- Position‹2 of 3›
- People like taboo ideas
- Argument‹2 of 2
The “Bad Boy” Attraction to serial killers
Bad boys are attractive. They live outside of society’s rules and do whatever they want. Because they are so cool, people can’t help but admire them.
The argument
The explanation offered is that the attraction is neither new nor specific to killers. The "bad boy" has been a recognised figure in popular culture for years, and audiences have long responded to him with something warmer than disapproval. John Bender in The Breakfast Club is the familiar example: a character with a complicated and annoying personality who is nevertheless presented sympathetically, and who is revered as the embodiment of a rebellion the other characters feel but do not act on. What makes the figure appealing, on this account, is independence. The bad boy does what others will not, and in doing so appears unconstrained by the rules that visibly constrain everyone else. That reads as a kind of freedom, and it gets a lot of attention — in fiction and outside it. The attraction is to the defiance rather than to any particular act of it, which is why the archetype survives across very different characters and settings. Serial killers, on this reasoning, occupy the extreme end of the same scale. They are figures defined entirely by defiance of the law, and the fascination they attract borrows the structure of the response the archetype already produces: the same interest in someone operating outside the rules, directed at a person who has gone further outside them than anyone else. The taboo is what supplies the intensity, since the appeal of the archetype has always depended on transgression, and here the transgression is total. Proponents of this explanation are describing a mechanism rather than endorsing it. The claim is that the cultural fascination with serial killers needs no special explanation of its own: it is the ordinary attraction to the taboo and to the rebel figure, following a pattern already well established in how audiences respond to fiction, and extended to real people who have committed real crimes.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Bad boys bring a lot of trouble. Bad boys are “bad” because of their delinquent behavior. But serial killers go beyond a high school delinquent or college jock. They take people’s lives. Therefore, serial killers shouldn't be seen as attractive.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Serial killers are more than bad boys. They are criminals that have killed people and hurt their families.