Nobody is more synonymous with sex than Casanova. With connotations of virility, lust, and sexual prowess, it’s a name many of us might forget actually refers to a real person, someone who has inadvertently helped set a centuries-old precedent around sex, power dynamics, and gender stereotypes.
This month marks 300 years since the birth of Giacomo Casanova – and the beginning of a reputation so prolific that his name would go on to be defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “a man who has had a lot of sexual relationships”. Born in 1725, the Venetian alchemist, church cleric, and scam artist was known for harbouring several vices throughout his life, namely gambling and women. One landed him in prison – cue an infamous jailbreak story – while the other earned him a reputation for being one of the most notorious seducers of all time.
Having apparently bedded more than 150 women, Casanova had affairs with everyone, from married women and nuns to socialites and sisters. He did many other things over the course of his 73-year-long life, including publishing a translation of the Iliad and working as a librarian in Bohemia, but to this day he is best known for his philandering with women (and some men), much of which he documented in his autobiography, The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova, published in 1825.
So established is his promiscuous reputation that very rarely is it ever questioned. This is despite the fact that in recent years, there have been calls to stop referring to people as “Casanovas” in light of several allegations of rape against him and concerns over the number of underage women he slept with; he was said to have a penchant for pubescent girls. Yes, 10 might’ve been the legal age of consent back then but that hardly makes it any better if the man was actually sleeping with children. He also refused to wear condoms, or “envelop [himself] in a dead skin”, as he put it. There’s also the not insignificant claim that he impregnated his own daughter when she was 17 years old. According to Leo Damrosch, author of Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova, he once wrote: “I have never been able to conceive how a father can tenderly love his charming daughter without at least once having slept with her.”
And yet, say his name today to someone and chances are all they’ll think of is a man who had a lot of sex. Either that or Heath Ledger, who played Casanova in the 2005 film of the same name, opposite co-star Sienna Miller. Such is the strength of the narrative that male hypersexuality equates to some sort of societal elevation. It’s a validation of their masculinity; a sign that they’re doing manhood right. A lexical slap on the back, if you will: well done, old sport. Keep calm and shag on. As a result, I suspect you’d struggle to find a man who won’t take being called “Casanova” as a compliment. Attribute the same label to a woman, though, and you’ll hit a linguistic wall, one built by a millennium of sexual shame.
There is no female equivalent of Casanova. Sure, there have been some in literature and pop culture. Before Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones there was the Wife of Bath. But while Samantha has been upheld as a totem of sexual liberalism and empowerment, she’s not real. And I’d guarantee that the narrative around her would be vastly different if she was, just as it is for women in the public eye who have the audacity to talk about their sex lives, let alone how active they may or may not be. Consider Taylor Swift, one of society’s most prime targets for slut-shaming.
Throughout her career, the 35-year-old musician has been ruthlessly attacked for her love life, with lists of people she’s rumoured to have dated regularly going viral online. The noise around it has been so loud that Swift herself went so far as to address it directly as part of her re-release of 1989, which originally came out in 2014. The new version contained a song titled, “Slut”.
“The voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them,” Swift wrote in the album’s prologue before explaining how, in the years prior to 1989 being released, she had become the target of slut-shaming. “The jokes about my amount of boyfriends,” she wrote. “The trivialisation of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy-crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.”
The irony, of course, is that Swift was, as she said, literally just dating: an experience that generally involves different partners at a given time. The reaction was entirely outsized and rooted in a fear of female sexuality that persists today. Sure, people might not get away with the degree of slut-shaming Swift faced if Swift were a person they knew in real life. But we still see it everywhere, embedded within the crevices of society. Women like Rebecca Loos, Monica Lewinsky, and Amanda Knox are proof of that: for many, their names will be perpetually associated with their sex lives. They are pariahs who have been forced to spend their lives defending and explaining themselves – see Loos’ string of recent interviews, Lewinsky’s podcast, or Knox’s new memoir, Waiting to be Heard.
Compare this to the playful manner with which we refer to Casanova: a man who was not so much a serial seducer as he might’ve been a paedophilic rapist with a penchant for incest. A man can do all of these things and still be upheld as a hero. A woman has sex and she’s instantly cast as a villain who has to justify her life choices.
It’s a galling contrast but one that might change soon. Conversations around slut-shaming are happening around the world, largely thanks to the likes of Lewinsky and co and celebrities like Swift who continue to rally against it. If this continues, the narrative could shift. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take 300 years.
