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By Laura Fissinger

Cougars and Cougar Town

 

 

Yes, Virginia, Crow's Feet Can Dance

 

My Mama was a semi-cougar. She would have been appalled by ABC's new bad-but-good comedy Cougar Town, even though she was one of earliest rebels who helped make cougarhood possible.

In 1943 she was not looking for a younger guy, or any guy. Her fiancé was off fighting World War II; Patti Morgan was on the road singing with big bands. One night she was playing a gig in Fresno, California, on the same bill as a band featuring a soon-to-be-shipped-out Air Force lieutenant on piano and vocals. She was 26. He was 21 going on 22.

 Around six months later, they were married.

Courteney Cox and Busy Phillipps in Cougar Town: I'd bet the farm that most females who understand the value of laughing in bed are over forty. It's one of those things about which cougar-age women tend to be wise.

I didn't know that my Mama was older than my Dad until high school. I was thumbing through the family Bible when I found Mama's birth certificate. I did the math and asked her. why the white lie?  It all seemed like nothing to the clueless teenage daughter, that Mama was older than we'd thought, and that she was older than Dad.

She stood in my room, this gorgeous woman in her early fifties, looking no older than her late thirties, her symmetrical features tense with pain.

It wasn't a little thing, the age difference, not to her. Both of their families had been hard to sell on their union, in part because Patti was "so much" older than Edwin. In the Forties, well-bred women didn't allow themselves to be courted by younger men, she explained. Good women never went after younger men, as some relatives thought Mama had done.

I gave her a big hug and told her she was nothing but class and good breeding.

Mama never knew about all the times my boyfriends and male pals would tell me, "Geez, your Mom is hot!" They were rather awed that a woman so "old" could be so attractive.

Indeed she was one: an accidental pioneer cougar.

If she'd seen Cougar Town on Wednesday, September 23...well, she wouldn't have seen much of it. Courteney Cox's lead character, Jules, is what Mama would have called "coarse.” She tells graphic sex jokes to everyone, even her seventeen-year-old son, Travis, and that's just part of her unfiltered speech and impulsive behavior. Patti Morgan would have turned the television off, dismissing both the show and its co-producer/star, Friends alumni Courteney Cox.

For those of us who think Courteney Cox's comic gifts far outweigh the merits of her new show's premiere, it's a relief to find out that said premiere scored very strong ratings. Cougar Town needs—and deserves—time to target the best things about Jules, Travis, and the rock-solid supporting cast. The audience needs time to settle in with a subject that is broader than it appears to be and matters more than many would think it does.

Which brings us to the core problem with Cougar Town: it underestimates its own core concept. The United States is jammed with single mid-life women. Some have always been single, by choice. Some have children; some don't. Others are divorced single mothers. Many of these mid-life women are baffled about how to be sexual beings in their forties, fifties and beyond. They all have questions to ask, stories to tell, and real human desires to face. These women don't want to be "coarse.” Given more time to think about it, neither does Jules. Not quite so often, anyway.

Movies and TV sure haven't said "go for it, girls!" very often. Mrs. Robinson, Anne Bancroft's iconic 1960s cougar from The Graduate, was meant to be viewed as needy to a pitiable degree. She was surely indiscriminate. Her daughter suffered because of her behavior. The message? A woman over forty, even in a permissive era, has no business trying to meet her physical and emotional needs with younger men. Period.

Academic treatises have been written on this topic—why has the older woman/younger man romance remained taboo at all since The Graduate era?

Cox and her show's co-creators, Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel (late of Scrubs), hit a big piece of the puzzle in episode one's opening. Jules is studying her face and body in the post-shower mirror (Cox says every body part shown belongs to her). She pulls at the skin right above the elbow. She smushes the flesh around her belly-button, finding a tiny pooch of fat. She taps the upper arm, making it wiggle.

This goes on just long enough for us to watch Cox's articulate face, and know that Jules doesn't see her beauty.  Some critics carped that Cox couldn't be believable in the scene, being one of Hollywood's stunning 45-year-olds, secret surgical tucks or not.

Jules's emotional underdevelopment makes her both annoying and loveable: she'd like to grow up, at least in moderation, but fear of change currently lurks everywhere. On top of that, it's spooky to have 17-year-old Travis cope with his inner life better than Mom does.

Nonsense to that. Many of the most beautiful women I know honestly have no idea that the word "beauty" applies to them. As for the over-forty gang? Things are getting better for mid-life women and self-image, but very slowly.

One of TV's few appealing cougars of the recent past had a delightfully healthy self-image.  Samantha Jones of Sex and the City implies by comparison that Jules absolutely can get more comfortable with her body, and more comfortable with finding men to enjoy it. Ms. Jones rarely experienced any hesitation going after men 10 to 15 years her junior. She didn't have a problem going after men her own age, either, which Jules is doing well to consider—even though she fusses nervously that they're all "broken, gay, or chasing younger girls".

Samantha Jones embraced moderate hedonism, celebrating sex for herself and for everyone else; however, it took her all six seasons of Sex and the City to begin allowing her emotions to come to the party.

For the most part, the premiere of Cougar Town (the series name comes from a high school sports mascot) finds its residents either overwhelmed by emotions (Jules; her neighbor/best pal Ellie) or practically oblivious to them (co-worker/pal Laurie). Jules's emotional underdevelopment makes her both annoying and loveable: she'd like to grow up, at least in moderation, but fear of change currently lurks everywhere. On top of that, it's spooky to have 17-year-old Travis cope with his inner life better than Mom does.

I'm in the cougar age group now, but I'm not a cougar. I don't find younger men automatically more attractive than men my own age, or older.  Like Jules, I don't favor gauche dresses that say "easy mark" in neon lights. I don't pile on the false lashes and bright lipstick. I don't self-baptize in aggressive cologne.

Still, because I'm unmarried, and I look like I have some measure of interest in males, I get nailed with the label "cougar" and the negatives that go with it.

Throughout recent interviews, Courteney Cox speaks like a producer/ actress determined to peel some layers of stigma and taboo off of single women past forty.

In Jules, she just might have a character both brave enough and stubborn enough to take up the cause. Jules settled for a piece of boy bed candy in episode one, true. Still, after only five months of divorce recovery, maybe that's the only step she's ready to risk.

It certainly scratched her itch for the moment. As she said to Ellie about having sex again for the first time since the split, her face and voice alive with surprise: "I feel like I can see colors!"

It's the only line that made me laugh out loud. But that scratched my itch. Speaking of which—I'd bet the farm that most females who understand the value of laughing in bed are over forty. It's one of those things about which cougar-age women tend to be wise.