Can cougars with fibreglass nails disembowel an antelope?
Please remit this and other questions to Dylan McDermott, former star of The Practice and now being showcased in Dark Blue, who was - strangely enough - in the news on the weekend for revealing that he dated two "cougars" as a teenager.
McDermott, who has long been dogged by gay rumours, has told a truly controversial tale, whether he intended to or not.
The women were 30. He has just lowered the tacitly understood age of sexual desperation by 10 years, and he was 15. So, technically, that is not "dating" as much as "raping." The good times occurred on Fire Island, where his father owned a bar.
After several years, the word and the concept "cougar" is still going strong, if changing for the worse, and the better.
The worst first: A friend of mine was walking home from the gym the other day when she noticed a stationary, greasy, combed-over ferret-being, staring. "Cougar!" he hissed.
I realized when she recounted the story that the term I thought was played out is still being modified and is now also a coarse synonym for a woman over 30 who is possibly sexually active and, ergo, revolting.
A few months ago, Cougar Town's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, pledged to change the name of the show. He recently changed his mind, even though the story lines do not involve Courteney Cox chasing that wealth of man beauty: skinny, shorts-wearing guys in their 20s with no jobs who clean themselves with yellowy towels and use their sinks as bidets.
Being hot and twentysomething is virtually the exclusive domain of the female, the girl-woman Bob Dylan immortalized as aching and faking like a woman; as breaking like a little girl.
We all know the girl: She is so much more mature than she seems, according to many the lumpy, old man. Is she less legally blind? I always ask, eyeing their shiny heads and melon bellies.
But we don't know the man-boy: outside of an aspect of queer culture and Germaine Greer's dirty mind (she is the author of the coffee table stroke book The Beautiful Boy), no formidable woman - and no, Erica Jong and Colette are not formidable - has ever made the older woman/young man combo less disturbing, less evocative of cologne-dipped fancy men rifling through their bedridden old-woman wife's handbag.
This is sexism, of course. We have long known that older women are, as Simone de Beauvoir observed, the "third," or invisible, sex.
On the other hand, small, limping speckle-headed slugs everywhere are squiring young, gorgeous babes to fine restaurants, where she will tie a lobster bib around her sweet daddy's neck, even if they're eating turf.
He doesn't even have to be rich! I guarantee you that every ancient, fugly, stache-combing cop and fireman in every city has a Bombshell McGee on deck; almost every nebbish professor; every man with a house, car and pulse.
And so what? Ladies, if you like to redefine the term "soft core" every night; if heads of healthy hair repulse you along with flat chests; if you like grooming auricular hair and raising another woman's angry children, who are we to disagree?
Women's failure to stop confusing authority and sexuality is our problem, not the fault of the men involved. (Common sense is at issue also. Ask yourself, girl: Would he like you if you were his age?)
But now that men - and women are so much more vile on the subject - are so easy with terms like tramp, cougar, hooker (and so on, the terminology is commonplace and way raunchier), one finds oneself wondering: Where is that feminist protectorate that used to call foul during this long, twisted game?
There is nothing empowering about the cougar phenomenon. Look at Lucia, the hostess of cougarchannel.com, on YouTube. There she stands, made up like a clown with a stack of yellow hair and a pale-blue dress revealing ample, tired breasts, expostulating on "classy" ways to be a cougar. Beneath her? Reams of vicious comments, and among them the most piercing: "so sad."
The cougar dating and sex sites are barely a step removed from old lady fetish porn; the contents unbearably sad for all of the hollow posturing.
Still, the world is changing, a little bit. Very rich and powerful women are dating younger; young and powerful women are dating men their own age - Jessica Simpson recently rejected Jack Nicholson's advances as grotesque, a landmark decision in Women vs. Moobs.
And, ultimately, women can speak for themselves: Female derision, that fearsome thing, can always stop an unctuous ignoramus in his tracks. (My friend's catcaller ran away whimpering after she was done with him.)
On the planet Fabulous, we may date age-appropriately, or not, but we will stop hating women so much! Every woman out there calling another woman worse names than Mel Gibson on a Tape 4 roll: Ain't you a woman?
Then again, it was Gibson who said (screamed, panted) at his much younger girlfriend: "I need a woman! Not a girl with a defective..."
Madman? Or the voice of desperate reason?
You tell me.