a man could combine several different kinds of bad – but some are incompatible with others.
I thought the OP clearly defined what he meant by Bad Boys. All you have to do to find out what OP meant is to click on his cite, go frame by frame, and jot down the attributes of “Bad Boys” as it appears in each frame. There is no mention of the Bad Boys being drunk, drug addict, violent brute, rampant womanizer, dishonest, manipulative, lazy, useless parasite. These are YOUR attributes of a “Bad Boy” – not the OP’s.
Being one myself, I see nothing wrong with being a Bad Boy as defined by the OP.
I hope you are not just jealous that I’ve been getting all the hot chicks.
I find it hard to believe that any woman would want a bad boy – for his bad boyness. But apparently there are some attributes that bad boys have – according to previous posters: they’re good sexual performers, self assured, and fun at parties. I assume that a “good boy” who had these same attributes would be equally desired.
And, men don’t want to date sluts. We just want to date good-looking women who are willing to go to be with US quickly. It would be a huge bonus, in our eyes, if said women didn’t want to have sex with any other man.
Tangentally, was it just me, or was that like the worst “animated” presentation ever? The picture was identical frame to frame! And it was basically just a still picture. The only thing thing that was at all animated was the picture itself appearing and then the woman blinking. It was the same every time except for the one changing bit of text, but every time I clicked I still had to wait (I’m on dial-up) through the “loading” screen to see the same exact appear-and-blink I just saw.
But did you jot down anything after each frame? Yes. I mean the written text. Lamia, the attributes were the texts appearing on upper left hand corner of each frame. The animated picture is irrelevant to the issue. Obviously you missed the whole definition of “Bad Boys” as referred by the OP. You only concentrated on the blinking cartoon, thus missing the whole point.
Oh, you mean the “one changing bit of text” I mentioned in the post you’re replying to? Like pasunejen says, I saw it. Maybe you should concentrate a little more on paying attention to written text yourself before you worry about other people.
*The animated picture may not have a lot to do with the OP, but that would be why I prefaced my remark with “tangentally”. My post was about the piece of animation itself, which was stupid, pointless, boring, and poorly designed. There was no need to waste time and bandwidth by making it animated, since the only thing that moved were the woman’s eyelids.
This is relevant to the OP in that I don’t think we need to give much weight to “romantic insights” presented by people so dumb they couldn’t figure out that they’d accomplish the same goal more easily, more quickly, and more accessibly by combining a single still image with a list. It’s no surprise that, as the OP says, “Each reason is more asinine than the next”, because the whole thing was obviously put together by idiots.
Or maybe I’m just bitter because I’ve only got a dial-up connection.
I clicked the link – it seems to be saying good girls like boys who are “bad” only in the way they relate to women – guys who are self-assured to the point of being arrogant, and so full of testosterone that one women ain’t enough, and none too sensitive of a woman’s feelings.
Does anyone seriously disagree that a substantial minority of women go for bad men? Not all women, not even most. But a significant number. My guess is that, if a woman is afraid of or just not presently interested in true intimacy, a bad boy is the easiest way to go about avoiding it. If he’s neglecting you and you know the relationship has a life expectancy of a week and a half, you can avoid messy emotional entanglements. And it makes sense that youngish women would want to (and I’ve always rather liked the above evolutionary theory - isn’t that the “Sexy Son” theory? It provides a rather plausible explanation.)
Listen to what Indygrrl said. A lot of young women are not looking for stability, and emotional intimacy is probably unnecessary and unwanted if you have no thought to build a relationship with someone. Besides, they’re unpredictable and exciting. In the short term, when you’re 23, sometimes exciting beats reliable. Why is that a shock?
Granted, I’m a gay guy who watches hetero relationships the way some people watch nature shows on the Discovery Channel. (“Witness the strange mating rituals of the heterosexual. Will she accept his gift of a meal at a mid-range restaurant and domestic beer?”) But I’ve had my shoulder commandeered for lamenting over dead relationships more times than I can count. This is a pattern of behavior that exists. Some women stick with the emotionally unavailable types; some end up with abusers (one of my best friends left a relationship with a physically abusive alcoholic not all that long ago.) Sometimes people make bad decisions because their infatuation makes them blind to the other person’s characteristics. Other times they make perfectly reasonable decisions that just don’t match what an outsider things they oughta be doing.
Then there’s people who are strongly attracted specifically to evil men, but that’s another situation entirely . . .
I’m young (21) and have never been attracted to “bad boys.” Probably never will be either.
I like reliable, I like loyal…I don’t want a huge wussy, but I don’t want a jerk either. I want someone who wants ME, not just my girly bits - and I only go for monogamy. If a guy wants to date more than one woman at the same time, thats just fine - but I won’t get involved.
Apparently this makes dating really hard for me, but I won’t budge on my standings. This is also probably why I’m not particularly attracted to men my own age, and can’t help but prefer men who are a little too old for me.
For a given value of “bad”, then yes. But I think the point of this thread is that there’s a pretty wide spectrum of behavior that could be called “bad”. There’s a big difference between saying that women go for “bad boys” that, say, don’t remember their one-week anniversary (a specific example from the link) and saying that women go for “bad boys” that smack them around (as in the OP).
Do you think a substantial minority of women go for men who are outright abusive? Not that they’d be willing to tolerate abusive from their partner, but that they’d actually seek out a violent man for a relationship and prefer him to an otherwise similar man who didn’t beat them? Of course not. There may be a few really disturbed women like that, but not many.
*I don’t think a man who isn’t interested in a serious relationship is “bad” in any moral sense of the word, as long as he’s honest about it. If he tricked women into thinking he was interested in commitment just to get them in bed then that would be another matter, but if the woman knows the deal then there’s no problem. I believe what the OP is getting at is that a guy who is interested in sex-with-no-strings isn’t actually “bad” in any meaningful sense and shouldn’t be called a “bad boy” at all.
As for myself, I don’t see any problem with using the term “bad boy” to describe such men. I think most people understand what is meant. The “boy” is a diminutive and thus diminishes the implied badness. We don’t say that Charles Manson was a “bad boy”. If Merl Minnozza is looking for a way to distinguish between your guys that don’t call the next day and your abusive thugs then I think “bad boy” and “bad man” are fairly clear.
That’s true. We may be having some definitional problems here. “Bad boy” can mean anything from the Fonz to Ike Turner when different people use it. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with two people having a short term relationship if that’s what they’re into.
Are you familiar with the frequency of domestic violence? I don’t have any statistics off the top of my head, but some women seem to be drawn to jerks like moths to the proverbial flame, and a huge number of women have been in violent relationships. It’s not a conscious choice, granted, but I think some women just sort of intuitively identify abusers, and go for them. It’s particularly common in women whose families were violent. So no, I don’t think it’s incredibly rare for a woman to end up repeating the same scenario over and over.
But yeah, I think we may be addressing two entirely different situations at the same time in this thread. Not to mention all the times in which a “nice guy” decides some dude is a jerk just because he happens to get the girl. Still, I think you haven’t been paying attention if you don’t think that there’s women, and more than a few, who really do end up with jerks over and over and over.
I am familiar with the statistics, but what the statistics don’t tell you is how many of these women really want to be in abusive relationships. I’m guessing that number is close to zero, though.
*A scenario which may not have much to do with what she really wants. A woman from an abusive family might believe that domestic abuse is normal and to be expected, that she personally deserves to be abused, or that she has no chance of landing a man who isn’t abusive, without actually feeling that abuse is desirable.
This is why I attempted to make the distinction between “willing to tolerate abuse” and “desiring abuse to the extent that, all other things being equal, one would reject an non-abusive partner in favor of an abusive one”. Obviously a fair few women tolerate abuse, at least up to a certain degree. But the question in the subject line is asking what women really want. Not what they’ll accept, tolerate, or settle for, not what they’d consider preferable to being alone, not what they’d put up with until something better came along or they’d just had enough, but what they really want. I do not believe there can be more than a tiny number of women who genuinely and sincerely desire with all their hearts to be violently abused by their partners and would scorn any non-abusive suitor no matter how otherwise appealing he might be.
So you say that women don’t want to be in abusive relationships? I’ll grant that.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a good number of women that go for the bad boys, though. People sometimes enjoy the thrill of something with little or no consideration for the long-term consequences. Why else do you think people take up smoking?
Look, if you don’t want to read my posts then don’t read my posts. But if you aren’t going to read them then it would be nice if you’d stop responding to them. I’m tired of restating the same damn thing over and over again for you.
For the last freaking time, and as I have said from my very first post in this thread then yes, there are many women who are crazy for bad boys – provided “bad boy” is defined in the right way.
I cannot say it any more clearly than that. If you’d like to reply with yet another “But a lot of women like bad boys!” then go right ahead, but I will not be engaging in any further discussion with you.
