Why posh girls love a bad boy
Like Jeremy Meeks to Chloe Green, a bit of rough is quite appealing, says Hannah Betts
In an otherwise non-too celebratory summer, this week has brought solace in the form of a romance between so-called “Hot Felon” Jeremy Meeks, and the arguably somewhat less hot Chloe Green, daughter of Sir Philip. Philip Green is famously worth £3.8 billion. The fact of this fortune would appear to be not entirely irrelevant, not least as Meeks is currently disporting himself with his inamorata aboard an 180ft superyacht cruising in the Med, for which La Green – and ultimately Le Green – is doubtless picking up the £112,000-per-week tab.
Mr Meeks is thought to have met Ms Green at the Cannes film festival, where he was promoting boxer shorts, his torso etched with tattoos including the name of the vicious gang of which he was formerly a member, an inky tear leaking from his eye. The couple have been spotted “cavorting” – tabloid-speak for kissing in swimmers, while posing up a storm. Accordingly, they occupy a state that might be referred to as “Instagram official,” despite Meeks being in possession of those cumbersome apparatuses that are a wife and child. Green Senior – while not being a paragon of rectitude himself – is apparently not amused.
If you are unaware of the phenomenon that is the “Hot Felon” then, really, where have you been? In 2014, Meeks, now 32, became a viral sensation when his piercing, chiselled mugshot was posted on social media by a Californian police department describing him as “one of the most violent criminals in the Stockton area”. The world and his wife – particularly his wife – reacted not with disapprobation, but a “phwoar”. Global adulation and a six-figure modelling contract ensued.
Ah, the eternal appeal of the bad boy, lamented by nice chaps everywhere. Treat women mean, keep us keen; be an absolute maniac and we are yours for life. Bad boys bring the drama, and drama is so addictive. Who doesn’t want to be the heroine of her own great adventure – not least a nice girl, from a nice family, for whom the future appears tediously mapped out?
And, if she’s rich, à la Chloe Green, Cameron Diaz or Millie Mackintosh, then a bit of rough such as Meeks or rapper Professor Green becomes every girlish dream. Witness the story of Lady Alice Douglas, daughter of the Marquess of Queensbury, whose marriage to a former armed robber descended into “a war-zone” after she discovered his drug habit and affair with the au pair.
Literature is teeming with such fabulous badassery. Fellow heiress Helen of Troy was first to succumb, abandoning her husband for good-looking ladies’ man, Paris: a king’s son, but brought up on the wrong side of the tracks for prophecy-related reasons; devious, a bit of an a---, but clearly rather dazzling in the sack. And we know where that pash led.
Maidenly Jane Austen went wild for a rascal – safely in fiction, at least – Henry Crawford, John Willoughby and Frank Churchill shining so much more brightly than the Tom Bertrams, Colonel Brandons and Mr Knightleys of her world. Fitzwilliam Darcy only beats the delightfully caddish George Wickham in the smouldering stakes because he’s an apparent bad boy too, before being revealed to have good-guy hidden virtues.
The Brontë sisters similarly swooned. Saturnine, swaggering, lunatically besotted Heathcliff is your basic teenage fantasy. As Cathy bawls at Nelly: “He’s not a rough diamond, pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” Yes, I do still know that by heart; and, yes, it did blight my erotic choices for a good – well, bad, but also brilliant – 30 years.
Meanwhile our penchant for a bad lad persists, in today’s obsession with pouting vampires and the assorted cads of Love Island, and swarthy Ross Poldark, strutting about Cornwall.
Recent history brought us Luis “the Bounder” Basualdo, the Argentinian polo player who scandalised Seventies Britain with his social and sexual misdemeanours. Taki, The Spectator columnist, referred to him as “the undisputed numero uno of bounders among the practitioners of a sport known to contain more cads than Jeffrey Bernard has had hangovers.” And, of course, there was the late, great George Best, his sporting prowess rivalled only by his gift for wild living. As the man himself recalled: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.”
Scrape the surface and every nice girl will have a bad boy hidden in her past. Some of us have made a habit out of it. It is the allure of forbidden fruit, tactical game playing, the thrill of the chase (one of you forever after the other, never racing towards each other at the same time). There’s so much narrative potential in a run-in with a rogue – life is never again so adrenally charged again. There you are, drunk on love, telling your friends that: “It’s complicated,” when really it’s blindingly obvious.
A bad boy is a fixer-upper, and there’s nothing a certain type of girl likes more than a project: some charity case to become her sole focus. “He’s not bad!” the nice girl declares. “He can’t help himself. He’s broken, a lost soul, and I, wonderful, caring, redemptively feminine I, can be the woman to change him.”
Naturally, all this uncertainty guarantees that the sex is hot as Hades. The brightest, baddest star in my own firmament was such a reprobate that said action was astounding: my blood pressure would soar, everything would go black, and I’d see stars.
Whether or not we grow out of them, the bad boy harbours a shelf life; there is something rather sad about a chap attempting to sustain the performance beyond middle age, desperate to convince the world of his irredeemability.
A bad boy may be alluring, a bad man merely bad news.