"Gwen, tonight dare to be great," says a make-out artist to the mysterious woman he picks up or is picked up by.

Now the term is always pejorative, replacing the mock-heroic Lothario (after the rake in a 1703 play) or Casanova, suggesting the disapproval of promiscuity expressed in the slang make-out artist or operator.

A notable exception was Amy Heckerling's "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982), a funny, poignant adaption of Cameron Crowe's story about surfers and make-out artists in Southern California which showed the holy grail of sexual initiation as something more shadowed and equivocal where the girls were concerned.