It’s a dangerous time to be a word. Put yourself in the place of the word cougar and think how you would feel. One minute you’re pottering around in a peaceful corner of the dictionary, minding your own business and referring to a mammal native to the Americas. The next, Courtney Cox has come out of nowhere, pounced on you and crowbarred you into the title of her dramedy Cougar Town, and Grazia is fretting over whether or not you’ve become an offensive term. It all happened so fast, but now it’s done and your meaning has changed forever. It’s time to take stock.

As someone who was recently cougared, I take a particularly interest in the subject. Is it wrong of me use the word in this sense, even though it’s currently everywhere? Should we fight to give it back its old meaning? Words are slippery things, and can easily elude our clutches. For example, according to official cougarology, I should now be called either a cougar “cub” or a “victim,” which suggests a certain confusion as to whether I was being mothered or attacked. I suppose I’m still a bit confused about that too.

Winston Churchill famously said that anyone who wasn’t a conservative by the age of forty didn’t have a brain. This may apply to politics, but the old dog certainly can’t have been talking about sex Conservative it was not. I suppose there’s just no point wasting time on inhibitions when you’ve seen it all before.

There we were, me ravishing a woman old enough to be my mother; her all over a boy young enough to be her son. Psychologically, it was pretty fucked up. There was clearly some deeply troubling Oedipal stuff going on in both our minds—dark, unholy thoughts best left unsaid. But we both knew they were there, and the space between the thoughts and their expression was filled with some really great sex.
Wow, I thought. Cougars.

In the morning we shared the mirror. As I spiked my hair with styling fudge, and she caressed her face with L’Oreal Revitalift Anti-wrinkle and Firming Eye cream, we caught a glimpse of each other’s vanity and vulnerability reflected alongside our own. For a moment, we were both more cub than prey.

That’s what we need to remember when we toss around words like cougar to describe each other. It’s not the word that is important, it’s the person, and no word is ever going to do justice to the multitudes contained within. That’s why I don’t have a problem with the word cougar any more than MILF or toyboy or twink. They’re just words, and they’re funny, and the sooner we choose to read them as descriptive rather than pejorative, the better.

When Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls pleaded with the girls to “stop calling each other sluts and whores…it just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores,” she had the right end in mind, but the wrong means. She should have told them to start calling the promiscuous guys sluts and whores as well.

Much like the St. George’s Cross was an insignia of racism until those of us without tattoos and rottweilers decided we quite wanted it back, so should we cheerfully look forward to the day when “I am a slut” will be no more an offensive sentence than “I have blonde hair.”

So if someone you know is being a cougar, call them a cougar. If someone is sleeping around, be they straight or gay, old or young, male or female, then call them a slut. To their face. But not as an insult, just as a noun. That way, together, we can truly build a better world.

By Michael Pollitt
8:00 PM