What is a Lothario?
A Lothario is a man who commonly seduces women, or who is viewed as intensely attractive to women, even if he chooses not to pursue them. As a general rule, Lotharios are also viewed as somewhat dangerous, since the assumption is that after the seduction, they will throw the woman away. Some similar slang terms include “Casanova” and “Don Juan.” Curiously enough, no female counterpart to Lothario exists, at least in English, perhaps because of a double-standard about sexual behavior which dominates many English-speaking societies. This slang term is a reference to a play called The Fair Penitent, written by Nicholas Rowe and published in 1703. In the play, Lothario is a character who seduces a woman and then ultimately betrays her. Rowe may have borrowed the character from Don Quixote (1605), where a remarkably similar situation also includes a character named Lothario. By the 1750s, “Lothario” had entered common English slang to refer to a seducer, usually with the implication that th
