Why are Bad Boys so sexy?

The if's and why's of stuff are what spices up life! After all, if someone asks me, 'why do you always write about bad guys?', I like to be able to answer. This means, I have to think stuff through that usually doesn't need a lot of thinking. If you like something, it's enough to know that you do, right? Right.
Unfortunately, the gap between 'that asshole' and 'that bad, bad boy' isn't wide enough to risk ending up on the other side. If you, like me, want to write about the right kind of bad boys, it's important to know which way to go, so I pondered over this for a while and wrote down the few cliff notes I noticed. Here goes!

The forbidden fruit

We all know lots and lots of good, solid, nice, helpful, a little boring people. Those aren't bad qualities at all! It's good to live in a world generally void of crazy people. Makes a lady willing to leave the house in the morning and all that.
Fiction, on the other hand, should be a sanctuary, a ways to escape every-day-life, something new and fresh and titillating. Most of us will never meet- and like- a bad boy in real life, because they are, well, bad. A book, story, movie, TV-series, on the other hand, offers a safe, sane and entertaining way to get a taste. Just a little lick to spice up your mind and then get back to your (hopefully) just as safe and sane real life.

Dangerous people and the dream of protection

I guess I won't have to explain to you what Stockholm Syndrome is, but as much as this plays a role, it's not what I mean with the dream of protection. Stockholm Syndrome plays to the need to live in a protected group, to keep yourself out of harm's way, but it only describes a special set of circumstances. If you're not in harm's way, you can't really call your attraction to a bad boy "Stockholm Syndrome". You'd have to be under duress for that, sorry :)
A blatant display of aggression does trigger something in us, though, as long as it isn't directed at us. I don't mean bar fights or aggression issues, I mean controlled, prepared willingness to defend yourself and use the most effective means at your disposal.
Bad boys control their surroundings and themselves, and that's sexy. They don't light a cigarette in a hospital because they don't know that they aren't supposed to smoke there, they do it despite knowing that, and in full awareness of the repercussions. That they get away with setting their own rules speaks to us mere mortals, and it makes us want to be one of them.

They stand out from the crowd

There are actually loads of psychological studies about the phenomenon of "bad boy attraction" in the world wide web, so please feel free to google yourself into a psychological studies coma if you'd like to read more!
I'll just do the quick-and-dirty short version here, so here goes.
First of all, bad boys tend to have markers for a number of behavioral abnormalities, like narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy and so on. People with such a behavior challenge have proven to be especially skilled with playing a role to get into women's panties (or a guy's skivvies) - seems like the lack of sociability might be a good incentive to treat group behavior like a skill to learn.
But! Not only do most "bad boys" know how to charm a lady, they also stand out because of how evolution taught us poor humans to identify patterns and notice abnormalities. That means, if a bad guy and a good guy both appear at the same time, we still notice the bad guy sooner, because he tickles our instincts, which in turn tell us to pay attention, gosh darn it!

They are crowd pleasers and a foundation for the hero

This is my final point on the topic of bad boys, and it's one I've only recently started to notice.
The media landscape has gone through a lot of changes over the last decades. Put the audio series of the first "Superman" next to the most recent "Superman" movies, and you'll see what I mean. Characters have become more three-dimensional, more real, more diverse. Good guys nowadays have their own flaws and quirks, some could even be considered bad guys if you cut them out of their environment and have a good look at them. Examples, anyone?
Riddick, for one. He's a bad guy and he isn't shy about it, but because of what he does and how he decides, we still like him. What about Dexter Morgan from the TV-series "Dexter"? Can't argue that he's bad, oh so bad, but we still like him in a disturbing way.
It's gotten to the point that we'd have a hard time distinguishing good from bad, were it not for the surrounding factors and hints, and this is where bad boys and bad guys come in. They not only show us that evil can actually look good, they also underhandedly point us towards the "good guy", without forcing us to choose.
They also show us that bad boys don't equal bad guys, but that's a topic for another time. :)

So, what's your favorite bad boy, and is he also a bad guy?