Of cougars and why they actually scare us

Love, Rainer Maria Rilke said, is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

By the time one is done with one’s crushes, first long term romantic relationships in one’s twenties, one’s marriages, happy and unhappy through one’s thirties, one assumes one is done with love, and it was nice knowing you. But love, as they say, knows no bar, age included. Nor, of course, does lust.

The one good thing about being older is the pragmatism between love and lust that comes about. But being demanding about one’s sexual needs, while seen as a macho thing for older men, is often sniggered at when a woman does the same. Perhaps, this why the older woman, self-assured and demanding in her quest for sexual satisfaction from men, at times younger than her, is disparagingly termed a cougar. But we must remember, there are clear distinctions between being a sexual predator that is equal opportunity creepy for both genders, a woman who clearly seeks  consensual sexual satisfaction no strings attached and the third category, a woman who might be older and might fall in love with a younger man, where the age difference doesn’t really matter to either of them, so disapproving noses could do well to keep out of their business.

My very first introduction to the phenomenon of the cougar came about in the 1967 Dustin Hoffman film, The Graduate. Mrs Robinson, played Anne Bancroft, and immortalized by the duo Simon and Garfunkel in the eponymous song, seduces a young purposeless graduate, Dustin Hoffman, who then proceeds to in keeping with all precepts of predictable plot twists, fall in love with Mrs Robinson’s daughter. Perhaps the most iconic was the film’s poster, a stocking clad leg held aloft in the foreground, an invitation of sorts to the wary, uncertain young man looking on. American television, the font of all things disturbing in popular culture, has a reality show called The Cougar, which has an older woman choose from a line up of 20 younger men, seeking to be her love interest via a series of weekly challenges. The aim? To ‘tame’ the Cougar.

Does the Cougar need to be tamed is the moot question, a point we are still debating centuries after Shakespeare said his bit about taming the shrew, a different creature though from the cougar. Then there’s a dating site, called Cougarlife.com, which encourages older women to find younger love interests, and I use the term love with all the gentle, tender emotion it comes weighed down with.

This is not to be confused with Cougarnet.org which has nothing to do with the older female of the human species but all to do with the species of the cat family who live in the wild and can be nasty creatures to cross. Wikipedia, helpfully, has a page on “How to identify a Cougar,” with tips about noting brittle hair caused by hair dye and yellowed teeth, because yes, charm, confidence and a strong personality are, according to them, nothing in the face of the natural passage of time which does take away the sparkly sheen of youth.

The fierceness of the term cougar is telling. A cougar defies the patriarchy in both the pursuit and the docility. The cougar is the other. On the flip though, is the argument that this is exactly what men have been doing all along, objectifying younger women, and that is where the questions rise. As for that dismissive label, we might give it a rethink. As it is, we’ve appropriated too much of the animal kingdom anyway.