Lady Caroline Lamb's famous description of Lord Byron.
The image conjured up, and much beloved in bodice ripper novels, is of a man who is fatally attractive to women, intelligent, fascinating, but ultimately damaging to them, heartlessly casting them aside in the long term, leaving them broken hearted and suicidal (Lamb herself attempted suicide when Byron ended their affair).
The Byronic hero is the type that a romantic woman dreams of taming, and making "their own", but (outside the covers of Mills and Boon) this pursuit is doomed to failure.
Assholes, it seems, have always been attractive.