Cougars and Carnivores

A search on amazon.com for “cougar” yields a helter-skelter selection ranging from innocuous merchandise—Washington State football gear, John Mellencamp albums, and a Disney-biopic-cum-Lassie-knockoff about a cub searching for his family—to unrated films and pornographic novels (Hot Cougar Sex and Cougars, Poptarts & One Night Stands, to name a few titles).

Marketing firms are not the only ones who seem to have mistaken a wild stalk-and-ambush predator for an actual person. This image of an aggressively sexual older woman who pounces on younger men pervades our media. Spurred by the marriage of then-42-year-old Demi Moore to then-27-year-old heartthrob Ashton Kutcher, cougar mania swept Hollywood at the start of the millennium and engulfed both fictional characters (Samantha Jones, the seminal cougar of “Sex and the City” fame) and real-life women (most recently, Madonna, age 50, and her barely-legal Brazilian lover, Jesus Luz). Even Sarah Palin was deemed to possess cougar-worthy hotness, a status bolstered when doctored photos of her clad in a star-spangled bikini hit the web. “Cougar Town,” a sitcom starring Courtney Cox-Arquette as a divorcee on the prowl, is in the works at ABC, while “The Cougar,” a “Bachelorette” spin-off starring 20 20-somethings gaming for the affection of a 40-year old mother of four, airs weekly on TV Land. Sites like dateacougar.com offer a leopard-print infused twist on eHarmony; outside of the virtual world, cougar speed-dating presents further opportunities for felines to feast.

At first glance, the term sounds like a progressive, coquettish take on the older-woman-beds-younger-man phenomenon. Its representation of females as both claiming and controlling their own sexuality explains why women have rushed to appropriate the epithet as empowering. Inverting the tradition of the sexless spinster, the moniker acknowledges that childbirth does not exorcise a woman’s libido and affirms the sex drive of the perimenopausal.

In the pilot episode of “The Cougar,” cougar du jour Stacey Anderson nearly chokes herself with continual assertions of the term’s power to dispel cultural stereotypes and reverse traditional gender dynamics. Citing their heightened spontaneity and “zest for life” as the root of her attraction to younger men, Stacey suffuses her statements with not-so-subtle sexuality, gloating: “I’m in my prime, they’re in their prime, so not only is that connection outside the bedroom, it’s inside the bedroom as well!” Swap the genders and this assertion reeks of sexual exploitation. Yet, when applied to Stacey’s zesty boy-toys, who enter the scene in a party bus, pounding shots and concocting such precious one-liners as “I really hope this cougar likes lamb, ’cause I’m nice, sweet, and tender,” this terminology is acceptable.

In fact, there is nothing transgressive about Stacey’s typecast role. Morphing a welcome revelation of older women’s sexuality into the mindless caricature of a desperate youth-seeker who continues to have the hots after her hot flashes fade, the brand “cougar” is anything but forward-looking. The term was originally coined by men as a demeaning label for aging barflies who settled for whoever was still conscious at closing time. The “cougar” does not stem from a female fantasy of sexual empowerment, but from a male one: the desire to dominate and control the subversive sexuality of the woman past her prime. Bedding a woman in her 40s who knows what she wants and has a career to boot is the ultimate validation of a man’s stud-status. Like her counterpart, the MILF (Mother I’d Like to Fuck), the cougar’s brawn does not derive from an intrinsic feminine power: It hinges entirely on her desirability to men and the attractiveness of her mate.

The term “cougar” cannot even claim originality as its saving grace. Feline metaphors—fox, puma, pussy—have long been applied to female sexuality. “Cougar” is merely the latest epithet in a long tradition of verbal constructs—slut, skank, whore—that construe women as sub-human sexual objects. Urban Dictionary defines the cougar in terms of the sexual stimulation that she provides to men and her lack of emotional attachment: Cougars “don’t expect you to call the next day, and don’t require much cuddling after a good one night stand.” One particularly graphic entry describes the cougar as a miserly divorcee who was once the “town slut” and who now “enjoys going after men that are the age her aborted child would have been if it was still alive.” By these definitions, a cougar is not sexy and confident. She is a psychologically disturbed pervert and the laughing stock of her community.

That a woman who sleeps with a younger man needs to be called anything other than a woman is disturbing, not empowering. When older, unattractive men liaise with women half their age, we call them “sugar daddies” and “bachelors”; when older, attractive women do the same, we ridicule them and animalize their pursuits as if they were beyond the pale of civilized activity. By embracing this culturally imposed label, women like Stacey Anderson are not revolutionizing our modern understanding of female sexuality: They are merely aiding and abetting their own objectification.


Courtney A. Fiske ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.