I live in Denmark today, but pay an annual visit to the Philippines without fail. Each visit I open up one of the many boxes containing my writings (journalistic and creative) dating back to the fun years I spent working in Manila, as well as to my ostensibly normal childhood. I've been paging through a clutch of magazines from the Summit group, which published the Philippine edition of Cosmopolitan. I wrote for Cosmo and Preview in the late 1990s, and now that nearly 30 years (gasp! I was a veritable kid!) have elapsed, it's time to share them with a digital community.
How will these articles be read by young women who have been formed, over the last 15 years, by the very visual platforms of Instagram and Tiktok, for whom Facebook probably resembles a retirement community? Back in the day we only had novels and American magazines to read and emulate; we wrote long and thoughtfully; we wouldn't known how to reckon with today's deliberate destruction of the English language on social media.
Why we fall for bad boys
Lakambini A. Sitoy
Cosmopolitan Philippines
November 1998
Ginny’s in love with a married man. Their lovemaking is always furtive, rapid; afterwards, a couple of minutes of tenderness before he must get dressed. He moves with the grace of experience--this is the sixth time he’s cheated on his wife. By day, she sees how suavely he handles himself, and suffers in silence. But she’s used to suffering.
Before him, there was the compulsive liar whom she went with for two years. Until now she doesn’t even know his origins, his family, what he did before he met her. Prior to that one was the uppity med student she pursued for a year, who did shabu to stay awake and ultimately flunked out of school. And then there was the boyfriend in college who would load her, like a doll, on the back of his motorcycle; who was forever knocking on her door in the middle of the night, drunk, bruised from a tiff with a tongits buddy, begging for a loan. Incredibly charming but bad to the bone.
Ginny, late 20s, is no loser. Relatively pretty, with a winning smile and a gentle voice, she’s fairly successful in her field, which is public relations. In her pastel suits, hair in place, she seems a poster girl for propriety--the sweet, diffident type that boys are supposed to take home to their parents. Yet, she gets turned on by the unconventional: washed-up rock musicians, alcoholic newsmen with no money, bratty ex-preppies. As she puts it, “I don’t go for the garden variety types. I’ve dated them. They’re too uptight, you can’t f--k with them and they bore me.”
Bad to the bone
Ginny is compulsively attracted to men who are not only bad for her, but are bad according to society’s mores. The worse they are, the more she seems to want them. Her case is not an isolated one. Dr. Bernadette Nepomuceno, a psychologist, has counselled persons like her, and attributes her compulsion to what Karl Jung described as the process of individuation--that innate drive in the human being to seek his best potential, which ironically may be found in the perverse.
“Certain sides of every person are undeveloped, and when you’re attracted to someone, you are actually attracted to the undeveloped side of yourself, which you see in a man,” Nepomuceno explains. Nice girls, brought up by their parents to be chaste, refined, smart and career-oriented but not too outspoken, have an overdeveloped socially-acceptable side. Some must compensate in some way for this imbalance.
And what of the men who seem so compelling to them? We know who they are: they have been much documented--or celebrated--by media. James Dean, Tommy Lee; closer to home, Robin Padilla, Ace Vergel, Gabby Concepcion and, more recently, Joko Diaz. Their behavior--the tough guy pose, the drugs, the womanizing, the lies and the bola, the wild parties, the way they walk out of jobs--is their way of working out some major psychological issues. They’re angry in some way. Perhaps the trouble started at home. Perhaps they were middle children, or their parents split pre-adolescence, or they grew up in an overly critical household. Perhaps they suffered sexual trauma when they were very young--this is the worst of all; the man unable to love and trust until the wounds are addressed. In any case, says Dr. Nepomuceno, their anger translates into disruptive behavior, which breeds more hostility from mainstream society, which in turn hurts them even more.
Some of the “badness” may be part of the man’s “persona”--that is, the mask he dons to avoid getting hurt. For instance, says Dr. Nepomuceno, if he’s in a defensive phase, brought about by a need to ward of criticism, a guy learns to come up with a mean, macho exterior. This type of person is easier to change than, say, a victim of incestuous abuse, for once he enters into a trusting relationship with someone, he finds that there’s no need to wear the mask. All a bad boy needs, it seems, is a woman (or a friend) who trusts, loves, understands and accepts him.
Girl gone wild
The situation gets complicated, though, when the woman who loves him is actually working out baggage of her own. Take Ginny, who gets excited by illicit lovemaking. “I think I’m rebelling against the principles of morality and goodness that my parents raised me on,” she says. “My cousins were getting drunk and drag-racing and having sex with ‘bad women.’ They’d come home in the wee hours of the morning and brag about what they’d done. They were protective of me; they would have beaten up anyone who tried to hurt me. The truth is, I always wanted to be part of their club.”
May-Anne, who had a three-year relationship with a restaurateur secretly hooked on shabu, says, “It made me feel good to see how much I seemed to influence him sometimes. My opinion didn’t count much at home. And then I saw the chance for me to save somebody, just by being there for him.”
We all have our reasons for falling for “bad boys.” Most women claim it has something to do with the way they were raised.
Dr. Nepomuceno begs to disagree with this rationalization. “It’s not a rebellion against the principles of morality and goodness per se, but against your having allowed yourself to be constrained by your principles,” she says. “It’s not about conditioning. This only sounds like a refusal to accept the wild side that is inherent in all of us.”
Nepomuceno recommends that, instead of focusing totally on the “bad boy,” women look more closely at themselves. They should ask themselves what they like and dislike about the object of their obsession, what it is about him that is so tantalizing.
In fact, they may discover that it’s not the “bad boy” they are drawn to, but the “wild man” in him. “Wildness” has nothing to do with morality, with “goodness” or “badness.” What it does is attract the woman who is overly tamed.
For a “tamed” woman would rather assign responsibility for wild behavior (getting plastered at a party, having an orgasm, letting out a primal scream) to whatever bad guy she’s with. She can’t abide the thought of herself as being less than virginal. The challenge is in confronting, and welcoming, the wild woman inside her and in being accountable for her actions.
Wipe the tapes
Unless she does this, a woman will be condemned to repeat the pattern of falling in love with, and being hurt by, “bad”/wild men. If she listens to the advise of friends as well as her own inner voice (“Leave him; he’s not good enough for you), she will only find herself flitting from relationship to relationship, unsatisfied and confused. If she stays, and continues to play the nice girl, the martyr, the relationship will probably end as well.
“The irony,” says Nepomuceno, “is that although the ‘bad-boy/good girl’ duality was the basis of the attraction, it cannot sustain the relationship. It’s the very thing that will break up a couple.”
A woman who’s already suffering in such a relationship must get back her projections, Nepomuceno says. She must find the things she wants in him that she needs in herself. She must learn to see the man, and not the projection. Eventually she will find out whether she loves him for who he is.
In a situation where she’s emotionally dependent on a man, or a type o man, yet knows she’s unhappy, she might try to find out how she can love herself more. This would transcend buying herself nice clothes, scent, whatever. It means getting totally involved with herself--keeping a journal perhaps, or writing down memories, or meditating. Being aware, too, of baggage--the daughter of an alcoholic will most likely find an alcoholic husband; a woman who is afraid of intimacy may seek the serial adulterer.
Nepomuceno offers more tips for the woman longing to be wild: First, stop the old tapes that keep playing in your head--the disembodied voices of your mother, your lola, the Mother Superior at convent school. Alternately encouraging and admonishing, they ask you when you’re getting married, chide you when you fall in love, build up the gilded cage in which you, a proper young animal, are to reside. Find your own voice, and learn to discern it from that of others.
Secondly, stop moralizing. This can be the most hurting thing you can do to yourself. Attraction is a completely unconscious process. So forget what the rest of the world says. Instead of concluding “A ‘good girl’ isn’t supposed to love a ‘bad guy,’” just get in touch with yourself.
After all, love is a private transaction between two beings, each of whom, as Jung put it, has an innate motivation to seek his/her individuality. It would be cruel and inhuman to frustrate yourself, and your lover, in your quest.
This article originally appeared in Cosmopolitan Philippines, November 1998
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