Shaun Mullen, who blogs over at Kiko's House (which you guys should check out, if you like gorgeous photography, editorial cartoons, and Abraham Lincoln), had a big post up yesterday about the cougar phenomenon in popular culture, and emailed me to ask what I thought about it. And I have to admit, the subject gave me pause. I've always found the entire concept of cougars deeply boring and condescending. Anyone who doesn't know that women like to have sex beyond their sixteenth birthdays, and throughout careers, college, motherhood, and beyond, is stupid or not paying attention. So to have to invent a cutesy term to explain that extremely basic fact is overly simplistic and annoying. And the depictions that have emerged to flesh out that term are even more condescending and strange. Shaun writes that:
But the critic [of a review of Cougar Town that Shaun mentions] got it bass ackwards in asserting that older women today are more uncertain of themselves than ever, fearful of losing their sexuality and intimidated by all the young things around them whose social lives are one big orgasm. Puh-lease! If that's the case, then I'm hanging out around the wrong shopping malls because the older unattached moms that I know seem quite certain of who they are, have fulfilling lives with challenging jobs (if not the best health insurance) and could care less about the Miley Cyrus lookalikes who will give a blowjob at the ring of an iPhone.I think both of those descriptions--single mothers are insecure drudges, single mothers are sexually and professionally confident--are overly simplistic. Being a single mother isn't just a psychological condition. It's an economic, physical and professional one as well. You can be an older woman with children and be secure in your sexuality but insecure because you can't pay the rent because your ex-husband doesn't keep up with child support. You can be an older woman and be professionally secure but not want to have a lot of sex because the person you loved is dead. You can be sexually insecure because you were left, because you were abused, because you haven't had good sex before. You can be sexually secure if you're pretty, if you're plain, if you've had good sex, if you haven't had sex at all. You can want to have fun at absolutely any age. And you can treat people badly at any age, too. Picking out a guy who is younger than you, or older than you, doesn't actually indicate anything about who you are or where you're at in your life.
Cougarhood isn't a useful concept for understanding women's experiences, because there isn't actually a stable definition behind it beyond the "older woman who dates younger man" outline. But unlike the "sexy librarian" trope, which doesn't pretend to be anything but a pop joke, the cougar trope is new enough to not be entirely cliche yet. So while it's empty, and will be empty in twenty years when it's old, people think it has actual meaning now, and that's problematic.
(On the other hand, what do I know? I watched Eastwick while preparing this post, and I have to admit--totally entertained, even though I know I shouldn't be. Paul Gross has the charm of a knockoff Chris Noth, which is a good thing. A reporter [and the show has a female reporter who wants to do investigative corruption stories!] utters these lines: "I don't deserve him anyway. He is a volunteer fireman. He has an environmental blog!" And Rebecca Romijn...well, I'll love her forever. I have needed magical trash since Charmed end, and I think this will fill the slot nicely.)