Why do girls like jerks?

Why do lovely girls fall for tough, angry jerks? Why do they do it? What is the attraction in bad boys and jerks?

The reality is that girls are not as innocent as they appear. Like all humans, girls carry insecurities and they compensate for this by getting a lot of their reinforcement through being found sexually attractive. Innocent ‘nice guys’, like Richie Cunningham in the old TV series Happy Days, aren’t as sexually aware as men like Fonzie, and so women gravitate to men like the Fonz who can give them this sexual attention. While these are only television characters from a series made some 35 years ago, their enduring popularity is evidence that there is some deeper truth represented by the characters.

It should be mentioned that there are times when girls will fall for a jerk, Fonzie-type character not because they are interested in the sexual attention, but because they think they can ‘save’ him, or simply because of the mystery such men represent, but this is probably a rarer scenario. The Simpsons played on this theme in the episode where Lisa dates Nelson.

To really answer ‘why do girls like jerks?’, and the deeper question of why they need sexual attention, we needed to be able to first explain some more fundamental issues, such as why girls became insecure in the first place, and thought they had to abandon their real selves, and resign themselves to becoming ‘sex’ objects. We also needed to be able to explain why men started using sex for reasons other than just reproduction. We needed to be able to explain why we all have needed (to varying degrees) artificial, superficial, sexual reinforcement, and the relief that it has provided from living under the duress of the human condition.

Most wonderfully, biology is now able to provide answers to all kinds of previously seemingly unanswerable questions, like ‘why do girls like jerks?’ with the full explanation of the origin of our non-ideal, ‘corrupted’ state or condition, and as a result why men use sex in the way that they do, and why women in particular, have had to resort to getting reinforcement from being found sexually attractive. This comprehensive explanation and defense of our human condition is available in this video series and the book Freedom: Expanded Book 1, by biologist Jeremy Griffith.

The beauty of this explanation is that it turns out that humans have had to become ‘upset’ and that resigning ourselves to distraction through sexuality or sexual attention has been a necessary, albeit dysfunctional, strategy. Griffith explains that we humans have a loving, instinctive orientation that evolved over millions of years, however with the emergence of consciousness some two million years ago, there came a juncture when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, and a terrible battle broke out between the two. The effect of this psychological battle was the extremely upset state that we call the human condition.

So finally, the explanation is here that explains why girls have wanted attention from jerks and bad boys like the Fonz rather than the more innocent Richie. Now both men and women will be able to view the reality of sexuality with complete compassion.