Men Who'd Like to Be Don Juan

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


Do all men who approach women with the intention of having a sexual relationship act from a position of confidence? I know we’d like to think so. There is an inherent allure in the notion that men are some kind of switched-on sexual hunters that are driven by a relentless desire to win over and conquer as many women as possible. And that they are unaffected by any concerns of self consciousness, lack of confidence, or questions about their desirability or sexual ability. Oh, and that they never fail in their quest.
Certainly there are men like this but they are far from being in the majority. That is to say, of those men who are seeking a partner only a certain element, it could even be a minority, see it as a serial occupation that is both a continuous and seemingly effortless exercise.
When you take into account the broad spectrum of men within any given population seeking female partners, the majority settle, after the traditional process of trial and error, for one woman.
How then does the Don Juan* image have such a hold over not just women’s general perceptions of men, but also men’s perception of themselves?
I suppose I ask that question because I was talking to a number of men recently on the subject of sex. It was interesting for a number of reasons. Two had female partners that they did not want to have sex with, instead preferring online porn as a way of finding satisfaction. One of them liked it that way and was going to have difficulty changing. The other didn’t want to live that way and wanted to change.
Another man had just finished a long term relationship with a woman who had dictated the terms of the relationship and when they could have sex together. He loved this woman very much but she was so dominant that he became overwhelmed by her constant rules and demands and eventually had to end the relationship.
A fourth man was more Don Juan-ish and he had no difficulty finding women, they seemed to come out of the woodwork for him, as we say in Ireland. But he had a fear of them when it came to being intimate and was unable to engage in sex. The fifth man had no difficulty finding women either but while he had no difficulty engaging in the sex act, he was unable to reach orgasm.
Five very different approaches to the issue of sex, sexuality and, I suppose we could say, gender identity. By gender identity I do not mean that these heterosexual men had an issue around whether they were gay or not. Gay and lesbian issues tend to dominate when it comes to considering gender identity, for understandable reasons, but we often forget a more obvious question that arises in this area. Each of these men had, in their own unique way, a question around what it meant to be a man.
It’s very difficult to find consensus as to what it means to be a man. Everyone has a different definition. Some believe it is about being tough and having muscles. Some believe it is about being strong but fair, protective and understanding. Others see it in terms of physical prowess and we could include sexual prowess here, and still others see it in terms of bravery and courage in the face of adversity.
If we were to look for a common element we could simply say that having a penis is perhaps the baseline for being a man. That and perhaps being able to sire children. But not everyone who has a penis either feels like a man or acts along the lines of the male stereotypes set out above. Nor is a male who cannot sire children any less of a man because of it. So you see how difficult it becomes to find an absolute benchmark for what it is to be a man.
French psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan, following in a long tradition within psychoanalysis, says that one’s biological makeup is no guarantee of gender. Biology is not it. Rather he postulates that the decision is made at the level of the unconscious and that we each take up either a male or female position as a result of the infinitely detailed and almost inconsequential experiences of our lives from infancy onward.
You can trace this line of thinking back to Plato. In his play The Symposium, one of the characters explains how the Greeks believed that once upon a time people were both male and female but that the gods split us in two, hence making men and women. This is the origin of the idea that we eternally seek our other half.
So, where does that leave us in terms of the Don Juan notion? Some analysts see the fictitious womanizer as someone engaged in a pathological quest for the perfect other, the other female person who will satisfy all desire and stop us yearning. Yet it is a quest that is at once both pitiful and doomed to fail because the thing that quells all desire can never be found. It is the act of searching to which he is addicted and in every new woman he hopes to find the answer.
If you accept this version of things, then consider how attractive the mythic concept of Don Juan is for many, many men. Some are drawn to it to the point of living out either dominant or partial elements in their lives. Others who are less confident in their abilities with women see it as an ideal to which they aspire and a standard against which they rebuke themselves if they believe they fall short.
Not every man is an accomplished lover but that does not make someone a failure in the game of love either. And yet a mythic concept operates at an unconscious level against which men measure themselves. A myth based on a fictitious figure endeavouring to satisfy what could well be a pathological need to be loved.
* Among the best known versions of the Don Juan myth are Moliere’s play 'Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre'(1665); Byron’s epic poem 'Don Juan' (1821) and most famously ‘Don Giovanni’, the opera by Mozart.