What's with all this talk of 'cougars'?Why are women being labelled like animals in the zoo for dating younger men?
Hadley Freeman The Guardian, Wednesday 20 January 2010
Pot-bellied pigs? So 90s. Labradoodle? How noughties. There's only one animal to mention these days if you want to look ever so now, darlings, and that's the cougar. Flatteringly, this term does not refer to an actual animal but rather to women. To be precise, a woman who is involved with – no, no, cover the children's eyes! – a younger man.
With the likes of Demi Moore, Madonna and Sam Taylor-Wood all daring to date younger men, rare is the tabloid or magazine that has not featured "cougars" recently, and even rarer is the publication that does not feature the verb "prowl" in the story.
Cynics may point out that, despite the tabloids' unabated horror, powerful female celebrities with nubile younger men is not exactly new, with examples such as Mae West and Joan Collins (who surely earned the universe's eternal adoration when, asked whether she was concerned about her and husband Percy's 32-year age difference, replied, "If he dies, he dies") coming easily to mind. For every Samantha Jones, there's a Blanche Devereaux making double entendres in the background.
But these cynics are missing the point, because few things retain the ability to shock like the idea that a woman doesn't necessarily float off on an iceberg of chastity after her 35th birthday. And if the horrifying spectre of young male flesh brushing up against older female skin wasn't sufficient warning, here's Iris Robinson, now being treated for clinical depression, after her affair with a teenager was exposed, although it's hard to say what has horrified people more: her alleged financial improprieties in raising money for her lover's business or that the gentleman concerned was 19. Six of one, half-dozen of the other, really.
(Incidentally, my favourite cougarish tale comes from Peter Biskind's biography of Warren Beatty, in which Beatty took a more mature Lillian Hellman out to dinner. Most ladies worry about getting food stuck in their teeth on a date; Hellman went one further by dropping her teeth into her spaghetti. Nonetheless, Beatty was apparently quite taken. Who needs Oil of Olay when Beatty's around?)
Spaghetti splashes aside, the risks posed by these women are so great that an American cruise line has banned "cougar events" on their vessels (cruise ships known for being the last word in taste) and Air New Zealand recently ran an advert about the rise of "the cougar", which managed to make Australia in comparison look like the bastion of political correctness.
This nonsense is as predictable as the fact that Jay Jopling, did not, to my knowledge, get labelled with any animalistic terms when he was photographed with Lily Allen, 22 years his junior, unlike his ex-wife Taylor-Wood, now pregnant and engaged to a 19 year old. Is one less acceptable than the other? As long as everyone's legal that seems pretty moot. Less moot though is this: if Jack Nicholson has spent most of his life dating women born when he was already an adult, and been celebrated for it, why should women be labelled like animals in the zoo? Because of a woman, that's why.
According to a 2001 article in the Globe and Mail of Toronto, "cougar" first appeared in 1999 in the name of a dating website, cougardate.com, after one of the site's founders claimed her nephew told her that she was like a cougar, "in search of defenceless animals".
Ten years later, Courteney Cox decided to build on her Friends success by starring in the TV show, Cougar Town, which makes having sex after 40 look about as fun as having a smear test in the middle of Trafalgar Square.
As Gail Collins details with understandable regret in her new book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to The Present, women have shown a remarkable ability, ever since the 60s, to turn their liberation into self-exploitation, as anyone who has seen a teenage girl walk down the street wearing a T-shirt proclaiming that she is "Tight like spandex" knows.
So it is not surprising, merely depressing, that the term "cougar" has been propagated so heavily by women and the female-oriented media.
This weekend, a female columnist tutted that "cougars have a short lifespan . . . one day it's a hot thing, the next it's hard work". Shush, everyone out there, who's protesting "hmmm, that sounds like every relationship in the world", and let's give this journalist some credence. Of course, it would be easier to do that if she hadn't cited the recent demise of the relationship between Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins as proof that "cougars have a short lifespan", seeing as, reportedly, it was Sarandon, 63, who left Robbins, 51, not the other way round, despite Sarandon having "crossed the border", whatever that means.
There's no need to get carried away and claim, as one paper did, that Iris Robinson "is a feminist heroine", seeing as allegations of financial impropriety and depression don't feature in most feminist manifestos.
However, the clearly unwell Robinson aside, an alliance between an older woman and younger man suggests that not all relationships spin around the axis of procreation. Sometimes, sex is just about sex – even, heck, especially for women over 40 – and some people should take the hint from Chaucer's Wife of Bath who said 700 years ago, "Jhesu crist us sende / Housbondes meeke, yonge, and fressh abedde." Or, as the insurpassably glorious Golden Girl Blanche Devereaux put it, "I've decided to overlook that minor detail [of age] and succumb to the Vesuvius of Passion that is about to erupt from me."
