Married to a younger man and sick of being stereotyped, the Sex and the City author shows her claws in the great cougar debate.
About a year and a half ago, I was innocently trolling the Internet when I came across the headline “Cougar Attack!” The sexual usage of cougar was fairly recent back then, but already irritating. Still, I was curious. I expected to see mature women plasticized within an inch of their lives running after boy toys. Scrolling down, however, I saw that I was the cougar in question. My identifying behavior? Posing for photographers at the premiere of the Sex and the City movie. Sure, after hours of hair and makeup, I looked pretty good (one of the requisites, I suppose, of cougardom), but I know the only thing I wanted to attack at that moment was a cocktail. Besides, there was nary a young man in sight.So why had I been labeled a cougar? It was perplexing. Yes, my husband is 10 years younger, but we’ve been married for seven years. And he’s 40, ferchrist’s sake. And how come every time women manage to break out of traditional roles, someone comes along and tries to ruin it with a derogatory label? If you’re a female CEO, you’re a ballbuster. And let’s not even go there with Hillary Clinton. In comparison with what she gets called, I suppose cougar is fairly harmless. What I dislike most about the term is that a complex group of women in a variety of different situations end up lumped together under one sensationalist and slightly vulgar rubric. It reminds me of the old days when women were routinely divided into two categories: madonnas and whores. Chalk it up to progress: Now we can be madonnas and cougars!
Problem is, I know some real-life cougars (meaning, simply, women over 35 who are with younger men), and they don’t at all resemble the pop culture stereotype. For instance, my younger sister, whom I’ll call Z, is 45 and married to a man 11 years younger. A former engineer, she has three children and runs her own business in rural Connecticut. She’s never used Botox; heck, she’s never even colored her hair. But because her husband is more than a decade younger, I guess she’s a cougar.
