The Mythical Cougar

Twenty-Something Beauhunks Aren't Every Woman's Dream

Married, mid-thirties, and bereft of an urban feline's riveting "Rowrrrr," I'm no cougar. But I watched the season premiere of TV Land's reality show The Cougar, a Bachelor-style series in which a foxy 40-year-old divorcée and mother of four is wooed by 20 hairless, pec-flexing beauhunks.

Stacy, the giggly Barbie-clone from Arizona, whittles the batch down by literally "kissing off" each episode's winners and losers — a dweeb who told her "You're under arrest; you stole my heart" got to stay while a dork who made a crude sexual joke was shown the door. Another kept blurting, "I have my own house!" as though the statement alone were an aphrodisiac. They were play-acting at being men.

Still, I watched. I watched because I wanted to see the mythical Cougar dynamic in action. I have no trouble picturing what my cougar friends bluntly call the "no-strings-attached athletic sex." In fact, let's all take a moment to picture it now together, just because we can.

It's the hook-up that I get stuck on. The part where the mammogram-age vixen and the Halo-playing meathead lock eyes and fall in lust. In The Cougar, it happens when Stacy meets her wide-eyed, faux-hawked, hooting suitors.

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