Cougar Town

Wikipedia, Google

2009

2009-09-23-Express

Desperate Measures: 'Cougar Town'
Review in
Washington Post's Express, 2009-09-23

2009-09-24-NYT-Warner-Cougar-Town-Courteney-Cox

The Real Cougar Fans
by Judith Warner
New York Times Blog, 2009-09-24

[For a short (~1 minute) excerpt from the show, click here.
For more Courteney, click here.

Ms. Warner writes (but the emphasis is added by the current author):]

It was hard for me at first to find words for why I hated — simply hated —
“Cougar Town,”
the new Courteney Cox vehicle that debuted Wednesday night on ABC.

It really wasn’t Cox herself,
though I found her manic energy exhausting,
and found watching her pretend to jiggle the flesh
on her improbably flat belly and her skeletally skinny arms
little less than nauseating.
(Message to matrons: if Cox, thin as a rail at 45
and maintained like a museum piece,
can compare herself to a “farm animal,”
then you really are a bunch of cows.)

But then I started reading a bit,
and came to Washington Post critic Hank Stuever’s roundup review
of “Cougar Town” and “The Good Wife,”
a new CBS drama about a woman who rises from the ashes of public humiliation
after her politician husband admits to having sex with prostitutes.
Both — like “Sex and the City,”
“our culture’s ur-text on desperate women in desperate times,” he wrote,
are animated by the same stereotypical “undercurrent”:
“Women today are more than ever uncertain of themselves, nearly broken,
worried about senescence,
intimidated by the youth around them and depleted by various cads.”

[Yeah, right. Like these.]

He concludes: “It is sad, this confused state of American womanhood.”

Yes, it would be, if it were true.

[Washington Post Style Section staff writer Hank Steuver
has informed his readers that he is homosexual.
That, by definition, cannot help but have some effect on how he views women.

In any case, I too read those lines of Steuver when they came out,
and thought they were laughable.
They are perhaps true for some women of Steuver’s acquaintance,
but seem most unlikely to be true of the broad American female population.
In any case, there is scant evidence for it, certainly none that he has presented.]

...

Most women in their 40s,
however conflicted, however sometimes confused,
aren’t actually spiraling into self-doubting despair,
but are actually working their way toward
some greater degree of self-acceptance.
Many experience — along with
the shift in body mass that pulls things down and pushes them sideways —
a kind of psychic shift
that frees up some of the energy that once went into external appearances.
Many come into their own, creatively, professionally.
And in motherhood, in friendships, in romantic relationships.

[Evidently
“the shift in body mass that ... pushes them sideways”
hasn’t yet affected Jenny Sanford:

Then there’s the 52-year-old Denise Austin:

[Warner continue in the same hypercritical vein:]

A woman like Cox’s Jules —
visibly vibrating with self-doubt and thinly-veiled self-loathing,
is, it’s fair to say,
probably the least likely figure of fantasy
to be conjured by women Cox’s age.

[In any case, is there something wrong with sexual relationships?
And can’t those “friendships and romantic relationships”
which Ms. Warner seems to place in opposition to what Jules is after
in fact be with men, perhaps much younger men?

I thought feminism was about giving women options.
Evidently at least Ms. Warner is quite willing to criticize
women who chose what she considers the “wrong” option.

Feminists are always accusing women who don’t play by the feminist playbook
of being “self-hating,” “self-loathing,” “conflicted,” “confused,”
“spiraling into self-doubting despair,” etc.
It’s just a cheap mind-game feminists like to play with those who oppose them.
(Also, it’s not the feminist ideal:
The Battle-Axe, without hint of self-doubt,
always insisting that she is right,
who when criticized responds, or her friends respond for her,
“Don’t blame the victim”;
the battle-axes that women’s studies programs churn out
and who drive men away from the thought of marrying such dominatrix’s.)

Why couldn’t Jules accuse Judy Warner of the same psychological afflictions?
The reason, of course, is that
those people who oppose feminism
don’t have the massive power of Jewish-owned or -controlled media
to keep hammering their point of view into the public’s consciousness.]

---

A super cougar!: Iris Robinson! (Google; image; laughing head-back image;
Daily Mail 2010-01-08 story)

Putting this in a larger context, this is really a “Man bites dog” story.
That is, the usual accounts of sex between teenage males and over-55 women
involve sexual aggression on the part of the male.
At least in the newspapers I read, every now and then one reads about
some teenage punk who rapes a much older woman, sometimes even in her 60s.
I don’t recall ever reading about a situation such as
that of Mrs. Robinson and her lover before this.