Recently, out in the Village, Marilyn had a tangle with a twenty-one-year-old boy-cub. The guy came to her house to deliver some boxes, and apparently he was the friendly type, because he began chatting her up. After fifteen minutes, she finally managed to shoo him out of the house by reminding him for the sixth time that she had a conference call.
She did her call and forgot all about the delivery boy—until 6:00 p.m. when he texted her.
You’re so beautiful, he wrote. Can we hang out? Or is twenty-one too young for you?
Yes, it is too young, she wrote back.
Immediately she got another text: Ouch! That’s harsh.
We brushed the incident off as an anomaly, but two days later Sassy had a similar encounter. She went to hear an opera singer at a private party hosted by a society lady of a certain age. When the concert ended and all the middle-aged people hurried to their cars to get home in time for a good night’s sleep, Sassy was approached by the twenty-two-year-old son of the society lady who’d been lurking in the background with his friends. “Hey,” he whispered. “Do you want to go to a club?”
And then it happened to Queenie. She hired a twenty-four-year-old intern for the summer. He’d barely worked past Fourth of July before he confessed that he found her incredibly sexy and tried to kiss her.
Which made me wonder: Are middle-aged women now catnip for younger men?
At first the idea seemed impossible. After all, for years, the very idea that a younger man would be attracted to a woman ten, twenty, even thirty years older was unimaginable—to the point where it was nearly considered a crime against nature.
Plus, while there are a zillion movies depicting the older man/much younger woman dynamic, for decades there was only one movie depicting the opposite: The Graduate.
However, unlike the older man/younger woman movie thing where they ride off into the sunset to live (somehow given their thirty-year age difference) happily ever after, The Graduate turns out to be pretty bad for everyone involved.
The message of this movie is clear: ladies, don’t you ever, ever, ever try this at home.
And so, for about twenty years, no self-respecting woman did, until the eighties came along. Suddenly, there were “cougars”—older women who dared to have sex or at least be attracted to hot young men who were called boy toys—often depicted as pumped-up young men in black shorty shorts and greased muscles. Everyone made fun of them and rightly so: they were ridiculous. You’d look at them and wonder: If I have sex with a boy toy how will I get that greasy-thick Vaseline mixed with sweat off my sheets in the morning?
Now another thirty years have passed. And thanks to pornography, things have changed. In 2007, the most googled porn request was “MILF”—mothers I’d like to fuck.
In other words, there is now a whole generation of young men who’ve been turned on by the idea, at least, of sex with a woman twenty and possibly thirty years older.
And why not? Due to exercise, hair extensions, Botox and filler, healthy eating, and advanced skin care, even if a woman is technically too old to bear a child, she can still look like she can.
Making her the perfect candidate for a cubbing experience.
Catnips versus Cougars
Instead of being about older women in pursuit of younger men—like it was in The Graduate—cubbing is about younger men in pursuit of older women. And while the word “cougar” conjures the stereotype of a hardened woman who dresses too young for her age, catnips tend to be nice, practical women from the city, the suburbs, anywhere really, and they are very, very likely to be someone’s mom from school.
But then something happens, and all of a sudden a sensible woman finds herself in the middle of an unintended cub situation.
Take Joanne. She was attending a dinner at Queenie’s house when it happened. Queenie had hired a chef. Like so many situations these days in which millennials are doing the jobs much older people used to do, the chef was twenty-seven. Joanne and the chef happened to look into each other’s eyes, and bam.
Unintended cub collision.
Perhaps it all would have been fine—if the guy hadn’t been Queenie’s niece’s boyfriend. Queenie was understandably pissed. Joanne said he was fair game. Sides were taken. But who knows what the etiquette is even supposed to be in this situation?
I ran into Joanne in the city three months after she’d been caught with the cub. I assumed she and the cub had parted ways.
Nope. The opposite was true.
She was not only dating him, but he had also been living in her apartment for the past three months. “We were shacking up,” she said with a little shrug. “It was really, really fun.” But now, she informed me, he was getting his own place.
She looked a little embarrassed and vulnerable. I could see that she’d let herself fall in love with him and no doubt was wondering if the fact that he was getting his own place meant he was about to break up with her. I could feel her shame: at fiftysomething, shouldn’t we all know better by now?
Absolutely not. A few more months passed and Kitty ran into them shopping for appliances. They were still together.
Because in the new world of cubbing, some men do stick around. Or even worse, fall in
love.