Born To Be Bad

Girls love the bad boys. It’s a common cliché, a hasty generalization, an irrational assumption. And, in the opinion of this former girl, a pretty fair characterization. Maybe it’s a maternal instinct, our inner Wendy made manifest, that draws us toward these fixer-upper Peter Pans. Or tragic self-esteem issues. Or something. You’d like to think that, as self-actualized, independent women nurturing daughters with multitudes of horizons open to them, we would have evolved out of the attraction to misfits and malcontents but, alas, the naughty ones still catch our eye. Case in point: there’s a boy in the mainstream population at the junior high who I’ve watched grow up these last three years. He is smart without being dorky, athletic without being brutish, and cute without being unapproachable. But the girls take no notice. He will make a great partner, husband, and father someday, but the girls flock instead to the black-wearing boy whose hair hangs in his face, who casually tosses around adult profanity, and never does his homework. What is our hero’s great crime and deficit? He’s nice. He holds doors, listens respectfully, and even gets involved in service projects. Chick magnet suicide. There’s hope, though. Some girl (who has likely been a moth burned by the bad boy flame) will eventually figure out what a catch he is and reel him in. But until then… In Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline and the Bad Hat, the straight-line girls think their naughty neighbor, Pepito, is the cat’s meow. They’ll learn.

http://www.amazon.com/Madeline-Bad-Hat-Ludwig-Bemelmans/dp/0670446149

http://www.madeline.com/author.htm