Judith Warner, a columnist at The New York Times, has written a critical yet predictably off-base column about the recent spate of “cougar” programming on television.
Warner herself is skeptical of the cougar phenomenon, noting:
But does “Cougar Town†or its spiritual sisters truly say anything real about the state of American middle-aged womanhood? Any more than “Sex and the City†did about American relationships or most women’s shoe-shopping budgets?
I don’t think so. I sure hope not. It would be a mistake, I think, to talk ourselves into believing that it does or should. “Cougar Town†— the whole Cougar phenomenon — perhaps taps into many women’s worst tendencies: their fears of getting older, losing sexual power, ending up on the slag heap of social desirability. But most women, I think, end up taking these feelings in stride. Most women in their 40s, however conflicted, however sometimes confused, aren’t actually spiraling into self-doubting despair, but are actually working their way toward some greater degree of self-acceptance. Many experience — along with the shift in body mass that pulls things down and pushes them sideways — a kind of psychic shift that frees up some of the energy that once went into external appearances. Many come into their own, creatively, professionally. And in motherhood, in friendships, in romantic relationships.
A woman like Cox’s Jules — visibly vibrating with self-doubt and thinly-veiled self-loathing, is, it’s fair to say, probably the least likely figure of fantasy to be conjured by women Cox’s age. In fact, she’d be more of a nightmare. But this Cougar beast — sexually aggressive, ever-available, a woman beating a man at his own game — is a fantasy that seems to be selling pretty well right now, at least to (mostly male) studio heads and TV execs and advertisers. Maybe that’s because she’s such a twit: so narcissistic, so superficial, so stunted emotionally, so dependent upon deriving her value from her desirability — her currency — in men’s eyes. Maybe it’s because, despite her ostensible sexual power (derived, you’ll recall, uniquely from a young man’s acceptance of her), she’s really so very unthreatening. So very pitiful.
It’s girls-gone-wild feminism for 40-somethings. It’s ridiculous and belittling and it stinks of another round of backlash. In the Cougar fantasy, in the figure of a woman who uses her younger mate to puff up her vanity and enhance her sense of power and control, you find all the most cartoonish aspects of boorish middle-aged masculinity. I’m sure we can generate better fantasies for ourselves.
The notion that cougars somehow represent middle aged men projecting their own fantasies onto middle aged women is strained and obtuse, but typical of a feminist like Warner. See something going on regarding women that you don’t like? Why, of course, men are to blame for it. An “authentic” female perspective would never have come up with such a thing, because it doesn’t resonate with me, so therefore men are to blame. Q.E.D.
Luckily Warner’s commenters aren’t letting her off lightly this time. Many women have commented that the cougar phenomenon is a reality for them, and that they enjoy it very much, citing the energy of younger men and so on. Others write that following their mid-life divorces, younger men simply seemed more attractive, and so on. For whatever reason, however, there are many women today who are not only interested in the cougar phenomenon, but who are living it, to one degree or another.
My own personal perspective is that I see no issue, in itself, with people dating at various age ranges. Many women seem to experience a heightening of the libido betwen 35 and 45, and perhaps at that specific time in their lives a man who is significantly younger can be rather sexually attractive to such women. I would suspect that many of the larger age-gap relationships will not last as the women age into their 50s, but some may. I do agree with the women critiquing the cougar craze in that it perpetuates standards of beauty and appearance into later ages, which is probably not helpful for the vast majority of women (and women like Warner certainly don’t like it), but in this culture, people are free to behave as they wish. Cougars may seem desperate and pathetic, but perhaps some of them are more fulfilled than may be apparent, and are simply getting what they want out of life at this specific moment.
In any case, however one feels about cougars, laying the blame at the feet of men for the recent spate of cougar programming is rather silly. Men aren’t watching TV to anything like the extent that women are. The cougar programming seems squarely aimed at women, presumably because at least some women like the programming based on testing. I do think that the topic is controversial, and that this controversy is going to cost these shows quite a few viewers (women seem polarized on the cougar issue, either liking it or hating it) — but perhaps that was the point to begin with? To attract attention to a controversial subject, and thereby make money? To me that seems much more likely than Warner’s scenario of some middle-aged TV exec pushing his own fantasies onto women. But, then again, feminists never really do make a lot of sense about most things.
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{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
Of course middle aged women like the cougar programming. The belieft hat they are still sexually attractive is important to them. Its important to any human being to believe they are attractive and women lie to themselves far more than men do to themselves.
Blaming the men is typical, but the reality is women are to blame for everything they have done for themselves and to themselves.
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Women have always desired to have sex with younger men, and men have always been willing to have sex with older women. That is nothing new. What is new is the emergence of older women who are sexually active outside of marriage. Previously, an unmarried older woman usually just fell into two categories – the widow or the old maid (read: closet lesbian). And in either case the notion to cruise for a young man was not very appealing. The widow (if still young) would typically search for a new (typically older) husband. And the “old maid†would continue to happily live in spinsterhood.
Divorce and the social acceptance of unwed motherhood have allowed women to act like they are 20 year old girls well into their 40s and 50s. If such women keep somewhat attractive (i.e., don’t get fat) they can usually find a younger man in a bar who would be happy to pump and dump them. However, finding a younger man who is willing to commit to marriage is a different story. Most men instinctively prefer to have a younger wife. And those men who are willing to be willing to marry a much older woman tend to be men that have limited options.
Sure, there are exceptions. An extremely rich older woman such as Madonna or Demi Moore can easily find a desirable younger man who will marry. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.
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I watched the pilot episode with my wife last night (TiVo), and while I though it definitely had it’s humorous moments, I simply could not get past several key inconsistencies (I’ll get those later).
However, my wife loved the show, and promptly set up a “Season Pass”, so it looks like I’ll be getting to see more of it.
Now, as I suggested to my wife, I think she identified too closely with Courtney Cox’s character. She is nearly the same age as Cox, and looks quite a bit like her as well. In addition, much like the Character Jules, my wife (a lawyer) is a success career woman and mother of a teenage son (but also two adult daughters). And, as I joked with her, had she ended up marrying the college football player she was with when I met her, she would likely be “Jules”.
Actually, for those very reasons, I too, found myself identifying with Jules. But, again, there were deep inconsistencies with the whole plot setup.
As anyone who’s paid the least bit of attention to men’s issue will know, attractive women, with careers, simply DO NOT “carry” dead-weight husbands for (what we are left to assume is) 16-17 years of marriage – children not-withstanding. This would be especially true if the man were a serial philanderer. Women less attractive than Cox, and with few options (romantically and/or financially) routinely divorce their husbands for far less provocation. It simply strains credibility to accept that Jules stayed married to Bobby until she was in her mid-forties.
Next, there was the large number of her cougar peers who were also relatively attractive – in fact, I don’t recall seeing one “typical” looking middle-aged woman. A better representation of typical cougars was Saturday Night Live’s “Cougar Den”. Instead were asked to believe that all cougars have strong sexual marketplace value (yes, I’m aware that using more typical looking women would not have made for good viewing).
There’s also the matter of availability of young studs looking to hookup with (exclusively) cougars, and thus choosing to hang out at the cougar bar themselves. As if young men with strong marketplace value would not be preferentially looking for younger women. Again, SNL’s “Cougar Den” seems to have been more realistic.
Which brings me to something I’ve been wondering about vis-a-vis the men who do “go” for cougars.
Personally, I’m envisioning a group of opportunistic young men (male gold-diggers, if you will) who look to hook-up with well- heeled (does anyone still use that term for financially well-off) cougars for the financial advantage to be gained. I can easily see men, who don’t have the same access to college financial aid that women do, turning to an older women so as to exchange sexual companionship for tuition and living expense money.
Unless I miss my guess, in a few short years, we’re going to start hearing the griping from feminists about young men who “use” older women for their money, then dump them once they’ve gotten what they wanted.
Anyway, just my quick thoughts about the pilot of that show. I guess I’ll be learning more about it in the coming weeks. At least it is fairly humorous, even if not easily believable.
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Neglected to mention the divorced neighbor, who bags the young chicks.
At one point Jules states he walked away from his marriage Scot-free.
Yeah, right! I don’t think I need to explain the illogic/statistical improbability of that one.
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Personally, I’m envisioning a group of opportunistic young men (male gold-diggers, if you will) who look to hook-up with well- heeled (does anyone still use that term for financially well-off) cougars for the financial advantage to be gained.
Terry McMillan, anyone? Or Guy Ritchie, for that matter. He may only be 10 years younger than the “Material Girl”, and have some wealth in his own right, but he still walked away from the marriage with a tidy sum.
The 1980 film “American Gigolo” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080365/) portrayed Richard Gere’s character as more of a sort of sexual social worker, but the woman I was dating at the time identified very strongly with Lauren Hutton’s character and the power she had in the film. Given that was nearly 30 years ago (how time flies) the fact that the woman’s power derived from her husband and was not achieved in her own right, fit the times.
If the feminist vision of utopia is to be achieved, and a complete mixing and swapping of roles between men and women become the norm, it is totally to be expected that some younger men with the male version of beauty power will exploit that power by using it to gain material resources from women in exchange for meeting some of their emotional needs and pretending to be attracted to them. Men have traditionally been able to compensate for their falling value in the sexual marketplace on purely physical attractiveness terms by acquiring secondary material assets, so now that women have thrown away the long term investment strategy of locking in a mate at the time their sexual market value is highest, it makes sense for them to be able to engage in the same sort of compensation.
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” See something going on regarding women that you don’t like? Why, of course, men are to blame for it.”
Reminds me vaguely of when women screech at the fashion mags because of the stick-figure ideals they propagate.
Problem is that the editors and managers of those fashion mags are women and (mostly) homosexual men. Not too many heteros in that crowd.
I suspect that the networks suffer from the same malady. Moreover, the networks wouldn’t run the show if it doesn’t sell, i.e., doesn’t attract advertisers. Which means there is a market for it. Which means that women want to see crap like that.
“It’s girls-gone-wild feminism for 40-somethings”
Perhaps. But let us not forget that the girls in the GGW series “do it” for t-shirts, sometimes nothing at all except the thrill of being “bad” or getting their 15 mins of fame. They pour their sexuality on the street because it is nothing but cheap currency for them, something that they came by not by the sweat of their brow but because they were born with a vag.
“…you find all the most cartoonish aspects of boorish middle-aged masculinity”
No, on that show you’ll find the most cartoonish aspects of what used up middle age fembot women think is a proper expression of middle-aged masculinity. In other words, the expression of “masculine” behavior is more a reflection of women’s concept of manhood is, not what authentic masculinity does.
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the whole Cougar phenomenon — perhaps taps into many women’s worst tendencies: their fears of getting older, losing sexual power, ending up on the slag heap of social desirability.
Translation: Judith Warner is already there, and wants us to think it’s not so bad.
Many experience — along with the shift in body mass that pulls things down and pushes them sideways — a kind of psychic shift that frees up some of the energy that once went into external appearances.
Translation: I, Judith Warner, have totally let myself go, and no longer even try to make my aging, slack body attractive to men, least of all my beta provider husband.
despite her ostensible sexual power (derived, you’ll recall, uniquely from a young man’s acceptance of her), she’s really so very unthreatening. So very pitiful.
Translation: I, Judith Warner, am not sexually attractive to young men, and thus must sneer at the very idea of being sexually attractive to young men as pitiful, stunted, and superficial.
It’s girls-gone-wild feminism for 40-somethings. It’s ridiculous and belittling and it stinks of another round of backlash. In the Cougar fantasy, in the figure of a woman who uses her younger mate to puff up her vanity and enhance her sense of power and control, you find all the most cartoonish aspects of boorish middle-aged masculinity. I’m sure we can generate better fantasies for ourselves.
Translation: I, Judith Warner, know that the “cougar fantasy” is unattainable to sexually unattractive women like me, and therefore I must scoff at cougars and especially at those damned boorish men who are attracted to young women and not to me.
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Good points Tarl.
Feminists now have to deal with the scourge of women their own age making men happy. Younger men at that!
Feminist insecurities can be so transparent at times.
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Feminists are also having to deal with the collapse of their ideology as women’s intrinsic natures (which feminism has flatly denied existing) continue to assert themselves.
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So are female high school teachers sleeping with their younger male students part of the Cougarevolution? Older women seeking validation they are still “hot” from a captive audience?
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Unrelated to Warner’s column, I have to say, this cougar-phenomenon is quite good for the manfolk.
This might be an unpopular view here, but I found the relationships with them to be unbelievably comfortable. If you can act/look manly they tolerate almost anything and they are quite grateful for everything :] They know what they want and they know what YOU want, and I like that in women. They are MUCH less likely to play tiresome mind-games in bed, and also have a LOT less taboos.
Of course it’s best to have a younger LTR and a cougar lover
It’s evident that cougars are not for 18 year olds who value smooth skin above almost anything else. Also they are not for hardcore alphas who believe that dating anyone not at least 5 years younger is a sign of weakness. For lazy men in their early 30s like me they are perfect though.
Probably many conservatives and/or natural alphas sneer at me now, but as a ‘reformed beta’ I can tell you that you can have an extreme boost in your confidence and a never-before experienced feeling of freedom if you know that you’ll never ever have to put up with any shit again because you have OPTIONS.
Also, I find some(!) cougars quite sexy.
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2009/08/hello_ladies_fur_flies_at_bay.php?page=1
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ztp, teachers are rarely cougars.
By the (somewhat loose) definition, cougars are above 40.
Also they are not paedophiles, they don’t want ‘innocent little children’, quite the contrary, they want full-fledged men for obvious reasons.
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A big part of the appeal of the cougar phenomenon for women is the ridiculous idea that these older women are “preying on†younger men. Since feminists see older men having sex with younger women as taking advantage of them, the reasoning seems to be that the opposite must be true as well. Of course this is absurd. These women are giving out sex for free, no strings attached, and the men are simply availing themselves of it. The former have no power over the latter at all—if anything, quite the contrary.
One of the real reasons that Warner finds cougars pathetic is that this reality is starting to dawn on women like her. While I don’t think cougars themselves are necessarily all that pathetic, the idea that they’re somehow turning the tables on men and giving them a taste of their own medicine, etc., is one of those 180-degree inversions of reality that women seem to specialize in. “Beating a man at his own game”–yeah, right.
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I second Deansdale’s opinions on this matter. Many of the maligned cougars are divorced first wives of high-status men, men who are now dipping into a lower age female cohort for a second wife or LTR. It makes sense that a younger male would like to find added (read: supplemental) relief or affection b/w the legs of a cougar, to not only sate his student/teacher (or any other analogous) fantasy, but to also ‘get back’ at the higher status first husband who has now taken to drawing from the younger male’s generational cohort.
But I do think I understand the logic behind all the push in media to play on the ‘self-eval’ triggers in aging women. It’s likely just an angle to sell more beauty, diet, exercise, etc. products.
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Here’s a review of Cougar Town:
http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2009/09/cougar-town-courteney-cox.php
They note that Cox is not a very realistic cougar:
Yeah, that sounds like a realistic cougar!
Also, we note that as usual in Hollywood these days, her ex-husband is a loser:
Yeah, that sounds realistic! Someone as hot as Cox married a prole!
Why couldn’t her ex-husband be a successful guy who is dating a succession of hot young Eastern European girls? Hmmm, well, that would bring into sharp focus the low SMV of cougars, and their lack of power and options in the sexual marketplace. The feminists would scream with fury if such hard truths were depicted.
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There was a quote from Cox a number of years ago, noting that it was a shock for her to no longer be the youngest gal in the room and no longer have men look at her (instead seeing male gazes go to younger women in her social circle). But she said, she told herself she was married so it did not matter.
Funny.
TV is a gay/female ghetto, particularly in show-running and the executive level, so the charge that evil White Men (who are straight) are ruining things is typically bogus.
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This couger craze is increasing the pedophilic desires of middle aged hags towards prepubescent boys. And this is dangerous because women have far easier access to children than do men. Yet no one in the lamestream media is seriously discussing the spate of female pedophiles raping their underage male students (and) the alarming increase in mother-child sex abuse cases.
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Cougars are awesome. I look forward to becoming one someday.
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“at least to (mostly male) studio heads and TV execs and advertisers”
TV is run by women and for women.
Judith is another woman-liar.
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“My own personal perspective is that I see no issue, in itself, with people dating at various age ranges.”
I do, regarding older women seeking younger men. First of all, it affects the overall powerbalance between men and women, which in turn affects me.
Second of all, these women have been playing feminist slut their whole lives – as promiscuous youth, and as asset-stripping divorcee – rather than been abandoned, she is rewarded for her behaviour into her later years.
This is an unjust (i.e. feminist) scenario. Let’s not sit on the fence here: cougarism is wrong, it is an unjust (feminist) development.
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“I do think that the topic is controversial, and that this controversy is going to cost these shows quite a few viewers (women seem polarized on the cougar issue, either liking it or hating it) — but perhaps that was the point to begin with? To attract attention to a controversial subject, and thereby make money?”
TV is always 50% profit, 50% social programming. This programming is made to kick-start social trends.
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“Personally, I’m envisioning a group of opportunistic young men (male gold-diggers, if you will) who look to hook-up with well- heeled (does anyone still use that term for financially well-off) cougars for the financial advantage to be gained.”
In feminist society, women are not cheated by men. Full stop. Stop talking nonsense.
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“If the feminist vision of utopia is to be achieved, and a complete mixing and swapping of roles between men and women become the norm”
Please separate rhetoric from actual intent. Feminism is not about true “swapping of ‘gender’ roles”. It is about female prvilege and preference in all instances.
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“Feminists are also having to deal with the collapse of their ideology as women’s intrinsic natures (which feminism has flatly denied existing) continue to assert themselves.”
Women’s intrinsic desires (resource-acquisition, fucking over men, infinite entitlement) have always been equivilent with feminism. Get with the programme.
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I like this “no 2 femlies” guy.
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Yes. The problem is this: any degree of “hottness” is antithetical to the cougar concept.
A cougar is so old, decrepit, undesirable — “invisible” is the word lots of older women use — that her only hope of any male “face time” is to go after young (and thus presumably horny) guys with her money and lots of alcohol, in the hope of maybe getting a couple of hours with one. She has no other options, so her only recourse is go on the hunt. Not that I think very many have the moxie to do so, years of BS about “strong, independent women who go after what they want” notwithstanding.
The original cougar, Cougar Annie, was 72 when she advertised in the local paper for a husband to help her run her homestead. He was an abusive drunk who just happened to be 63, but you take what you can get when you’re desperate… So think Joan Rivers without the fame, money, personality (if you think she has any) or any of the many plastic surgeries.
Demi Moore is not a cougar. Far from it. Neither is Courtney Cox or her TV character. Any woman who has any sort of non-negative value in the dating/mating market and is thus getting hit on by men for dates is not a cougar.
The tail end of the Boomer women are now 45, so this manufactured megahyping of the cougar concept, which I think started with “Desperate Housewives” 5+ years ago, is no doubt designed to give them the delusion they can still be “hot”, too. Maybe a tiny percentage are, to some slight degree.
As women tend to be age-obsessed, I suppose it was inevitable that the attempt would be made by the advertisers of beauty products to redefine the concept to the point where age difference alone is the sole indicator (which entirely misses the point), so we now have the ridiculous situation of 35 year-old women on the forums at single’s sites asking “…there’s this guy at work I like. I found out he’s 28. Does this make me a cougar?”. Sheesh. They’re so gullible they’ll believe anything.
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I have no problems with older women being with young guys. I mean if its a mutually beneficial arrangement, who am I to disagree? What I do have a problem with is the hype of yesteryears skanks (some of them) and over the hill women (al0t more of them), as women out to empower themselves by scooping up helpless younger men. (As if men the same age aren’t good enough.) The truth is that these women are settling for what ever they can get, and clouding it in a delusion of self empowerment. Young men for the most part that go after older women (45 and up, as there are plenty beautiful 35 year old women) are lacking in sexual activity and therefore compromise their standards (if they had any in the first place) to get well laid. And who better to chase, than an over the hill desperate woman who is just glad to get attention? The media try’s to portray this as older women showing their muscles\power and breaking free from “societal restraints of age”. Its all a sham, in years past, these women would have probably quietly brought male prostitutes, or admitted to themselves that they were shamelessly throwing themselves at younger men who really didn’t want them but for a d**k-hole. I guess women can’t face the facts, and have to gussy up the pig. But a pig is still a pig and over the hill skanks, chasing young men is still just a compromise on both sides. The thought of an old wrinkly cottage cheese laden woman thinking shes the shit, is not my cup of tea. If its someone elses, by all means go for it. Just call it what it is. Desperate women hooking up with desperate guys, or guys that want money etc…
I mean, I’m 45, and I wouldn’t even date a 45 year old woman, unless I had to.
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Stallywood,
Probably because those men are dating much younger women.
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That’s the most finessed rendering of ‘I ceased to give a sh*t’ I think I’ve ever read…
Yikes, I looked at those cougar pics. Yikes. To use one of my great-grandma’s favorites, they look like strumpets
The clothing, the yards of boobage, frosting, hair extensions, surgical enhancements, are the equivalent of ‘Me! Me! Look at me! I’m hot! I’m NOT getting old!” in blinking neon. Aren’t there any classily dressed cougars? You can see they’re all trying to outdo each other. Trying frantically to beat/extend the ‘best by’ date.
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Crella,
Exactly.
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Stallywood 1: What I do have a problem with is the hype of yesteryears skanks (some of them) and over the hill women (al0t more of them), as women out to empower themselves by scooping up helpless younger men. (As if men the same age aren’t good enough.)
Stallywood 2: I mean, I’m 45, and I wouldn’t even date a 45 year old woman, unless I had to.
POT MEET…………..KETTLE?
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Stich,
Nice. You rock for pointing that out, but he and others will probably say “oh it’s because it has to do with evolutionary, biological reasons, etc., etc., so it’s ok”. If both parties are happy, then so what. Who says that it’s always because women are settling or because men are lacking in sexual activity?
And “helpless young men”? Please (I know you didn’t say this Stich). NOW men are helpless?
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I didnt say men were helpless, I said that the magazines portray them as such, and that they are being scooped up by cougars…. learn to read…
Stally
Stitch, wtf, pot meet kettle?
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if your going to take shit out of context, this is not going to work.
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