Idolising bad boys makes Charlies of us all
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Pity Lindsay Lohan – how bad do things have to get for drug-addled, porn-addicted, wife-beater Charlie Sheen to feel the urge to proffer life advice, in this case to try to "control her impulses" or, as Sheen doubtless put it to the reporter: "Yraggh, ussssh, unk, gimme some crack, GRAARRR!"?
Well, we've all had nights out like that, though for Charlie, this was probably Tuesday morning. He's such a bad boy, isn't he? The baddest! Sexy, isn't it, ladies? He's living the dream, isn't he, guys? If anyone answered "yes" to these questions, please smother yourself with a pillow for the good of humanity now.
It seems to be bad boy season right now – "caddish" Charles Spencer snaring yet another fiancee, Shane Warne upsetting Liz Hurley, Berlusconi… being Berlusconi. However, all of them are drips, amateurs, compared with Charlie.
Sheen ended up in rehab twice recently (drugs, alcohol, porn stars, violence, hospitalisation, all the classics). His top-rating show, Two and a Half Men, was temporarily postponed while he got better.
Better? Sheen resembles a startled gosling that's just crawled out of Charles Bukowski's left nostril or a haunted scarecrow from a Stephen King story. His smile looks like the broken zip from hell. Does this pass for "better" in Hollywood these days?
I thought: "I should feel sympathy for him" (let (s)he who casts the first stone, etc). Despite being a multimillionaire, Sheen is clearly a sick idiot, who views sex and celebrity as an extreme sport. However, I tend to make a point of not feeling sorry for bad boys such as Sheen. And that's because I don't want to indulge and encourage them. It's the equivalent of saying: "Go ahead, bad boy, make another woman's life hell."
I'm not even sure I buy into all the Charlie Sheen myth-making. If he really was that perma-intoxicated, he wouldn't be copulating with porn stars, he'd be urinating all over himself. Some other myths? Bad boys are funny, charming, wild, a rollercoaster ride (sigh!), not like other men.
In Sheen's case, would this be "partying" with a porn star, while his former wife, Denise Richards, slept a few rooms away with his children? (Adorable!) Threatening another wife with a knife. (A keeper!) Or ranting at Richards when her mother was dying from cancer: "Go cry to your bald mother, you fucking loser!" (Hot!)
Sheen comes across as the worst kind of diehard misogynist, modelled from a Mel Gibson Shaker Maker kit. And what happens? He's idolised. Paid millions. Elsewhere, even non-famous bad boys are encouraged to think that they're Marlon Brando in Streetcar, the untamed real deal. All this admiration, not just from other men, but from women, too. One thinks: what is it about these self-hating women that they flatter and indulge these horrors? It is tantamount to gender betrayal.
Someone once told me that, subliminally at least, everything men do, or dream of doing, from climbing mountains to making millions, even to pulling their fingers and comedy farting, is to impress women. Could it be that some men look up to men like Charlie because they think women want men like Charlie? This results in behaviour in the general "Charlie" spectrum, which leads (ta-da!) to a lot of unhappy women and probably children, too.
Is this what women are doing when they simper over bad boys – turning the female talent for self-loathing into an everyday hell for the women who actually end up dealing with them? Those women who are "into bad boys" really should get over it, or at least stop broadcasting it. Remember that men sometimes actually listen to what we say, try to guess what we want, with the tragic outcome that Charlie Sheen syndrome becomes our fault, too.
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Idolising bad boys makes Charlies of us all | Barbara Ellen | Comment is free | The Observer
I'm not posting this for boring old gender politics reasons, but rather for literary ones. Just lately I've happened to be reading a few different things where characters that I hoped would be confirmed as magnificent bastards turned into mere bad boys, and I was crushed with disappointment. Seriously, I can't describe how much I hate this. Every time I see it happen a little part of me dies, and trust me it happens often.
I was trying to think about why it should happen so often, especially given that magnificent bastards are very popular with the fanbase. My guess is that it's to do with a confusion between attachment to one's own characters on the one hand and moral sentiments on the other. After a while authors either get to like the character so much that they decide that he was really a nice person after all and put in a load of childhood trauma (another pet hate: fuck you Bruce Wayne's parents) or a damascene conversion, or they decide that they really can't be having with this internal conflict any longer and turn the character into a pantomime villain to escape their own conflicted sentiments. In the best cases the author sticks with the programme and burns the village in order to save it (Lelouche in Code Geass, for example).
Then you've got the question of whether the female version exists. I would say yes, though it's a rare sight. The Marquise de Merteuil is clearly a female magnificent bastard, and Milady might be (we'd need to know more about her history/thought processes).
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