It has long been a truism of gender studies that there are more terms for promiscuous women than promiscuous men. The terms for women tend to be rather more negative in tone (slut, whore, slang) than the terms for men (lady-killer, player, stud). Not only that, but perfectly innocent words for women have a tendency to develop sexual meanings. For example, slapper used to mean "a large clumsy woman", hussy is directly derived from housewife, and harlot originally meant "a travelling entertainer". But surely this isn't true anymore. Surely there's no longer a sexual double standard now that we're all equal and everything is fair.
I was interested to hear my students using the word manwhore to describe a promiscuous male. It is nowhere to be seen in the OED, but blog evidence suggests that in 2005 it was used to mean "male prostitute", regardless of the gender of his customers. Perhaps it began to acquire wider visibility and more positive connotations by association with a Los Angeles rock band that won 'Best Artist of the Year' in the Los Angeles Music awards in 2005, but there have also been songs and books with manwhore in their titles, so it would be hard to say exactly why it came to be more commonly used. By the end of 2006, manwhore was being used to mean "a promiscuous male", always with negative connotations. There's no denying that the negative connotations are still normal in blogs and tweets, but a note of admiration does sometimes creep in, and there are at least two bloggers who label themselves as manwhores without implying that they take money in return for sex (it may be significant that one is a teenage boy).
Just in case you're wondering, whore very rarely has positive connotations.
