English Fails in Matters of Sexual Politics

My search for a female equivalent of the word womanizer , meaning a man who pursues women promiscuously, has not prospered.

That is indeed strange, because the English language is so profligate that it has a word for almost everything, and usually more than one.

The question arose from the widespread use in the media of womanizer for John Tower in his bid for Secretary of Defense.

It is curious that the first definition of womanize in Webster’s is “to make effeminate,” which obviously does not apply in the Tower case; thus, the press seized on the second definition, “to be sexually promiscuous with women.”

Dallas Williams finds it odd that as first defined womanize is a transitive verb, requiring a direct object; but by the second definition it is intransitive , and does not require an object.

“Now,” he argues, “assume a surgeon whose speciality is the sex-change operation (doing only the male-to-female variety), and assume that this is all he does every day. But every night this same doctor goes helling around with eight or 10 different bimbos.”

By definition, Williams argues, the man is womanizing day and night. “But here’s the dilemma: How can his womanizing be transitive in broad daylight and suddenly become intransitive after dark?”

An interesting question, indeed, but one that has more to do with the vagaries and flexibility of the English language than with our object--the discovery of a female equivalent for womanizer .

Karen Winant may have a clue as to why there is none. She argues that womanizers are not only promiscuous with women, but enjoy an “eroticized domination” of women. “It has to do with ‘conquering,’ with prey, with taking prestige from ‘having’ women.”

Women, she says, do not generally seek eroticized domination of men. . . . “So there is no female equivalent of ‘womanizing’ because women’s sexuality has not been cultivated along lines of conquering . . . women don’t have the same power in the culture as men.”

Like Ms. Winant, Ruth Brown protests my suggestion that in Washington “men of power would be easy marks for sexually attractive women of ambition.” She says that is “to slide the blame for the womanizer’s predatory practice of feeding his ego to his victims. . . . It is quite impossible to think of the womanizer as a victim of a procession of sexually attractive women with ambitions.”

There is no female equivalent of womanizer , then, because there is no female equivalent of John Tower?

Could be. But certainly there are man-chasers , to use the closest word I can think of, who pursue men of power for the fun of it, for financial gain or for the proximity to power.

Grover Collins suggests a word he picked up as an oil engineer in Bakersfield. The term cruiser was used by most of the oil guys in reference to the ladies who frequented the bar at the old Bakersfield Inn and the many other watering holes in Bakersfield.

In pursuing the word at the watering holes of Bakersfield we are straying far from the corridors of power in Washington, which is the proper venue for this inquiry. It is true that the women Collins describes were engaged in the sexual pursuit of men, but they can hardly be thought of as opposites to the womanizing power figures of the capital.

John Degatina recalls that in his mother’s gossip circle the words flirt and man-crazy were used, the second being more derisive. “I don’t think any better terms have appeared,” he says.

Ernie Alvarez suggests philanderer , not only as a synonym for womanizer but also for its opposite, noting that his dictionary defines the verb as “to have many love affairs,” and does not specify sex. (But Webster’s New World (1988) says “to make love insincerely, said of a man.”)

Carolyn M. Trump of Hermosa Beach suggests that lothario , meaning a “gay seducer of women,” could be feminized as lotharia . Somehow philanderer, lothario and casanova all suggest a lighthearted, romantic male, which does not seem to fit my image of John Tower and his ilk.

My friend Sara Boynoff Coonradt says succinctly: “There is no feminine counterpart of the word womanizer , just as there is no feminine counterpart of the word cuckold .”

I don’t think I care to get into that.