Older woman seeks young man for good times – no strings attached ... Lee Tulloch reports on the rise of the cougar and asks whether she’s a symbol of liberation or insecurity.
Rose Hantos, 52, a divorced community worker and grandmother of two from Sydney, is in search of a toy boy. Every now and then, she’ll put on hr “vivacious” look and dish out a fee of $89.95 to attend a cocktail party organised by umarket speed-dating organisation Fast Impressions. At the party, she will be one of a group of women over 45 who are there specifically to meet men aged 25 to 35.
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Armed with a glass of champagne, each woman is given eight minutes to make her pitch to each young man and vice versa. At the end of the night, all the men and women fill out cards indicating which of the candidates caught their eye. Event manager Carolyn Clydesdale says toy boy speed dating has the highest match rate of all the company’s speed-dating events, with 80 to 90 per cent of the older women finding at least one toy boy who would like to see her again.
“The guys are a lot of fun,” Rose explains. “They’re uncomplicated, unlike older men. I’m not interested in that baggage. I’ve just been all these years sorting myself out!”
Rose is a cougar and proud of it. According to the most common definition, a cougar is a sexy and sophisticated older woman who prefers to date men at least 10 years younger than herself. The term first appeared on the radar in the late 1990s. Two Canadian women created a website called cougardate.com, purportedly after hearing the term used by members of a local hockey team, who likened a group of older women who hung around the stadium and pursued them to wild cats. In 2001, US author Valerie Gibson jumped on the trend and released her book Cougar: A Guide For Older Women Dating Younger Men. There are now dozens of cougar dating websites, including dateacougar.com and urbancougar.com.
US actress Kim Cattrall’s sexually voracious character, Samantha Jones, on Sex And The City, was probably the prototype for the modern cougar, but the concept has now gone prime time with the release of the much-hyped TV series Cougar Town on the Seven Network. In it, Courteney Cox, 45, plays recently divorced real estate agent Jules, who has a slacker ex-husband, a teenage son and a bad case of sexual insecurity.
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“It’s scary to be a 40-year-old woman,” she tells a younger friend. “You can’t make babies anymore and your looks are faded.” More than anything, she fancies a roll in the hay with a young stud.
Luckily for Jules, she lives in a Florida enclave where it is the norm for older women to openly pounce on younger men. Yet these cougars spend so much time trawling for young men, they have morphed into aggressive, surgically-enhanced trolls. When Jules takes a young conquest out to a restaurant, the 50-ish woman at the next table leans across and quips, “If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?” At the high school football game, one of the women lusts after a player and tells her friend, “I’d love to lick his body” – in front of his mother. The cougars of Cougar Town make the Desperate Housewives girls seem like Betty Crocker.
Your say: What do you think about the rise of the cougar? Do you think she is a symbol of liberation or insecurity? Share your thoughts below...
To read more about these real life cougars, pick up the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now with Glenn McGrath and Sara Leonardi on the cover.
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