From our Now Just Imagine How Much Bellyaching You’d Hear From The Kook Pews If Gay People Were Doing This department…

Color me unimpressed by Mark Penn’s "microtrends" based on Marc Ambinder’s writeup. Penn mostly seems to be playing his favorite sport of defining groups arbitrarily and then finding that if you slice up the population in random ways, you can get interesting-but-meaningless results. That said, this is funny:

Within the past ten years, the number of women who sought younger male boyfriends has quintupled. These are the "cougars," Penn writes.

I’m not sure I understand why they’re cougars? Because it’s an alternative to being a cat lady?

That’s from Matthew Yglesias, who gets himself an education on "Cougars" in the comments to his post.  And so did I actually…

A new breed of predator is stalking LA—and young men are the prey. Sally Emerson joins the pack

Los Angeles is a land where conventional time no longer exists. “There are no seasons, it’s always the same sunny blue sky day after day, so you never feel you’re getting any older,” said a friend, tranquilly. Here you can pause the passing of the years, or even rewind a little — breasts can be pert again, skin taut, forehead uncreased.

Age is no bar to anything in LA, least of all relationships — look at 44-year-old Demi Moore, all glowing and toned on the arm of 29-year-old husband Ashton Kutcher.

So perhaps the rise of the cougars should be no surprise. They’re a new Angeleno phenomenon: rich, powerful and — unlike Demi — predatory older women, whose natural habitat is the high-end shops, bars and spas of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and whose chosen prey is younger men.

Chris Breed, the Brit maestro of the Hollywood club scene — he looks about 28, but isn’t — has seen them in action. “It’s a complete role reversal,” he said over dinner at Maestro’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills, a frenzy of mirrors and laughter. “But if you want to get on in this town, you go where the power is, and often the older women have power: power to cast an actor in the right role, power to get a man into the right club.”

“These girls don’t want steady relationships,” said Chris’s friend. “They’ve had that. Some of them have been married four times. They want to keep their money. Their attitude is, I’m rich, I’m in great shape, I don’t give a shit. They shred young men alive.”

“Do the men mind?” I asked. He grinned. “Hell, no.” At that moment, a woman swept in wearing a floor-length leopardskin coat, her hair bleached blonde, her lips cartoon-character colossal and exaggerated with so much lip liner and lipstick, she seemed to be more mouth than face. One hundred per cent cougar. Behind her hovered a slight young black guy, with white trousers slung low, and black beanie hat pulled down in an attempt to keep some street cred.

I later saw her haughtily leave the restaurant, and the doors nearly swung back on the poor guy as he bleakly followed.

“These girls,” the friend continued, “they carry Viagra in their handbags. Viagra and Cialis, the 36-hour drug. They are vicious. They call the shots.”

That’s from an LA Times article, posted up on the website UrbanCougar.Com…a website for older women who like younger men, and lots of them.  Take a wee stroll over there, and ask yourself how loudly they’d be screaming about it on Fox News if that was a web site for older gay men who like younger guys.  For one thing, no matter how much the operators and users of that site made it clear they weren’t about going after teenagers, let along children, the word all over the corporate news media, never mind Fox, would be that the site was somehow linked to NAMBLA, and was facilitating pedophiles.  Middle aged heterosexuals can pursue younger lovers and maybe get an occasional sniff of disapproval, when they’re not getting knowing winks.  Homosexuals are presumed to be child molesters. 

But…never mind.  There’s this foundational myth in western culture about female sexuality being more chaste and demure then male sexuality, and I’ve always been skeptical of it.  I went through adolescence in the free love 60s and early 70s, and I’m here to tell you the girls weren’t any less sexually aggressive then the boys.  But one of the slogans anti-gay crackpots like to throw out there is how male-female couples naturally complement each other in terms of their sexuality.  The female’s less lustful, more maternal sexuality attenuates the male’s predatory sexual nature, while males, provide structure and a firm hand of guidance to the emotionally weak females.  This, they claim, is why male homosexuality is so inherently reckless and promiscuous.  Men need a female to tame them.  Never mind it’s male superiority dressed up in a veneer of junk psychology.  With regard to female libidos, it simply isn’t true. 

Historically, it wasn’t all that long ago in western culture that the notion that women might actually experience orgasm when they weren’t ovulating, let alone enjoy sex for its own sake, was considered implausible.  And even these days, the most rigidly male dominated cultures are without exception also the ones in the deepest denial about female sexuality.  The more male dominated and fundamentalist a culture is, the more likely it is to nail female sexuality into a coffin.   In Saudi Arabia they put women in burkas.  Here in the U.S. we put them into the kitchen and tell them that only boys are allowed to have sex for its own sake, and that’s only because they can’t help themselves…they’re guys.  But women like to dance in the arms of eros too.

In their book, The Myth of Monogamy Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, David Barash
Judith Lipton write…

Early work, both empirical research and theorizing, took a decidedly male-centered perspective on multiple mating, emphasizing how males maximize their paternity by being sexually available to more than one female whenever possible, also competing with each other directly (by bluffing, displaying, and fighting) and indirectly by guarding their mates, as well as by using an array of anatomical, physiological and behavioral techniques – such as frequent copulations – to give them an advantage over other males.

More recently, biologists have begun to identify how females partake of their own strategies: mating with more than one male, controlling (or at least, influencing) the outcome of sperm competition, sometimes obtaining direct, personal benefits such as food or protection in return for these extra-pair copulations, as well as gaining indirect, genetic benefits that eventually accrue to their offspring. A penchant for non-monogamy among males is no great surprise, but as we shall see, the most dramatic new findings and revised science brought about by recent demolitions of the myth of monogamy concern the role of females. Freud spoke more truth than he knew when he observed that female psychology was essentially a "dark continent." A well integrated theory of female sexuality in particular still remains to be articulated…

But that’s half the human race.  If men don’t really know all that much about female sexuality, then how can they say they really know their own?  The dark continent is sex.  Still. 

Why are we still so ignorant about this vital part of our lives?  Because the status-quo doesn’t like being upset…and nothing upsets the status-quo like sex. Female sexuality has been kept in the closet all this time for the same reason that homosexuals were.  Control.  The prerogative of power is that you get first dibs on the hotties.  Otherwise what good is money and status?  In a world without fences, where everyone owns their own love lives, and manages their own sexual affairs for themselves, and are not only free to say Yes, but also No Thanks…then even the powerful have to ask. 

That’s why, for so very, very long, so many of us have been taught not to trust our own feelings when it comes to sex.  There are others who know what’s best for us.  We must always listen to them…never to our own hearts…