In a different voice

The really beloved bad boys of women's literature don't bully or abuse the heroine, but they continually provoke and tease her – they are teasing her to release her own latent wildness. Ando one thing the romantic heroes of women's fiction, even the bad boys, who can be brusque or verge on rudeness, never, ever do is actually snap at, that is, negatively startle, the heroine; think of the edgy but grudgingly respectful repartee of Darcy and Elizabeth. Virtually every women's genre romance novel follows a script of a man who seems bad – insensitive, corrupt, womanizing – but turns out to be good. It also often features a heroine who begins demure and unripe – "Poor, obscure, plain and little" in Jane Eyre's speech – but who becomes herself, under the provocation of this bad boy who is secretly good.
This seeming paradox or politically incorrect fantasy is, I would argue, an essential archetype of the female heterosexual journey. A skilled, even at times slightly dangerous, male provocateur can help the female sexual journey to begin. "Badness" is not literal badness – it is otherness, wildness, the dimensions of the unknown. The motorcycle boots, the Harley – they are about her adventures, her penchant for the open road, erotically and in terms of her own creativity and subcersiveness, that society has generally repressed in her and forbidden her to claim as a longing, let alone as part of her "good girl" identity. His male "badness" is simply the projected dark animus of her own unacknowledged wild self."

Naomi Wolf, Vagina