Home Page


Thursday, June 01, 2006

Bad Boys 2



More on the bad boys issue. I can only come up with two reasons as to why many women are attracted to nondescript characters-enculturation and propaganda. Enculturation or socialization entails a aggressive peer setting whereby some women have friends that promote a mindset of pursuing these type of men. I also think that fatherlessness is rarely analyzed from the female perspective. It is common knowledge that sons suffer from a type of pathology when a father is absent from the home, but what happens to daughters? If a father is not available, many women just do not have a productive template for future relationships and hence the bad boy (or thug in hiphop vernacular) syndrome develops. Propaganda also plays an insidious role in these matters. Simply put, the dark roguish character has always been positioned as an attractive consort for women in mass media. Anyone faimiliar with the Kate, Sawyer and Jack love triangle in Lost can attest to this. What can be done to turn this phenomenon around? I'm not completely confident this problem can be corrected. Heck, I have witnessed online dating sites where women are actively requesting pretty thugs as if being a thug were a vocational pursuit. Perhaps if it became trendy for fathers to resume the strong patriarchal role in these households, things may change in that regard. Of course more headlines showcasing the results of what happens when dating a thug turns deadly can hopefully prove to be educational as well as empathic. One can only hope.

No comments: