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.
