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Showing posts from August, 2024

Why are women called 'cougars' but men aren't?

I went out with someone 30 years my junior. It may or may not have been a date -- I assumed it was friends meeting for lunch until he insisted on giving me a backrub -- but there was no denying the age difference. When I mentioned this to my elder niece, thirtysomething, she quipped: "Aunt Laurie is such a cougar!" My friend Patrick, 65, ditto, "Cougar!" Good lord, people, a cougar isn't even my favorite cat or for that matter car. Call me a jaguar or a lion, but a cougar? Most of us older ladies who are trying to still date don't fancy ourselves predators, which is what the name cougar implies. And most of us aren't always choosing younger or much younger men. Quite simply, men our age are often happily married and most of us aren't sinking so low as to prey on them (that would be more cougary in my book). So why call us cougar? Is it to just point out how socially unacceptable it still is to date a younger man? My grandmother was seven years'