An example of sexualized violence. Stanley Kowalski—A Streetcar Named Desire
We’ve all heard about him. We have watched him smolder and lie his way through a film, a particularly juicy Avon book, and hell, some of us have even dated him. Well, a version of him.
He’s been with us for years. The one who is a little bit damaged, just a dash lost, but on the crest of being saved. He’s two steps from the ledge and three steps from your arms.
The reality of the “bad boy” is much more dangerous than art has led us to believe, which leaves me with a persisting question: why do we continually romanticize this recurring cliche? Through an examination of novels, films, television, music, mythology, and my own personal experiences, I will try to gauge exactly what this trope is and if it is still necessary. Has this trope ever been helpful or true? Why does it exist?
If you are an artist then you understand what it means to be empathetic—to look for the best in people. As actors, we are always searching for the truth in a character…it is a quality the free spirit in us sometimes chooses to ignore when the truth is presented in reality. For in reality, the bad boy is unfortunately, and unscientifically, 9 times out of 10 irredeemable.
Where did you get this fact Emily? Where is your credible source?
I am the credible source.
If any of you know my track record for dating, then it’s clear I’ve tested this theory. The truth is, that one chance the bad boy might have to save himself is certainly not going to come from you, your love, or the Heroine complex you’ve got going on (no judgment here, I speak only from experience). It is going to have to come from active change. From him. And sometimes even that is not enough.
I’ve studied, dated, loved, and confronted the bad boy on too many occasions. I even created art based on these occurrences. Capture, an award-winning and subsequently published play I wrote about my relationship with an abusive misogynistic sociopath is just one example. I'm sorry, I meant to say “misunderstood musician.”
My gripe lies with artists who perpetuate this sort of “dark” love and then turn around and force their “strong” female protagonists to accept abuse, to ignore red flags that blatantly point to the eventuality that things will not end well. No matter how passionate or forbidden their love might be, only pain and suffering is on the horizon.
But in the fantasy of romance, these men change, they see the error of their ways and suddenly another’s love (YOURS!) is enough to undo years of damage, trauma and mental health issues.
Dear reader, I think not.
It does not matter how hard you love someone, you cannot heal their pain… only they can do that for themselves.
It is an injustice done to young women who know nothing of sex, nothing of love. Impressionable pre-teen/teenage girls who watch unrealistic films about relationships, who sneak romance novels from their mother’s drawer and read them under the blankets with a flashlight, all the while assuming that if a woman wrote such a thing, directed such a film, then it must exist. That it must be real. That this man is true and you and you alone can save him.
Rubbish.
While preparing to write this article, I came across a preview for a teenage-romance film on Netflix called After, which depicted two college students (she the innocent country girl, he the brooding bad boy) having a heated debate about Pride and Prejudice.
SIDEBAR: It could have been Romeo and Juliet, or Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or any other classic story of days gone by. Now, I am NOT disputing that these stories are incredible works of art and great literature. However, these are not the worlds we live in anymore. Can you truly imagine what these stories would look like reimagined in a modern context? NEWS FLASH: Mr. Darcy is a dick (but he changes thanks to Elizabeth!) Mr. Rochester literally kept his wife prisoner in her own damn attic (but Jane’s love saves him!).
Think about this: Austen and the Brontës weren’t writing about love; they were writing about what life was actually like with a little FICTION sprinkled in. People keep forgetting, it’s fiction. And let’s be real, it was ugly back then even without having the misfortune of being born a woman. I don’t believe it would seem romantic to them (these women writers of the 1800s). Yet it has somehow been bastardized and turned into the gooey, softened and dreamy eyes of our youth that continue to be romanticized in modern films…
So I watch this film, After, which surprise surprise, the guy is damaged and a straight-up asshole. He lies and seduces this chick as a trick/bet with his friends to make her sleep with him (insert Cruel Intentions ripoff) but in the end she forgives him even though he destroyed her previous relationship, humiliated her and isolated her... it ends up actually being, you guessed it, true love!
After is based on a fan-fiction--this irritates me to no end, not because I don’t love a good fan-fic but because it gives it a bad name. It's just for fun, until a woman goes and makes money off of someone else’s ideas…hem hem, I’m looking at you E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Gray (originally a Twilight fan-fiction), which is about as trope and vile as it can get. Even the soundtrack to those films make me sick. One particularly upsetting lyric is from a track entitled Heaven by Julia Michaels from the Fifty Shades Freed: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. “All good boys go to heaven, but bad boys bring heaven to you.”
Kill. Me. Please.
Speaking of, Christian Grey is the ultimate control freak, sociopathic narcissist. The author doesn’t even try to hide it, she in fact does the opposite in glorifying it. He is not only a stalker, but verbally abusive, manipulative, forceful--for christs sake his love interest can’t even pick out her own clothes or even decide her own diet. He infiltrates every corner of her life while keeping her blind with his raw sexuality. Yet the film franchise alone accumulated almost a half of a billion dollars in profits. MIND BLOWN.
Let’s take someone a bit less human…a murdering, psychopathic vampire like Eric Northman in the series True Blood, who is given an unrealistic and outrageous redemption arc. All because of one woman, who was his “weakness.”
"To me, you'll always be that girl in the white dress. The one who walked into my bar." –Eric Northman to Sookie Stackhouse
This quote gets me every time. Young woman + white dress = the cure to fixing the bad boy? How ridiculous of a society are we that we continue to put such emphasis on this equation? It suggests that to be pure is the key, to remain a virgin and retain goodness, to emulate an innocence, which is a magnet for the bad boy. A beacon of light amongst his darkness. It’s archaic and completely delusional on all levels. HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU. I’m the least virginal person you could meet and bad boys stick to me like flies on shit. Narcissists don’t have a type, they only want someone to control. To conquer.
Now let’s look at the rise of the romance novel. It seems women have always craved these sort of novels because they are given a “happily ever after” and we seem to think that this is all a woman will ever truly need in her life.
Many women consider Romance a genre that centers on women’s pleasure. But does it actually? With unrealistic expectations of bad men who turn good, giving women the false hope that brutal warriors and fierce highlanders will turn into docile and loyal puppies for their love while remaining violent (i.e. protective) and raging with sexual toxic masculinity.
Here’s a couple of my favorite ”Romance” novel plots I’ve read over the years: the hero accidentally rapes his love interest because he mistakes her for a whore...all is forgiven. The hero murders and lies and cheats yet somehow remains true to only one person, the woman whose youthful innocence is the key to undoing hard damage.
...and on it goes...
Even J.K. Rowling has commented on her amazement at Harry Potter fans romanticizing the prejudiced and arrogant anti-hero Draco Malfoy (Malfoy literally meaning “Of bad faith”):
"…I have often had cause to remark on how unnerved I have been by the number of girls who fell for this particular fictional character (although I do not discount the appeal of Tom Felton, who plays Draco brilliantly in the films, and ironically, is about the nicest person you could meet). Draco has all the glamour of the anti-hero; girls are very apt to romanticise such people. All of this left me in the unenviable position of pouring cold common sense on ardent readers’ daydreams as I told them, rather severely, that Draco was not concealing a heart of gold under all that sneering and prejudice and that no, he and Harry were not destined to end up best friends."
Is it the character? The actor who portrays him? A mixture of both…? Or is it us…?
Take the play A Streetcar Named Desire and Marlon Brando’s legendary portrayal of Stanley Kowalski, the acme of masculinity. The “is it us” question I just mentioned above seems to come into play here. Stanley’s charisma and good looks distract us from his true nature --is this what it means to be a manly man? To use power and control as a substitute for true love? To so closely link sexuality and violence so that women continue to assume they go hand in hand? He is never punished for his behavior, he never changes and yet I continue to see the sexualization of a rapist who not only destroys the lives around him but is able to go on living his own without consequence. And yet, I feel there are too many who miss the whole point of the piece and instead claim how handsome and virile Brando made the character out to be. Meanwhile, one does not have to dig deep into the text to discover Blanche’s speech likening Stanley to an ape, his primitive qualities on display from the beginning when we see him hauling around a package of bloody meat. Perhaps the most important theme of the entire play is sexual violence, which is set up as the ultimate conflict between man and woman. Streetcar ultimately asks if values are useless in a savage world. But hey, he was so handsome when he was raping, right?
Let’s ask a different question. Before it was even a literary trope, is it possible that this dynamic between men and women was useful during some other period of time? How far back can we go? If art imitates life, can we find evidence of this as we look to the past?
Let’s take a little trip to the late 9th millennium BC, during the Neolithic Revolution where some humans began to switch from a hunter-gatherer existence, to agriculture. I once took a History of Prostitution course in Florence, Italy where my professor had a theory that pretty much went something like this:
When nomads began settling down, they domesticated animals - dogs, hens, cattle, etc. When they observed that no offspring were produced when female and male animals were kept apart, but were produced when the two were kept together, a “scientific” parallel was drawn. This might have very well resulted in man realizing that he was part of the creation process and therefore women were no longer to be feared or worshipped. In that instant, they were demystified, no longer goddesses but humans just the same, who now had to acknowledge man’s contribution to their existence. Gone forever was the Goddess Culture and the empowerment that their supernatural association provided. Enter the Patriarchy.
Whether there was ever a true matriarchal society is up for historical debate. Some claim it simply the stuff of myths or legends.
Speaking of legends...
Let’s fast forward to the late 2nd millennium BC and the earliest surviving great work of literature and the second oldest religious text - The Epic of Gilgamesh.
One needs to look no further than Tablet Number-fucking-One. Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk (an actual historical figure), is oppressing his people. For the women, this takes the form of droit du seigneur - the legal right a lord has to have sexual relations with subordinate women on their wedding nights.
It is worthy to note that the men were oppressed as well - exhausted through physical activities and labor. But, of course, when women are oppressed, it’s seemingly always of a sexual nature. It’s literally in part one of the first ever piece of literature. Well then, it’s nice to see this “trope” presented so clearly and as early as ancient Mesopotamia.
Samuel Noah Kramer was one of the world’s leading Assyriologists and a world renowned expert in Sumerian history and language up until his death in 1990. He described Gilgamesh as, “An adventurous, brave, but tragic figure symbolizing man’s vain but endless drive for fame, glory, and immorality.”
Sound remotely familiar? Ancient bad boy at your service.
The Epic of Gilgamesh had a major influence on Homer and both of his epic Greek poems. And so it only makes sense to now delve into how the bad boy trope relates to mythology.
Acclaimed neuroscientist Dr. Jordan Peterson, in a conversation with the late Sir Roger Scruton on Nov 2, 2018 in Cambridge, England, had this to say:
“The problem is, is that the courageous way to deal with the problem of the predator is to offer a hand in courageous trust and to invite forward a partner from the monster. That's the mythological manner in which this is supposed to be undertaken. A courageous part of the woman's journey, let's say, is to face the monstrosity of a man and to invite out of that something more noble.”
Oh really?
Let us take the myth of Medusa. It is the tale of a lovely young woman, minding her own business, until she is set upon by Posiden (oh you know - unstable mentality that often leads to extreme violence, often enjoys wielding power over women and brandishing his virile machoism). He traps Medusa in Athena’s temple and rapes her. As a God, it’s suggested that this is Posiden’s privilege. We would hope that the abuse might end there, considering Medusa did nothing to provoke this attack (Trick statement! There is NOTHING ANYONE can do that would justify rape). But no, poor Medusa is punished by the Goddess Athena for desecrating her temple (wait, what?). Athena then turns Medusa into a monster with living venomous snakes in place of hair while any who gaze upon her are turned to stone (#theultimatebodyshaming). She is then banished and slain by Perseus (seems totally fair).
Poseiden the fuck boy with his really small penis vs Posieden the God of your dreams
So why do we only ever hear about Medusa the monster? Why do we never condemn her rape or demonization, but praise her death at the hands of our uber masculine hero and the patrichary he fights to perserve?
So yes, Mr. Peterson, the mythological manner here is key. It’s false. Whenever a woman faces a monster who is a man she changes him. But whenever a man faces a woman who is a monster, he slays her? Even if he’s the one responsible for her fall to begin with? This is clearly an instance where we must break the cycle, not perpetuate it.
So her punishment is…making…men…hard? 🙄
Are women made to love? Is it because we bear children? The father can afford to abandon a child, but biologically speaking, a child needs it’s mother to exist? Is it that we’ve always been given the responsibility to love? Some intrinsic part of us that screams to mend and cure and help and give?
Shall we examine this question then from the perspective of evolutionary biology? There is, of course, validity to the idea that women, generally and historically, are not physically as strong as men. So when there has been an extreme threat, women have turned to men for protection. That same protection the man can provide by killing anyone who would hurt her, can also be used against her. And once a man has saved a woman’s life or more importantly, her virtue, she is indebted to him. In extreme cases, she will settle or give herself to the bad man to avoid the worse man. So on a more instinctual and grander level, you could argue that women stray towards the bad boy regardless of his danger because if she has his love, then she is protected.
Some medical doctors claim that the bad boy might be biochemical. Our desire for him and his flaws have everything to do with our need to make attractive babies or to release endorphins. It’s all down to dopamine and oxytocin which eventually seem to condition our brains into being masochists.
So are women who don’t want to have babies the ironic salvation from the bad boy??
I’ll pass on the whole medical explanation for now.
I’ve learned in my life, the good guy is where it’s at— you know the other trope - the boy tossed head first into the friend zone - the one who isn’t “strong” enough to get the girl, the lesser sexually attractive option, not because of his looks but because he is evenheaded. But in reality, a good guy supports you, believes in you, respects you, never tries to change you or remove important people from your life, and most critically he puts your welfare above or equal to his own. He also checks you, tells you when you are being self-destructive and attempts to guide you towards the best you. If that’s not bad-ass and incredibly sexy, I don’t know what is. You know what isn’t sexy? Having to come home to someone who verbally or physically abuses you in any capacity.
The artistic mediums that I have discussed above, who exalt the bad boy are the same ones who tear down the good guy. It’s almost as if they don’t want women to lead emotionally stable lives.
So to the women who dream of being bitten by vampires, these are creatures who cannot love, who do nothing but drain you…and to those who believe the Byronic hero will somehow champion the odds stacked against him…the truth is, he cannot. No sacrifice will ever be greater than the false delusion of love that narcissists hold for themselves. And that is the dilemma with the bad boy. The man who we forgive, over and over because women, and this is something we have been sublimated into accepting, deserve less.
The perpetuation of rape culture and sexual assault is shot into our blood stream everywhere we turn as it has been for hundreds of years before us. We’ve been told that we should suffer. We should take the man back again and again, even if he isolates us, even if he hurts us or rapes us…it’s not his fault. It’s his mother’s, or yours.
You didn’t give enough.
I have come to the realization that the bad boy trope has had quite an extensive evolution that may have accurately depicted civilization at one time. But today’s trope is more dangerous than ever. Not only does it not accurately depict the modern male-female hetereosexual relationship, it presents a false equivalence: a logical fallacy that provides women with the false hope of changing a man habituated to immoral conduct. Furthermore, it idealizes that same conduct for men, leading them to believe it is not only okay to engage in such behaviors, but it is necessary to win the woman’s heart.
While I suppose one could argue that the dynamic between men and women, from an evolutionary standpoint, had some sort of survival-based benefit, I would certainly argue that we have, in art, never actually benefited from this trope. It’s been pressed and pushed onto us for as long as we can remember. And I certainly don’t feel that we need it, not today and definitely not tomorrow.
In conclusion, I think it is pretty clear that the answer is yes. Yes, we should be done romanticizing the bad boy trope.
I can hear the Stanley Kowalski’s out there yelling already. So what? We’re just going to watch films about men getting smacked around by their wives all day?
No. Any abuse, by any gender, is still abuse. I’m not saying abuse shouldn’t be presented in art as that, of course, reflects real life. I’m simply saying it’s time to stop glorifying it. There will still be bad boy characters out there - of course; there are plenty of bad boys out there in real life. But now, let us be realistic about them. Let us put the romanticizing of them behind us.
How do we do that?
As a writer and as a woman, I implore that we all try to do better, to not force our female voices to bend to the illusion of love being the most powerful thing of all.
Perhaps it is not.
Perhaps, the art of being, knowing, and respecting yourself is the most powerful thing of all.
It is our job as artists to shape the future, to stand up for what is true. And that begins here, with no longer forcing a woman to choose between herself and a man.
There should never be a choice.
Onwards and Upwards, Always- E