Google the words “cougar sexist” and you’ll pull up enough opinions to keep you busy for quite a while. On one side are women like Kim Cattrall. She is so offended by the term that she refused to pose with a real cougar for a magazine targeting women over 40. The magazine responded by dropping her from the cover.
Ouch.
Cougar, some assert, is insulting because it implies a woman who is on the prowl, desperate, and preying on younger men. No equivalent term exists for older men who are into younger women, they point out. These men are simply, well, men, and typically the admiration they receive increases as the age of their girlfriends drops. Meanwhile, many women are embracing the label. They see cougars as strong, confident, desirable, and most of all, sexual women who are upending the status quo. Besides, they say, often it’s the hot young guys who pursue them, rather than vice versa.
Demi Moore is apparently in the former camp, once telling Harper’s Bazaar she found the word cougar “distasteful.” And this recent Huffington Post article, explaining how the actress can “salvage her brand” in the wake of her impeding divorce, is unlikely to change her opinion. The piece quotes author Stacey Schneider as saying that Moore made a mistake in tangling her brand with Ashton Kutcher’s. By doing so, Moore “became known first and foremost as a cougar,” rather than a “gracefully maturing movie star.” Schneider then goes on to suggest that Moore’s cougar status is limiting her choice of film roles.
Apparently audiences have had grave difficulty separating Moore’s real-life image of the older woman in her marriage from the characters she plays. As a result, she is not offered “age-appropriate roles,” such as a mother to a child Ashton’s age. In other words, how could Moore possibly be believable on film as a mother to an adult child when she brings gorgeous young arm candy to the premiere? That she actually has adult children in real life doesn’t seem to matter.
As I read the piece, I remembered a boss I had years ago who, in her late-30s, was proudly seeing a man in his early-20s. When another female colleague in her mid-40s learned of the age difference, her reaction was heard across the entire pit of cubicles. “That is disgusting!” Would she have said that to a man in the same situation? Similarly, would this type of article about Moore ever be written about a male movie star?
So normal is it for male stars to keep company with younger women that it’s almost jolting when you see one with a female his age. No one ever suggests that George Clooney can’t be taken seriously as a father to young girls, as in his current role in The Descendants, because he dates younger women. And when was the last time anyone used the term “gracefully maturing” to describe Clooney, Brad Pitt (who is pushing 50, and incidentally, is more than a decade older than his wife), or any other male A-lister over 40? If their age is mentioned at all, these men are lauded for their hotness. I’m certainly not disputing that they’re hot, but then so is Moore, yet she’s apparently been handicapped by the fact that her marriage has made her look “significantly younger” than her age. (And here we thought looking younger was a good thing.)
Whether or not she’s had any facial work done (and that’s a whole other Google adventure), she is, in effect, between Botox and a hard place. Though Schneider advises her to act (and dress) her age, we can’t deny that Moore’s refusal to do so is a large part of her appeal. When she wears something that’s considered more “age appropriate,” she’s ridiculed: The Daily Mail recently tagged her as joining the “cardigan club.” Besides, who gets to decide precisely what acting and dressing like a 49-year-old woman or “gracefully maturing” entails? Would Moore receive less criticism if she were childless? Less attractive? Clearly she can never again venture outdoors in a cardigan.
While cougars have entered the mainstream lexicon of popular culture, inspiring a cheesy reality show and a sitcom, the older woman/younger man situation is all but nonexistent on the big screen. It is uber-common to see male characters in relationships with women 20 years or more their junior. Yet on the rare occasion when things are reversed, the woman typically is depicted as desperate—as with Karen Stone in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone—or damaged and predatory, a la the iconic Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. We’ve heard A-list women speak out against gender-based Hollywood pay inequities, but for the most part, they stay silent on what would appear to be a glaring and widespread case of love scene ageism. Is film imitating life, or vice versa?
It will be interesting to see the types of characters Moore plays post-divorce, and what, if any, impact the age of her next partner has on her image and choice of roles. If he’s younger, does she risk being labeled as a perma-cougar, complete with a scarlet letter C? If he’s older, will they say she has learned her lesson where younger men are concerned? And what of her Twitter handle, @Mrskutcher? While we can debate whether it was a bad idea or a bold statement of self-assuredness, it’s interesting to consider how likely a male star would be to use his lesser-known, younger wife’s last name as his Twitter moniker.
Perhaps instead of debating whether the term cougar is sexist, we should be asking ourselves why we need a term in the first place. After all, with terms come definitions, and definitions bring strict categories and all those messy specifics. Then we have to collectively decide things like, when exactly one becomes a cougar—is it age 35, 39, or is 40 the hard and fast baseline—and what is the age cut-off for the younger man? If a woman of 33 is dating a 22-year-old, is she officially not a cougar, yet a 40-year-old with a man of 35 qualifies? Hmmm.
Maybe, instead of miring ourselves in these weeds, we should consider that any comparison between women and an animal species is probably bad news. Maybe we should be thinking outside the box instead of putting women in them, no matter whom they date or how many cardigans they wear.
Michelle Rabil is a freelance writer, public relations consultant, traveler off the beaten path and avid amateur photographer living in Manhattan. When she isn’t writing for Fortune 500 clients and some of the largest public relations firms in the country, she prefers to be in, on or under the Caribbean Sea. She has also written for Reuters, Psychology Today, Huffington Post and Salon.
Photo credit david_shankbone/Flickr
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