Why good girls love the bad guys

In a lineup of the three leading men from The Dark Knight, whom would most women go for?

Christian Bale (who plays Batman) looks like the Brawny towel guy. The blond guy (Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart) looks (at least at first!) like Ken.

Even though there will be howls of outrage, here's the truth: Most women would want to date The Joker.

"Not marry him," we'd all be quick to say. "But see him."

Yes, we know better. Of course we do. That doesn't stop us.

Face it: A lot of women still crave the Bad Boy. A great many otherwise sane women would confess, if given full immunity from our rational tsk-tsking selves, "That poor, tortured soul, The Joker? I could work with him. He's got potential. OK, so he has a nasty habit of using pencils as weapons. I bet his secret wish is to be a writer. Maybe I could get him to start journaling. Or scrapbooking. After all, he's creative, and I'm deeply attracted to creative types. I - and I alone - could discover the real reason for his scars. Or at least I could help with his makeup. That pancake stuff has got to go."

That's why serial killers on death row get marriage proposals: Some women have fantasies of rescue. (Also, some women just want to know where their guys are every night.)

The real joke, of course, is that some women actually think genuinely misogynist, enraged, embittered, violent, self-destructive types can be reformed by a little love. (Insert diabolical laugh here.) When they are left in debt, in trouble, incarcerated, inconsolable or inchoate after these guys pass through their lives like tornadoes, taking everything with them, the women are less likely to fall for the Bad Boy fantasy again.

But it happens.

Want to know one of the reasons it happens, and where the deeply tragic part of being a woman comes in? The Joker, as played by the doomed and enthralling Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, was so much more interesting than the nice-guy heroes that there was no competition.

I have to say it: Batman and the blond guy were boring. Score another one for the Bad Boy.

Even when the good guys were supposed to be turning bad and becoming more complex and emotionally chaotic, they still had no resonance. You just know they'd want to go to tailgate parties, see their old frat brothers, play golf on the weekends, and snorkel for adventure. Christian Bale spent too much time breathing through his mouth. And even with only half a face, the blond guy still looked like he should have been on the cover of a Wheaties box.

The Joker, however, was somebody who would keep you up late talking on the cell phone long after the good boys went to bed early so they could get up and hit the gym before work.

The Joker is the after-hours man. He's the one your girlfriends would be flirting with when you left the table to buy another round of drinks (the nice guys would buy; for The Joker, you'd probably pay). He's fearless - fearless enough to set fire to a mountain of money (which is why you'd have to buy the drinks).

SPOILER ALERT: There's another reason I'm not such a big fan of the good guys: Between them they could save all of Gotham, but not the pretty little brunette they both love. She ends up, umm, in an unhappy situation. It's an adventure-movie law of the universe: Any heroine worth her bath salts who is the focus of a love triangle between two heroic male figures is going to be toast. Seriously burnt toast. She's going to end up in a box or be taken home in a jar.

Like Satan from John Milton's Paradise Lost, or hump-backed Richard III, or gourmand Hannibal Lecter, or any character played by Denis Leary, The Joker is the embodiment of evil, who's - heaven help us - sexy. At the feet of such guys, women fling themselves, as if said guys had money in their socks. Wolfish in their appetites, brutal, determined and sadistic, these antiheroes rage for freedom. And let's not fool ourselves: Since little-girlhood, we're trained to find the Big Bad Wolf seductive. From Charlotte Bronte to Barbara Cartland, thousands of novels and tales insist that women have to find the man who will colonize their emotions, enslave their passions, and rule over their lives. In the name of finding love, women must seek out a fascist. Sylvia Plath wrote "Daddy," the definitive poem on the subject ("Every woman adores a Fascist") - right before she took her own life.

The fantasy of the Bad Boy and the reality of the bad man boy are quite different. It's wise to remind ourselves (and our friends!) of that - to avoid our own dark nights.