Womanizer

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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 would be Giacomo Casanova. However, many specialists and readers of Casanova's memoirs disagree that he was devoid of emotional attachment or was motivated superficially. On the contrary, he proves to be deeply involved in most of his affairs.

Fictional womanizers include Don Juan, the title character in Don Giovanni, Roald Dahl's Uncle Oswald, Edmund Steen (of Worcester area fame), and Ian Fleming's James Bond. In Hollywood films, womanizers are often punished and/or forced into a complete rethinking of their "shallow" behavior, for example, Jack Black's character in Shallow Hal.

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," like 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.