Thug Passion - women who date criminals or bad boys

Essence, Nov, 2000 by Victoria Stone

You know who he is--looks about 19, do-rag, jeans off his ass, brand-new Tims and tank top, hanging out on the corner hustling dime bags or whatever. And your want him

I'm what you would call a princess. One of those little girls who took piano, French and ballet lessons and went to horseback-riding camp and excellent schools, who grew into one of those educated, successful women who always have their nails done and are sometimes rude to cab drivers. Not that my parents had a lot of money. In fact, radical socialists that they are, they'd be horrified to hear me describe myself this way. Other people, though, know exactly what I mean when I cop to the princess thing. And as far as they're concerned, the ideal male fit to my pampered life is some well-bred executive guy. But that's not who I'm feeling these days. I'm hanging out with a thug.

You know the type: Tough, brash, sexy with a bald head and big hands; handles guns, money, God knows what and you. Talks loud, curses, makes love like a demon. A roughneck, thug, gangsta, bad boy, hot boy, fine, fine irresistible man. You crave him like chocolate even though you know he's the last thing a nice girl like you should be getting into.

Like this guy I see now. I am constantly entertained, astonished even, by the life-skill tips and urban philosophy that pop out of his mouth. Plus, he looks hotter than fire at the club, fixes stuff around my apartment and brings me things too--such as steamed fish from his grandmother's house, wrapped in aluminum foil, which he heats up and feeds me.

This isn't to say I haven't had drama. I've been awakened in the middle of the night to let in a bruised and bloodied man. No explanation. He hid in my apartment for two weeks. I still don't know what he was hiding from. I know it's crazy. I should be looking for someone more like me. Someone with a job, perhaps. Someone who knows how to use chopsticks, reads James Baldwin and has a degree. A suit-and-tie guy with a nice watch, a briefcase, an assistant and six-figure stress. But it's the boys with the tattoos, constant stream of Ebonics and trouble that do it for me. And apparently I'm not alone.

Samantha knows exactly what I'm talking about. She's an illustrator who says her ex-man, Knowledge, is as beautiful as an African sculpture. He used to give it to her on the kitchen floor when she was hot and sweaty and cooking chicken because he was just real like that. Not like the suit-and-tie guys who would want you to take a shower first. And he made her come, like multiple times. And she loved him. "There's no explanation for love," she says. "The way I felt about him was beyond our differences. We just had the best times and the most glorious sex. He had all these strange hours, which I never understood, so he was always coming over in the middle of the day. It was so ghetto. Here I am a professional woman, it's 11 in the morning and I'm watching Jerry Springer and getting high. It was like playing hooky from life."

Maybe what Samantha really craved was a romantic escape from her responsible, good-girl reality. "If you have any sense of adventure, it's hard to be with the typical nine-to-five guy," she says. "How sexy is it to have sex in the middle of the afternoon when you should be working? Okay, it's a fantasy, but if you can live it, why not?"

This other girl I know, Monique, 27, is a half-Korean, half-Black beauty. She spent her teens on Chicago's North Side. Her parents, a lawyer and an accountant, sent her to field hockey and cello lessons, but as soon as class was finished, Monique was hightailing it over to the South Side, where her family lived when she was younger. That's where all the roughnecks were.

"I can't tell you how much time I spent in parks drinking forties and doing my homework," she laughs. "I definitely lost a lot of friends because I was too busy hanging out in the 'hood. But besides that, I was a totally normal bourgie girl. I studied hard and got into an Ivy League school, and my best friend was a straight-A student. Her man was like a six-foot seven-inch gangbanger with jail tattoos and a Jheri curl. But honestly, he was the coolest guy you'd ever want to meet."

Hypermasculine Alpha Boys

Even when they metamorphose into something else--throw on a suit and take a corporate job, get down with UPS and go legit--thugs always have a hustle, a scheme, a way of living that puts them on the wrong side of convention if not of law and order. At their core, thugs are bad boys: hypermasculine Alpha males who take care of business--sometimes with a pop or a punch or some other strong-arm tactic.

Let's face it: This boys-from-the-'hood lovefest wasn't quite the same 30 years ago. Sure, lots of women might have had the hots for the local numbers runner, but back then the prevailing Black sex symbol was a Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Billy Dee Williams type. Smooth, debonair, worldly and educated. Then came hip-hop and the celebrity thug. Blown up on billboards, flashing constantly across our TV screens, selling everything from sneakers to soda, rappers such as DMX and Jay-Z and even R&B stars such as D'Angelo have taken on the image of the street and made it not only desirable but also socially palatable.

"Rappers have come to represent an unbridled toughness, and I think that women find that very attractive," says Nelson George, author of One Woman Short (Scribner). "Women want to feel safe, and through the eighties and nineties, as street culture became more dangerous, these kinds of men seemed like they could handle themselves. I know a lot of women who have been in those situations, and it always comes down to `Am I with a man who could whip a negro's ass? If someone disrespected me, could my man put it to him?' That has nothing to do with education; that is a visceral, primal desire."

But it's not all about the brawn. Often more passionate than passive, more spontaneous than sensitive, thugs carry the promise of bringing excitement to the sensible girl's rather conventional life. But when the excitement turns into chaos, things can get really out of control.

Remember the well-publicized story of Kemba Smith? She's the middle-class Hampton University student currently serving a 24-year drug-trafficking sentence for carrying cocaine for her dealer boyfriend. Since 1986, when tougher drug-sentencing laws came into effect, the incarceration rate for African-American women has increased almost 900 percent, according to the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C. Many of those cases involved women transporting or hiding drugs for their boyfriends. It seems that for some women the payoff of having a thug on her arm is worth the risk.

Consider Cara, who grew up in a predominantly White middle-class neighborhood in San Francisco. When she went away to college at 20, she says she was "constantly attacked" by the fraternity-sorority set and their "Blacker-than-thou bullsh*t." So she found her a man who would make up for the racial authenticity others felt she lacked. "I went out with this small-time drug dealer who did a hip-hop show at the college radio station," she says. "He looked just like Tupac Shakur. So who cared if the kids at school thought I was too White? I had this thug straight off the streets digging me like crazy."

Other women, like Lynne, who grew up in the South Bronx, New York, but went away to prep school, are looking for something that reminds them of home. "I went out with guys who hustled drugs and had straight-up gangster friends because they were a panacea for my cultural schizophrenia," she says. "When you leave the neighborhood, there is this sense of abandoning your roots--the people you grew up with and struggled with. Dating these guys made me feel like I was still in touch with where I came from. Plus, I could talk to them about things I couldn't talk to other men about, like what it was like to grow up in a one-bedroom apartment when there were seven people in your family."

Of course, we all have concerns about our identity, says Tricia Rose, professor of African-American culture at New York University. And it's only natural to choose a partner who addresses those issues. "I don't think you can completely generalize when it comes to these relationships," Rose says. "But sometimes they are about a longing for one's own past. Sometimes they are an expression of the woman's anger at the way she is being treated by the people she is now associating with. These relationships can be a way of rubbing it in their faces that she is different."

The story of the princess and the thug is nothing new. For decades, Hollywood has entertained us with its romantic renditions--just think Olivia Newton John getting turned out in Grease or Lonette McKee's tragic demise in Sparkle. But in real life, when these odd couples move from casual dating to bona fide relationships, they aren't quite so splendid. They are chased by trouble, these thuggish boys, and often have to go "underground" or "upstate" or "down South" until things clear up. Sometimes you have to kick them out--the baby mother, the drugs and various other annoyances just get to be too much.

"Where do the problems come in?" asks Samantha, who went out with Knowledge for two years. "Okay, never knowing where he is, never finding him, never going on a real date, never feeling like you are part of his life at all. You have their beeper numbers or their cell-phone numbers, but you never have home numbers because they live these crazy shady lives."

Nzingha, 28, a Philly-raised, private-school-bred, middle-class architect, can relate. Her man? A former crack dealer named Black, who has one year of college. She calls him a street dweller and says he's always on the corner with his boys, coming up with schemes to con people. Nzingha and Black have seen their fair share of problems. For one, Nzingha can't take Black anywhere. "Don't do it even to this day," she says. "Every other word is a curse word. I don't mean regular cursing, I mean extreme. And it's horrible if I hang out with his friends. They all call women b*tches. We do not mix our worlds. The only mixing happens in our house. And my father hates him."

Even so, when Nzingha met Black at a hip-hop show in New York, she went weak in the knees. He was dressed in a dashiki and jeans, and she says, "When he walked into the room, he had this really hard exterior. He had on sun glasses and he was walking with a staff. He just looked royal. Like he could take care of me. He knew how to talk, and he knew everyone, and he knew how to be."

In the four years since they've met, Nzingha says Black, 31, has taught her many things, such as how to stand up for herself and how to be comfortable around people she's not used to. He has also shown her his Sensitive side. "He's written me love letters," she says. "And he's cried in front of me and talked about issues that he's never discussed before, like childhood trauma and things like that--things that made him feel vulnerable. He told me that I was the only one he had told some of these things to."

Glen R. Hass, professor of evolutionary psychology at Brooklyn College, finds Nzingha's attraction to Black completely understandable. "A woman wants someone who will be tough and protective," says Hass, echoing Nelson George's assessment. "A self-assured, confident, take-charge kind of person." Those qualities are particularly attractive when she sees how other people respect and admire him. She wants him to be respected and maybe even feared by other people but really nice to her. The problem, says Hass, is that the very traits that win a man respect on the street don't always work well in a relationship.

Even though Nzingha adores Black, she says his bad behavior is threatening to undo their relationship. There's his temper the way he punches holes in the walls until his knuckles bleed, or gets mad and calls her every vulgar name he can think of. And she's constantly worried that he will get into a fight with someone when they go to a club. Still, the two are trying to reach a common ground. "He's told me he knows what he has in me, and he's going to do whatever he needs to do to keep me," Nzingha says. "Even if it means going into therapy, which he has." And why wouldn't Black want to mend his ways and bend over backward for a princess like Nzingha? He says she represents "the right path" for him.

As Black knows, women aren't the only ones who have something to gain from these relationships. "Going out with a princess gives you access and props," explains Supreme Magnetic, a self-described ghetto intellectual from New York. "Being associated with a girl who has money, education and privilege means you have overcome your circumstances and you're charismatic enough to circumvent the social stigma that comes along with being a thug. And it gives women vicarious power."

Rebellion and Salvation

Monique says no one made her feel as safe as she did when she was hanging out with gangsters, even though on occasion she had to hide a big, cold gun down her skimpy outfit when they would go out to clubs. Then she backtracks a bit and tells me the story of her first true love. She was in college and met him in a club. "He totally swept me off my feet," she says. "He was the slickest charmer I have ever met and made me feel like some kind of exotic Egyptian princess. I really thought this was the guy I was going to marry." They had been together almost a year when one day Monique caught a weird feeling, as if something was really really wrong. "His sister called and said Donell had been shot and killed," she recalls. "I hung up and I don't even remember what happened for the rest of the evening. I just cried and cried."

After that, Monique became very sullen, like a "full-time mourner. I looked down on all happy people--people who hadn't experienced true hardship and pain." Then she went on a mission. "I didn't save Donell, so I was going to save someone else," she says. "I only dated guys who I thought needed me. I would tell them how to start a bank account. Open a business. One of my boyfriends, I helped him find a spot to open up a store. It was the difference between just needing a man and being with a man who needed me, too. Like I was going to bring all these new things to his life and then he would never leave me."

"That's very magical thinking," says psychologist Audrey Chapman, author of Getting Good Loving: How Black Men and Women Can Make Love Work (Ballantine). "The truth is, when you mother men they grow up one day, and when they get on their feet they don't need you. I think these women go out with bad boys because they crave attention; they need validation. Some of these are high-achieving and attractive women. You'd assume they would feel more confident about themselves, but it's just the opposite. These women need the drama because they don't get validation from anything else they do."

Not everyone agrees. This idea that all women who date thugs are suffering from low self-esteem is complete nonsense, says Micaela di Leonardo, professor of anthropology and gender studies at Northwestern University. "Everyone wants to get involved with someone they think will never leave them. It's not a sign of low self-esteem, nor is it particularly female. The good girl-bad boy love story is a classic pattern. Books have been written about this; operas have been written about this. She gets the kicks out of rebelling by her association with him, and he becomes indebted to her for his salvation."

I'm not sure how much thug salvation I've done in my day. Sure, I've introduced a few men to Pan-Asian cuisine and recommended a couple of books here and there, but nothing really earth-shattering. Frankly, I think I'm reaping most of the rewards. I get company, I get entertained and I get distracted from my real life of work and pressure and constantly having to keep up a good appearance. If I didn't have money or a career or real estate, I might be looking a lot harder for an executive guy to make a life with. Could be I'd need him more. But right now I just want a sexy man to have fun with. It's a luxury, I know, but I deserve it. After all, isn't that really what being a princess is all about?

Writer Victoria Stone lives in New York. Is a thug your thing? To sound off on the pros and cons of dating bad boys, log on to www.essence.com.

I think this is just a phase that a lot of women go through. Going for and having sex with lots of bad boys, that is. I'm sure that once they mature, they'll be over these bad men.

So, my advice to you guys is to go to college, try to make something of yourselves, and then wait until one of these great women mature. That way, you will already have prepared a great life for them once they go after nice guys.

Eh. I fell asleep while reading about ten paragraphs in... something about women liking bad men... something... eh...

... Hrm... notice you don't see many women married to these "bad dude" guys. They're there psychologically for the thrills, the twists, turns and the roller coaster ride that screams danger, but sooner or later they'll tire of it, then come back to we less "dangerous" guys.

I'm a less dangerous guy. Well, sort of.

... Hrm... notice you don't see many women married to these "bad dude" guys. They're there psychologically for the thrills, the twists, turns and the roller coaster ride that screams danger, but sooner or later they'll tire of it, then come back to we less "dangerous" guys.
I'm a less dangerous guy. Well, sort of.