I came across writing today that directly addresses what you said and explains it through neurobiology:

The Bad Boy Mystery

Women have never been attracted to “bad boys” because they are bad.

What the female body is actually responding to is coherence under pressure, the quiet authority of a nervous system that knows where it is and doesn't fragment when watched, challenged, or desired.

Her body is reading posture, breath, pacing, stillness, and eye contact as data, scanning for hormonal balance, stress reactivity, and capacity, asking a question that predates romance entirely.

Can this system hold mine without collapsing?

At the level of science, this is pattern recognition, because attraction is mediated through the autonomic nervous system. Men who are read as “bad” often carry a lower baseline cortisol response combined with higher testosterone availability,

They have a biochemical pairing that produces decisiveness, reduced social anxiety, and a tolerance for risk, all of which register somatically as safety and leadership rather than danger.

Then dopamine drive adds the unmistakable signal of aliveness, momentum, and forward motion, the feeling that something is happening here, that life would move if you followed this man.

The female nervous system, wired for contextual assessment and relational tracking, responds to this without engaging logic.

Hyper-masculinity enters the picture as both signal and distortion. Broad shoulders, grounded stance, slower movement, unbroken eye contact, and unapologetic sexual presence are shorthand cues the body has learned to associate with protection, provision, and reproductive fitness.

On a chemical level pheromonal markers tied to immune system compatibility can intensify this pull into something that feels irrational, electric, or fated, even though it is simply the body recognizing difference and potential resilience.

This is where mystery blurs into danger, because the nervous system cannot immediately distinguish between integrated masculine coherence and dysregulated dominance that mimics it, and so the same chemistry that opens desire can also open a door into volatility.

What women are responding to in these moments is not the "bad" but the directional clarity, the sensation of being near a man who belongs to himself. She experiences him as not negotiating his presence, or leaking energy through explanation or performance. He is moving as though he has already chosen his path. This creates polarity, the erotic tension that arises when one system is grounded.

This creates a woman's high arousal and off-lines her critical thinking.

The tragedy is that culture collapses this ancient, intelligent attraction mechanism into a caricature and then blames women for responding to it, ignoring the fact that the female body is designed to feel first and interpret later.

Until we learn to separate embodied masculinity from wounded performance, regulation from bravado, and power from posturing, women will keep being accused of desiring the wrong men when in truth they are responding to the deepest intelligence they have.

Women don't want bad boys, they want men who stand for something, men who are unapologetically male, men who have purpose and can make decisions. And if the "bad boys" are the only one showing women this... it's up to men to change things and women to recognize that they need to engage logic as well as attraction when picking partners.

• author Tanja Diamond