Mozart’s Answer to the Manwhore Question
Susan Wash once more brings the calm and careful voice of reason to bear on modern sexual madness. She says, in part:
In my recent post What a Slut Is, there were several commenters who stated that there is no such thing as a male slut. I offer the popular terms manwhore and manslut as evidence to the contrary. Unquestionably, some women are rejecting previously highly promiscuous men for relationships. I’ve called this the Boomerang Effect of Social Proof. According to one study, 70% of women lose respect for men who hook up frequently. This may have little effect on short-term mating strategies, but is likely to have a profound effect on long-term mating strategies.
Hmm. I am pretty sure that before the great Antichristian movement of the 1968 generation, there were in deed some sort of terms or words used to describe men who were of less than sterling morals, sexually speaking.
Let me think.
Oh. The word is DAMNED.
Now I have a question of my own.
My boys and I were just watching a recent THOR cartoon, and one of the Warriors Three, Fandal of the Flashing Blade, always had at least two wenches fawning on him while he flirted and flattered shamelessly. I am proud to say that the reaction of my young boys was disgust. They thought his behavior was comically stupid and embarrassing like that of Brock on Pokemon, whose eyes turn to hearts whenever Nurse Joy or Officer Jenny appears, or anything else in a skirt.
This led me to ponder. When did infidelity in men start being portrayed in popular art or fine art as either an admirable or an expected thing? When did the loveable rogue, the sly half-smiling winking lady’s man start being cast as the protagonist?
I could think of no classical models. Odysseus spends ten years trying to get back to his wife: he turns his back on Calypso, a goddess. True, Agamemnon has Biblical knowledge (or foreknowledge in her case) Cassandra, his slavegirl. But the poet does not portray this as an attractive feature of his personality: he is chopped into meat by the axe of his wife, Clytemnestra, and one of the (several) reasons for the regicidal viricide Aeschylus puts in her mouth is her contempt for his infidelity with the gold girls of Troyland, including the doomed Cassy.
The various amors and adulteries in the matter of Britain or the matter of France, I mean King Arthur tales, or yarns of the Peers of Charlemagne, are handled with strict adherence to the code of chivalrous love. The adultery of Lancelot is portrayed as treason that leads to disaster and breaks the Table Round, the finest assemblage of knights ever under heaven.
So when did the ‘Loveable Rogue’ enter the moral vocabulary of literature? Even Long John Silver is portrayed in no sympathetic light if you read the original book by Stephenson, ignoring the movies. And he had no girlfriends waiting in every port.
I know the trope is older than Captain Kirk, whom, as I recall seeing on the telly back in the days when there were only three stations and PBS, would take off his shirt for every attractive femme and femme fatale in every star port that would admit his starship into dock.
Is James Bond the first of this type and this trope? Was it Hugh Hefner that glamorized this behavior?
If so, small wonder feminism picked up so much steam during the sixties. It is the first time in history women were actually treated as sex objects rather than as sisters, mothers, and wives.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
