I see that Clavicular was arrested, though it appears he won’t be charged. He is another of the armies of ‘influencers’ who popular the internet, putting out statements of limited value. Not to be snarky, but I know this type. He is not unlike men I’ve known who preen and pose and create nothing of value. In fact, one of his contributions to culture is both the term and practice of ‘looksmaxxing’ which means taking extraordinary steps to improve one’s appearance, and that include drugs and breaking facial bones in the hope they will heal into a more appropriate shape. Then you will be a Chad, and life will be much better. Women like Chads, other men like Chads, and, to his theory, will open doors and make life better.
It has been my experience that other men do not like this kind of guy, but there are plenty of women who are drawn in by this kind of ‘charm.’ However, if history is any guide, these types of men and the women who love them come to ruin. Let’s look at some examples; Don Juan, Cassanova, and Lothario.
Of the three womanizers on this list, only Casanova was a real person. Lothario and Don Juan come from tales spun more than 400 years ago. All of these men are associated with a particular male pathology, and all have captured the male imagination in one way or another.
Men, it has long been observed, are far more likely to be outliers in most endeavors, from the application of violence to mathematics. Men occupy the extreme edges of most human activities, and as such, life presents a far greater set of opportunities for things to go wrong than it does for women. Nobel laureates and prisons are dominated by men, and for a reason.
Men bring this same set of habits into their relational lives. Few things are more challenging to a man than how he must relate to women. He begins life with a mother, and there is an entire library of theories about how men are shaped by their maternal bonds. But when he becomes an adult, he faces a new set of problems and opportunities with women—and here is where we find our three anti-heroes.
Don Juan—or, in some versions of the story, Don Giovanni—is a fictional character traced to a play written in 1630 by the Spaniard Tirso de Molina. Don Juan takes great pride in his ability to seduce women, but this brings him into conflict with the father of one of his conquests. He kills the girl’s father, and in various versions of the story he is either killed and denied entry into heaven by God, or he confesses the murder and is forgiven.
In its original incarnation, Don Juan was a selfish cad whose sexual prowess was the result of deception—of being someone he was not. He seduced women for his own pleasure, and murder sat on the same continuum of destruction. His sin, not merely his relationship to women, was the central issue.
But then something happened to Don Juan. In later plays and operas, his seductive power is recast as a kind of weakness. He becomes a man unable to come to terms with his own mortality and so behaves like a perpetual youth. In other versions, he is portrayed as having arrested development: devious like a child, but armed with the wit and power of an adult man. Why women fall for this obvious man-child is unclear, but in modern terms he resembles a compulsive sexual addict—someone unable to find a more adult purpose and thus perpetually placing the next woman in his sights.
Over the centuries, Don Juan undergoes a metamorphosis—from willful sinner to unwilling addict—which mirrors the changing stories we tell about many men. Don Juan is a man with no purpose, not even the purpose of making babies.
Casanova was a real person, a playwright by trade, born in 1725 to a theatrical family. His father died young, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. When Casanova fell ill as a boy, he was sent to live with another family, where at age eleven he had contact with an older girl who fondled him. Of her, he later wrote:
“…pretty, lighthearted, and a great reader of romances. … The girl pleased me at once, though I had no idea why. It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a feeling which later became my ruling passion.”
Casanova tried many paths in his youth—the clergy, the military, and other respectable professions—but he would not stick with any of them, and he enjoyed gambling. After a long life spent on the fringes of nobility, frequently in the company of wealthy women whom he regularly seduced, he wrote his autobiography. His fame rested on a handful of plays, books, and articles, along with frequent run-ins with the law for blasphemy and sexual impropriety.
In the end, he was forced to take a job as a librarian for a minor noble—much younger than himself—who neither admired him nor cared to hear his stories. Casanova died having never applied himself seriously to anything other than women and sex. In his letters, he wrote:
“Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite of mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.”
Casanova’s life was dominated by women, yet it did not include a wife or children.
Lothario has a somewhat more complicated history. The character appears in a play written by the British writer Nicholas Rowe in 1702. Rowe places him in the English canon, though the original Lothario was a minor character in Don Quixote.
In both cases, Lothario is a lazy man who discovers, almost by accident, that he has a talent for seducing women and gaining access to their time and resources. He is less compulsive than Don Juan or Casanova—more of a “pool guy” or “milkman” figure—but still a man with little mission in life beyond bedding women. It is here we might find Clavicular; pretty and useless. Lothario has no stated profession, religious conviction, or creative drive. He simply exists, and functions more as a mirror for the sexual contradictions and confusions of the women he seduces than as a figure driven by deep or tragic pathology himself.
The stereotype represented by Don Juan, Casanova, and Lothario is very much still with us—and, I would argue, growing. The phenomenon of fatherless boys is connected to men who engage in recreational sex with willing, and I suspect often morally empty, women, while taking no interest in the children such unions might produce.
Yet these men, while sexually active, frequently have no children at all. They do not want children, and in most cases do not want marriage either. Casanova had no children in real life, and neither Don Juan nor Lothario did in their stories. While the type has changed outwardly, inwardly it remains the same.
Of course, many men throughout history died childless—but most often not by design. Young men died in war, accidents, or acts of sacrifice. That is categorically different from men who are healthy, interested in women, regularly engage in heterosexual sex, and still reach the age of fifty without children.
These men may develop hobbies. They brew their own beer, cook elaborate meals, or collect odd things—old cameras, classic video games. But what they lack are the traditional hallmarks of male adulthood, foremost among them a family. They have no wives and no children. They are, in evolutionary terms, a dead end. Even if they ride Harleys, they are soft at the center when confronted with the hardest realities of the world, which remains—evolutionarily speaking—red in tooth and claw.
They are the men C. S. Lewis warned would become common: Men Without Chests. They are here now, and in abundance. They have plenty of appetite and intelligence, but to what end? It is the chest that provides purpose and continuity, and on that score many men are failing. Clavicular, and his friends, like another guy who has done nothing useful and who makes nothing useful, Andrew Tate, are empty vessels who pour their nothingness on to other men.
There is no replacement for being a father and accepting that responsibility. A man can fail at many things and succeed at this and still be a winner. A few exceptional men have built strong substitutes, becoming leaders to men and women who were not their biological children. But for the average healthy man, if he can father children, does so, and accepts the role, the benefits are profound—not only for the child, but for him. These benefits cannot be substituted.
Men who miss that ride—men like Don Juan, Casanova, Lothario, and many men today—miss out on more than they can ever fully know.
Sex by itself is transporting, but it is merely the precursor to the act that actually matters.
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