Womanizer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Any material not supported by sources may be challenged and removed at any time. This article has been tagged since December 2005.

A womanizer, player, or philanderer is a man who engages in love affairs with women he cannot or will not marry. The love affairs are typically sexually motivated, with little emotional attachment. The most famous of these is typically Giacomo Casanova, though his motivations and level of commitment are debatable.

Fictional womanizers include Don Juan, the title character in Don Giovanni, Roald Dahl's Uncle Oswald, and Ian Fleming's James Bond. In most of these tales dating all the way back to Don Juan, womanizers are often punished for their callous behaviour in various ways, for example, Jack Black's character in Shallow Hal, Willie Swain's character in Schwilly Circus, or Telly from the 1996 film Kids.

There is no corresponding term of "manizer" in the language as yet, although the type can be found to exist; some use the term, "maneater", as in the 1982 Hall & Oates hit song "Maneater". A famous literary example might be Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, a woman of a certain age who chases a nineteen-year-old matador. Blanche DuBois, the third member of a sexual triangle in A Streetcar Named Desire by the playwright Tennessee Williams, is another example. Ariel Levy reports in Female Chauvinist Pigs that women are also now being referred to as players if they treat sex in a similar manner to male players.