Some Like it Rough
His name was Johnny. Triona had pulled him, but I was trying to discourage her.
Anne Sexton, 21 Jan 2010
It wasn’t that she was too drunk to know what she was doing. We’d only been in the club for an hour and she was still sipping her second drink.
It wasn’t that I was jealous. No indeed – I certainly didn’t want him for myself. Definitely not!
It wasn’t that his accent suggested he was from one of Dublin’s less salubrious suburbs. Plenty of good people grow up without money and only unreconstructed snobs think otherwise; besides which it’s not like my childhood featured Mercedes Benzs and show ponies either.
Nor was it that he was wearing a wife-beater and a tacky onyx ring – although that didn’t help.
No, it was more that she’d met him when he tried to sell her drugs. That and the fact that Johnny was missing a tooth and had a scar down the side of his face. He looked rough – and that of course is why Triona was attracted to him.
The sexual attractiveness of rough trade of is something I don’t really understand. Granted, I’d be unlikely to bed a preppy accountant in a pink shirt and Pringle jumper, and I like guys with tattoos and long hair as much the next girl, but really bad boys – ones that get into fights, spend their disposable income on smack and are on first name basis with their local gardai – they leave me cold. It’s one thing if your sexual partner sneaks off in the middle of the night, but anyone who may sneak off with your TV, DVD player and credit card as well is best avoided.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, my feelings make perfect sense. According to this branch of research, apparently, human beings aim for the best sexual partner they can get. First off, this means that whether we’re straight or gay, want children or abhor the very idea, we all like people whose physical appearance suggests fertility.
In some ways sexual attraction is quite narcissistic: most of the time we like people who remind us of our first loves – ourselves. We are drawn to those who come from a background similar to our own, who hold the same religious and political views, whose physical appearance is about as good as our own and who have as much education. Any great deviation from this and we tend to think that we’re in different leagues and that one of us could do ‘better’. That way lies misery, and most of us avoid it.
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