From Kitten to Cougar

It’s depressing to see drunk older women at nightclubs vainly trying to hold onto their former glory.  It’s a study in contrasts when these aging beauties go to clubs full of kittens.  They aggressively flirt with every guy because when they haven’t been hotly pursued by a man under 60 in ten years they turn to the hard sell for male attention.  If the cougar asks you the time and you give it to her she takes that as a signal to stroke your chest provocatively.  They rationalize this pathetic behavior as maturing into a confidently assertive woman who is done playing games like they did when they were “silly girls”.  There are so many self-help books now I think a person could positively spin just about any shitty life predicament.

I can think of quite a few girls I frequently see haunting the nightlife scene who’ve gone from kitten to cougar in just a few years.  Many women in the socialite crowd have crossed the cougar rubicon, yet stubbornly refuse to give up their lifestyle.  When all you’ve ever known is the inside of a club, 37 varieties of martinis, and dancing on raised platforms as horny guys give you your attention fix, it’s understandable you’d find it hard to accept your demotion to has-been hottie.

Cougarness in strangers is not hard to identify.  Friends are another matter.  When you see a person every day you don’t notice their physical changes from aging so much, but someone you see once every six months can shock you with their age-related deterioration.  The precise changes are hard to pinpoint but taken as a whole it’s obvious when the bloom of youth is gone.

The statuesque woman on the left is on the cusp of cougarhood.  Even though she has admirably stayed in shape, her upper arms betray her age, especially around the armpit, as do her sinewy hands.  You know her flesh would not bounce back from a firm squeeze, like a quarter off a Marine’s bed.  If she is still single, her time is short to find a life partner before she has to begin lowering her standards.

After marriage and kids, most women surrender the willpower to fight the ravages of time and let themselves go, content to become matronly and raise their children.  This is the normal progression of life.  But with career-delayed marriages and perpetual dating where she is waiting around forever to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist, the clubs are beginning to fill with women who have missed the boat yet won’t admit it to themselves.

Desperation causes them to do just about anything to cling to their fading looks.  You will see women over 30 suddenly lose a lot of weight because they are under the impression that being skinny will shave the years off.  Celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Renee Zellweger do this.  While it beats being obese, most simply look like bony older women with sunken eye sockets and loose skin.  Tom Wolfe, in his prophetic opus ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, called these women “social X-rays”.  It was an excellent description, as it highlighted their physical emaciation along with their superficiality.

This is an unwanted chest-stroking waiting to happen:

Eventually, the cougar who is sufficiently self-deluded about her ability to attract men becomes a brothel madam.

This woman is a fixture at the eurotrash clubs around town:

She is pretty, but it is only a matter of a few years until a roaring cougar emerges.  She looks Russian, which means that she will hit the wall sooner and harder than most women her age.  She has done the smart thing here by hooking up with an older man.  She will look hot to him for a longer time than she would to a younger man.  Not surprisingly, he displays the body language of a former player.  I suspect he is an artist of some sort.  Older male artists, as opposed to older male investment bankers or lawyers, are especially gifted at banging Lolitas.

As a man and an aesthete, watching women grow old and their beauty disappear forever is the greatest tragedy of life.  If I could magically prevent every woman from aging and thus increase the aggregate beauty in the world, I would do it.