Relationship Myths

These questions are a part of the BAM(H)! POW! SOB! series

5. A cougar: a woman who dates a younger man...thoughts?
My thoughts are I wish that I did not just use Google to do some research on this topic, because I saw some things that I wish I had not seen. I generally frown upon things that are illegal, so I would say that as long as the younger man is of age, then it seems okay to me.

In issues like this, I tend to look to what the celebrities are doing. Patrick Dempsey, at the age of 21, married his 48-year-old manager, which only made him a year older than his stepson. But they got divorced, so don’t necessarily take that as an endorsement. There’s Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. But really, if you want to understand how celebrities feel about cougars, look no further than John Mellencamp. John Mellencamp is completely responsible for the term “cougar” in popular culture.

In 1967, John Mellencamp saw the movie “The Graduate.” He was very taken with Mrs. Robinson, and he saw a lot of himself in young Dustin Hoffman. He said, “That woman is totally a cougar! From here on out, I will be known as Johnny Cougar!” And so he was, and that is how the term “cougar” came to denote an older woman dating a younger man. Johnny Cougar, and later, John Cougar Mellencamp, used his inoffensive pop music to subliminally influence our nation’s older women to date younger men. For example, few people know that in the song “Jack and Diane,” Diane is actually 30, while Jack is 21. “Small Town” is a reference to where most cougars hang out. “Pink Houses” refers to the kind of house that cougars and their younger men like to live in. And so on and so forth.

Most people think that John Cougar Mellencamp dropped the “Cougar” because he wanted to be taken a little more seriously in his music, but really, it’s because he got older, and if he wanted to keep chasing cougars, he’d have to date 60-year-olds. Now I hear he’s interested in being known as John Lolita Mellencamp, or John May-December Romance Mellencamp.

6. “Mythbusters” rocks
I don’t watch the show “MythBusters,” so it will be hard for me to say too much about this topic. But let me just go ahead and bust the myth that John Cougar Mellencamp is the one responsible for the term “cougar” in popular culture. I don’t know who made that up.