A strange beast: the cougar myth

So Catherine Zeta-Jones has finally bagged a younger man and the makers of The Rebound are selling the movie to Irishwomen on the basis that they love a shallow cougar yarn. But that's not what the film's about. And what's so darn funny about women over the age of 40 having a sex life anyway, asks TARA BRADY

IN ROMANTIC comedy The Rebound, the latest film by Trust the Mandirector Bart Freundlich, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a downtrodden, recently divorced house frau who strikes up an unlikely romance with her 24-year-old babysitter ( The Hangover's Justin Bartha). It's a sweet enough confection, albeit one that's marred by dazzlingly poor dialogue and a curiously bland love affair.

The you-go-girl pitch is simple: making an exit from the suburban home she shared with a cheating husband, Zeta-Jones moves her two children to New York, finds employment as a sports copywriter and recommences the dating game. Her transformation is jollied along by the helpful efforts of Bartha, whose character occupies the same cosy space normally reserved for Gay Best Friend – a trusted romcom constant known for cooking, cleaning, listening and reliable childcare.

One wonders if the studio's marketing department made it this far into the film. The promotional poster, currently looming from a billboard near you, seems to advertise an entirely different movie. In this version of The Rebound, Zeta-Jones has one hand on her hip, another wrapped around her co-star's thigh and what may be a boiled sweet in her mouth. Bartha, meanwhile, sits passively with a vaguely terrified expression and a pair of frilly underpants in his mouth, denoting some hitherto undocumented SM shenanigans.

The Rebound, whatever its failings, makes some attempt to depict a tender relationship between a 40-year-old woman and a companion more than a decade younger. There is, after all, a considerably smaller age gap between the two headlining stars than between Zeta-Jones (40) and her off-screen husband Michael Douglas (65).

But where the film purposely counterpoints its leading lady with a sexually avaricious chum Daphne (Kate Jennings Grant) – a Wife of Bath to Zeta-Jones’s Duchess of Malfi – the poster screams cougar comedy.

You can't blame them for trying. Cougars are big business in this part of the world. Over the course of a single day an Irish native might style their hair with a wand from the Desperate Housewives range, read this season's startling revelations about Iris Robinson, watch Courteney Cox in Cougar Town, then head out for an evening in one of this country's many Cougar-themed nightclubs and events. With a box-office take in the Republic of about $4,002,000 and counting, Irish punters account for close to 2 per cent of the global total for Sex and the City 2. For this, gentle reader, died the sons of Róisín.

We are repeatedly told that "cougarism" represents some sort of legitimate North American lifestyle choice and, moreover, a Darwinian inevitability. Timemagazine, that bastion of novelty science, is currently running with a sociobiological angle under the heading "The Science of Cougar Sex: Why Older Women Lust". Quoting from a University of Texas study, the article points out that women aged 27-45 report having more sex than women aged 18-26, a fact the study chooses to attribute to the "lizard brain". As in, "after the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it's harder and harder to get pregnant as a woman's remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years respond by seeking more and more sex."

The notion, however, that we are somehow besieged by elderly succubi, is rather more recent than prehistoric developments in the cerebral cortex.

The term "cougar", it is believed, first originated in the sex industry in 1999 with the launch of the dating website Cougardate.com. For more than a decade since, any number of attempts to popularise the concept in movies, commercials and magazines have floundered. Cougar Club, a 2007 comedy featuring Carrie Fisher and Faye Dunaway, failed to make any showing at the box office.

In fact, the term seems to have little traction among Americans. When we contacted Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, the woman who first documented lipstick lesbians and the conflation of the terms "bawdy" and "liberated" among the Girls Gone Wildcrew confessed she didn't know a thing about it.

When our US chums do happen upon the term, they can't get away from it fast enough. Desperate Housewiveshas haemorrhaged more than 10 million viewers since 2005. Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel, the gentlemen behind Cougar Town, have declared their desire to change the show's name: their parent television network, ABC, is reputedly happy with the decision.

To cap it all, Google has just banned all advertisements for cougar dating sites, saying: “We can’t comment on specific advertisers, but our policy is that adult dating ads are classified as non-family-safe, meaning that they will not show on the Google Content Network or when Safe Search is enabled on Google.com.” (Interestingly, there has been no equivalent ban for sites trading on “sugar daddies”.)

Many commentators have attributed the negativity around the word "cougar" to American puritanism or revulsion about the idea of an older lady bedding a 20-year-old. But in truth the entire concept couldn't be more derogatory. As Courteney Cox's tomfoolery in Cougar Townneatly demonstrates, "cougar" translates as desperate and hilarious. Indeed, the show pivots on the notion that nothing could be funnier than a sexually active woman in her 40s.

"The whole concept of "cougars" is part of our culture's inability to deal with real, female sexuality in anything other than cartoonish, vulgar ways," says Pamela Paul, author of Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and our Families(2005).

“There’s no reason why female relations – sexual, romantic or both – with younger men should be the subject of ridicule.”

Having been sold pups before – the male-created wolf-whistling liberation of the Diet Coke commercials, the whole ladette thing – Americans are simply not buying this latest mythical beast.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of the UK and Ireland. Around here if you’re not reading shocked tabloid headlines about director Sam Taylor-Wood and her 20-year-old boyfriend Aaron Johnson, odds are you’re reading hand-wringing broadsheet essays about the tabloid headlines.

Irish women, like turkeys queuing for Christmas, have demonstrated unfailing support for the cougar archetypes of Sex and the City, Desperate Housewivesand Cougar Town. It doesn't seem to matter that all of these shows were created by men. Or that all of these shows are defined by their contempt for women.

In the end, however we feel about older women chasing tail, if we wish to live as decent-minded, tolerant people, it’s time to get out the ammo and blow the cougar right out of our lexicon.

A bit of a swizz: misleading movies

A SINGLE MANTom Ford's melancholy drama sees Colin Firth pining for his late gay lover. The poster says: he's getting it on with Julianne Moore.

MONA LISA SMILESchool teacher Julia Roberts and her charges deal with proto-feminist dilemmas. The trailer promises raucous banana-skin pratfalls.

WHIP ITA roller derby sub-plot allowed this sappy identikit comedy to pass itself off as hip and liberating. Yep. It's Girl Power. Just like the Spice Girls foretold.

BORSTAL BOYWe thought this was director Peter Sheridan's adaptation of a play by Brendan Behan, but the DVD promises The Great Escapewith Danny Dyer.

SEX AND THE CITY 2The poster outrageously claims that this is a film and not a random bunch of stuff that just happens to feature the same cast as the TV show.

The Reboundopens next Friday, July 23