Warning: Cougar on the Prowl

Ahoy!  This morning the first International Cougar Cruise left San Diego.  This cruise is the first of its kind.  It is aimed at cougars (older, sexually charged women looking for some young men) and cubs (young, attractive men looking for an older woman).  The guest of honor on board the ship will be Miss Cougar America who was selected at the National Single Cougars Convention this August.  The cubs who attended the conference were the ones who decided the winner.  The Cougar Cruise and Convention are based on Valerie Gibson’s book entitled Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men.  In this, Gibson states that “a cougar is the new breed of single, older woman—confident, sophisticated, desirable, and sexy. She knows exactly what she wants. What she doesn’t want is children, cohabitation, or commitment.”

The cruise is co-sponsored by the Singles Travel Company and the Society of Single Professionals.  It will last for three nights and is advertised to be fun-filled with lots of dinners, dancing, and partying.  Interestingly enough, this cruise sold out almost instantly.  In fact, the company that sponsored the event had to hire more staff, just to be able to take all of the phone calls!

When reading about this cruise, I began to wonder, how different would the discourse surrounding this cruise be if the older participant were male?  Would they change the theme from “cougars and cubs” to “pedophiles and gold-diggers?”  I find it interesting that although Gayle Rubin places “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries” at the bottom of the hierarchy of acts, a cruise with older women and younger men is considered to be funny and liberating for women.  Have media influences, such as Courtney Cox’s television show, Cougartown or the highly publicized marriage between Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, influenced the perception of relationships between older women and younger men?  Or has the stigma towards cross-generational relationships always applied more to men than to women?

A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the cultural perceptions of masculinity and femininity.  Catherine Waldby’s description of the masculine imago displays men as strong “destroyers” and women as receptive and “destroyed.”  Fields says that in her experience with sex education courses, young boys and girls are taught to perceive males as sexually aggressive and in control.  Could it be that perceptions of the gentle, submissive woman compared to the strong, predatory man could be what creates this inconsistency?  Older men are considered to be even more predatory than younger men, whereas older woman are considered to be classier and more refined than younger woman.  Since a woman cannot (yeah, right) dominant a man, it is considered to be a much more acceptable interaction than were it the other way around. So have fun cougars and cubs!

Necrophilia and Pedophilia and Bestiality! Oh my!

I know that a post below me covered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a personal favorite of mine, and Twilight, but I want to look at the vampires in True Blood and New Moon. New Moon deals with some topics pretty far outside Rubin’s “charmed circle.” There’s cross-generational relationships—Edward Cullen, the dreamy vampire lead, is after all, over one hundred years old. However, that little factoid is quite obviously ignored, as he looks just like a teenager.

This idea of the ageless vampire makes me think of cross-generational relationships. Age differences are so easily accepted when it’s dealing with fictional vampires. Edward and Bella of Twilight fame, Buffy and Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sookie and Bill in True Blood. In all of these examples, the vampire is always the man- because don’t we accept age differences when the male is older? While obviously vampires are not real, cross-generational relationships are the ones abhorred by the rest of the world. In a cross-generational relationship, people look at the older member of the dyad as being deviant. I wonder how people would react if Twilight featured a female vampire who was hundreds of years old, and a young boy? After all, avoiding cross-generational relationships purpose is to keep children “pure.” Well, in Twilight everyone stays pure, so I guess the age gap ceases to exist. 

Walking the Walk Outro

Now that the semester is over, I find it fitting to address my first blog.  Now that the course has ended, what do we think we can do?  Some classmates’ presentations in another course, Sociology of Childhood, has inspired an idea in me.  A few of the presentations focused on the content of teen magazines.  One was about advertisements and another about all other content besides advertisements including articles.  One colleague found that there were four main foci of teen magazine articles—beauty, health, fashion and something I’m forgetting.

I remember reading many of these magazines as a pre-teen and accumulating a lot of my “common sense” knowledge from these articles.  Some were about abusive relationships, dangerous age-inappropriate situations, fitting in, eating disorders, and paralysis from birth or after an accident.  If the content of these articles was more widespread the next generation could learn so much more.

Kids get indoctrinated in their culture from a young age.  If you’ve ever seen the documentary Jesus Camp, you know that the radical Christian right hosts camps and classes that indoctrinate children into a culture they don’t even understand.  In this case, this is a conservative culture that reinforces the charmed circle.  Since the conservatives are so organized, the liberals and those in favor of all liberties for everyone in and out of the circle need a way to counteract these forces, or offer an alternative option.  I’m not saying we blindly indoctrinate children.  On the contrary, we provide children with the facts, all of the information, and we provide disclaimers about the philosophical problems with “truth”—that these are theories based on research and prior scholarly articles—and the kids will make sense of the knowledge on their own.  It’s okay for kids to have contradicting ideologies.  Good and evil, sin and sainthood are two examples of opposing forces that children learn to deal with at a young age.  But ignorance leads to destruction.  At least if the kids have the information they will be prepared for situations they will encounter in the future.

So, sociologists! Journalists! Band together!  Together we can take research and scholarship and turn it into language and form that young people understand.  This knowledge should not be limited to an upper-level sociology course.  The concepts are easy enough to understand with some explanation and conversation as most things are.  If we combine research and scholarship and teen magazines, we can begin to open minds to what is outside of the charmed circle for a freer, happier future for all.

1, 2, 3, Peter, Paul and Mary: The Prevalence of the Triad in Popular Culture

Really, Britney? It’s the sexiest threesome you could think of? 

Lately, threesomes seem to be everywhere. Britney Spears is singing about them, Dr. McSteamy of Grey’s Anatomy fame is having one, and Amazon is pushing them.

“God’s plan was for sexuality to be in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage.”

The above quote was said by Ted Haggard, an Evangelical minster who was “outed” in  2006… or was he? Ted Haggard preached against gay marriage and was featured in movies such as Jesus Camp. He had been married to a woman for thirty years, led a congregation of thousands and he met with President Bush to discuss policy. However, in 2006, male prostitute Mike Jones came forward with allegations that he had a homosexual relationship with Haggard for three years that also involved the use of crystal meth. Haggard eventually admitted that these accusations were true- that he had sinned and was a “heterosexual with homosexual attachments” but refused to be labeled as a homosexual.

Who is Ted Haggard? A closeted gay man who has been socialized through religion to believe that living life as a heterosexual is the only way to stay in Rubin’s “Charmed Circle” and receive benefits? Or is he a man who is simply unable to fit into the heterosexual/homosexual binary, a man who proves that people are innately bisexual and can defy labels? Maybe he is just a hypocrite.