Why women love bad boys – and what that means for crime culture ‹ CrimeReads

It is a cliche that women love bad boys. In third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with the movie Fat where the good girl Sandy falls in love with the bad boy Danny Zuko. We watched the film over and over again and learned the songs by heart. And I learned something else: even good girls desire men who are bad.

In high school, I longed for a Danny Zuko of my own and was disappointed by the nice jerks I was surrounded by. Instead of a bad boy fix, I craved fictional monsters like Edward Cullen in dusk. Edward tells Bella straight out that he’s a killer, which only makes her desire him more. That made sense to me. No one wanted the high school simpleton or even the well-meaning werewolf when they could have someone dangerous.

As an adult, I began reading true crime stories and became fascinated by the women who dedicated themselves to men accused of serial murder, like Carol Ann Boone, who was impregnated by Ted Bundy during his trial, or the Manson girls who carved swastikas into their foreheads in support of their murderous leader. I condemned these women, yet understood that the distance between us was uncomfortably small.

In my debut novel Love letters to a serial killerthe protagonist falls in love with an accused serial killer. I am different from her in that I have never fallen in love with a murderer myself, but I understand how it could have happened because I have repeatedly felt attracted to men, both fictional and real, who have an aura of evil about them. With such men, evil is the attraction. I am not alone in this. I recently watched an episode of the Bravo reality series Southern charm and one of the actresses repeatedly says “I like bad boys” as an explanation for why she still loves her horrible ex-boyfriend.

It’s easy to talk about this stereotype in single terms, to say “she has terrible taste in men” or “she runs at warning signs.” I think there’s more to it than that. While I don’t want to suggest that women who fall in love with men they know are bad for them aren’t responsible for their own choices, I do think that this kind of desire is fostered from a young age because it allows men who behave badly to not only get away with such behavior, but to be seen as “sexy” for it.

There is a term, “Overton Window,” that describes the spectrum of acceptable behavior that is usually applied to government. A shift in the window to the right or left means a change in what is acceptable. If we idolize murderers, even fictional ones, like Joe Goldberg from You or the protagonist of Dexterwe expand the acceptance window a little.

As far as I know, no one I know has ever fallen in love with a serial killer. However, I have had close friends who dated men who demeaned them, flirted with other women, and repeatedly ignored them. Rather than this behavior turning them off, it only increased their desperation for reciprocated affection. Before I met my husband, I was the same way. Looking back, it seems so illogical. Why did I want men who I knew had the power to hurt me? What was so unattractive about people who were good? Even during my marriage, I continued to desire fictional bad boys, including the entire cast of Succession and the male lover of several romance series. I met Barry Keoghan in Saltburn and thought, “Ah yes, that’s the kind of weird little freak I want.”

It is easy to judge women who pursue men who are not good for them, but I do not think it should be argued that this trait is rare. Whether they are watching Fat, dusk, Youor a number of media outlets that idolize evil, women are taught from a young age that monstrous men are sexy. In my novel, the protagonist takes this attraction to the extreme by actually attending the trial of an accused murderer. While most of us haven’t done this, how many hours of our lives have we spent watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, or reading books about men who have done evil? If you had the choice between dating a boring nice guy or a mean and hot guy, who would you choose? Be honest. There’s something appealing about evil.

None of this is a coincidence. As much as we might say otherwise, we live in a culture that idolizes bad boys. Instead of just criticizing the women caught in their web, maybe we should think more about what drives them there in the first place and who benefits from it. Why should men be good when they can be bad and women will love them for it?

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