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My husband is seven months younger than I am. We were fairly young (for New Yorkers, anyway) when we got married, but the seven month age difference and when the wedding fell on the calendar meant that he was only 23 when we tied the knot, and I was half-way to being 25. "I robbed the cradle!" I liked to exclaim, although the funny thing is that he looks older than he is and I look younger than I am (or at least I used to, anyway). This was years before it was cool for women to partner with younger men. Yeah, I'm so ahead of the fads...
A few weeks ago in Salon, Rebecca Traister (one of my writing heroes, FYI) wrote a mostly funny essay (despite my excerpt) about the cougar trend that took off in 2005 when Demi Moore married a man 15 years her junior:
Cougars, as we portray and celebrate them, are mimicking the midlife crisis-penis-car-crippling-insecurity version of mature masculinity. They are trying to be the dudes who are half-reviled and half-heroic in the American imagination, the ones who ditch their longtime partners for uncomplicated trophy sylphs who supposedly won't argue with them about either U.S. policy in Afghanistan or whose day it is to drive carpool.
These ladies, like Stacey Anderson [from the TV show "The Cougar"], want the mindless young men with whom they have little hope of actually connecting intellectually or emotionally, the kind of boys parodied on "30 Rock," when Liz Lemon dated a 20-year-old and had to buy him video games and a leather bracelet and he lived with him mom, who looked just like Liz. When these women say they're looking for someone uncomplicated, who doesn't want to settle down, they're parroting men like Jack Nicholson's character in "Something's Gotta Give," who tells Diane Keaton's character that he dates young women because he likes to "travel light," with women who don't threaten or challenge him or even really engage him. As "The Cougar" roars at us with faux go-girl verve, "If men can do it, so can women!"
In her takedown of so-called "sexperts" who just push old stereotypes dressed up in new leopard print mini skirts, Teresa at Flesh and Spirit has a most excellent point: where are the lesbian cougars?
I suspect this new emphasis on women over forty pursuing casual sex with significantly younger men has as much to do with good sex as men over forty pursing casual sex with significantly younger women. In other words, it’s less about sex than ego.
No, in my experience — and again I’m no “sexpert” — the best sex is to be had not with those boy toys but with the cougars pursuing them. Forget Sex and the City. Our paradigm is The L-Word. So where are the columns on lesbian cougars? The only place I find them is online in porn videos — fantasies for men, not science for the columnists.
Right. I forgot that the whole point of cougars is really to play into stereotypical ideas of female sexuality, which of course, would leave out any women who don't desire men or male fantasies about women's sexuality. Which brings up the whole size issue. Cougars are all super fit, super thin ladies who just happen to be older than 22. Di at Fat Chic ties the cougar thing in with the idea of body image:
I only heard the term “cougar” in the last year or so, and until now I’ve chosen to ignore it. Part of me hopes to see it claimed as something positive - women who generate fabulous right through to the end of their lives - but most of me cringes at the not-subtle implication by (essentially) Hollywood that women of a certain age should stop being so inconvenient and just disappear. That’s my motto: encouraging women to make Hollywood uncomfortable one pound and year at a time.
Like lesbians, cougars who wear a size above 2 won't be playing on a screen any time soon. What young guy would want a "fat" older woman who thinks she's sexy? Geez!
Another interesting aspect of this whole cougar thing is who is writing about cougars. We have feminists like Teresa and Rebecca, who are glad that feminism moved humanity into more open roles than traditionally considered acceptable, but who bemoan the exploitation of feminist goals that turn women into charicatures like cougars. Then we have the people who believe
