The Single Rider » feminism

My “cougar” days, part one

Erin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:29:19 +0000

What a ridiculous term by the way – “cougar”. Where the hell did that come from? I’ve been googling around to find out how a woman who pursues relationships with younger men has come to be known as a “cougar”, but no one seems to know. I even looked up some facts about the actual feline known as “cougar”, also known as puma, panther, or mountain lion, depending on if you live in Texas, Florida or Wyoming. I found no evidence that the female cougar prefers younger male cougars for mates, but did find reference to adults being more or less solitary and meeting for one reason and one reason only – mating. Perhaps this is the basis for the terminology – hunting for a mate, then going home alone. I know, it’s a stretch, but aside from that I got nuttin’ !!!

A survey conducted by AARP asserts that 34% of women surveyed responded indicating that they were dating younger men, thereby fitting the definition of “cougar”. The survey is 6 years old at the time of this writing. Spurred on by high-profile romances such as that of Ashton Kutscher and Demi Moore, I imagine that statistic has only grown in the intervening years.

Guess what? There was a time when I fit the “cougar” definition, too. Yes, ladies and gentlemen – I was cougar before cougar was cool I once calculated it and came up with a startling statistic – I am older than 80-something percent of all the guys I’ve ever been involved with. Age differences have ranged from 3 months all the way up to 8 years.

(As an aside, I also calculated that 80-something percent of all the guys I’ve ever dated and/or married were also Jewish. Yes, we detect a pattern here. No, I haven’t really tried to analyze it. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Queens, so I’m not shocked that I’ve got an affinity for Jewish guys).

I began my auspicious career as a cougar circa 1975-76. Harry was in 9th grade and I was in 10th. He was exactly my height, sandy brown hair, blue eyes, with freckles. A class-clown type, Harry really knew how to make me laugh, and he was just adorable. Soon after we met, he got his braces removed, a fact which relieved him no end. I’d privately thought that they only added to his adorableness factor.

We were both in the high school chorus, and both had 5th period free, during which time we ran errands for the people working in the guidance office. One day, the student body decided to stage a “walk out” during 5th period over some (no doubt) burning, socially relevant issue, and Harry and I decided to walk up to McDonald’s instead of hanging out in the guidance office. I guess that was our first “date”.

Soon after that, he proposed to me amidst the melee that occurs periodically each day at every high school across America – otherwise known as the break between classes. We were passing on the staircase. I was trapped in the throngs heading up, while he was heading down. There’s no stopping when you’re in the crush of humanity on the staircase in an over-crowded New York City public school. He was looking for me; he saw me and thrust something rather sharp and pointy into my hand. As the crowd swept him away, he hollered over his shoulder, “Marry me!”. I opened my hand to find a copper-colored paper clip, bent pretzel-style into the likeness of a ring. Despite the fact that the ring eventually left a greenish tattoo on my finger, I was da shit for the duration of the school year. A boy, a CUTE, nice Jewish boy (all my friends were Jewish – I was the token shiksa) had proposed. With witnesses! It seems like half the school was on that staircase during the first (but not last) proposal of my life. This is how I came to be the sensation of the 10th grade that year.

I received my first-ever kiss – with tongue! – from Harry. I suspect it was his first as well. We were riding in the back of a car driven by the senior boyfriend of one of my pals, on our way to a party. The sun was shining on a fine spring day, and the Beatles crooned All My Lovin’ as we practiced our exploratory maneuvers, entirely neck-up, on each other. Thereafter, just walking down the halls or ambling hand-in-hand down the street, one or the other of us would spontaneously burst into All My Lovin’, while the other harmonized. To this day, when I hear that song all I can think of is Harry and soft, first kisses in the warm sunshine.

When my friends threw me a girls-only Sweet 16 party, Harry and some of the guys from our crowd crashed. The hostess was my friend Denise, God rest her soul. She was rather put out, but I was delighted. They came bearing gifts. One of the boys gave me Wings At The Speed Of Sound and another Endless Summer. Only, they were LPs! You actually needed a record player to play them! These remain staples of my music collection. Harry, however, chose to come bearing jewelry. He’d petitioned his grandmother for funding and presented me with a tiny, perfect sterling silver cross. This was a grand gesture coming from a nice Jewish boy and his bubbie! I treasured it and wore it always, even after we moved away, which ended our relationship.

Fast-forward one year, which can seem like a thousand at that age. I was a junior at my new high school and a senior asked me to accompany him to his prom. The day after the prom, we went to see a show on Broadway in NYC, and who should we bump into outside the theater but Harry. It seems a senior had asked him to the prom too, at our old high school. We were ecstatic to see one another, but that made our dates antsy, so we had to be brief. A year had made a huge difference – I could tell he was now officially WAY taller than I was, and he was even cuter, if that was possible. His parents had relocated him, too – to California. We wrote to one another a few times, but as often happens with young love, one or the other of us stopped writing and that was the end of that.

I don’t know what became of the “engagement ring”. It probably disintegrated and went to paper clip heaven. But I do know what happened to the silver cross. Fast forward another year, to the magically golden summer of 1978. Our town sponsored an outdoor summer theater workshop, and during rehearsals for a dance number, the chain I wore the cross on somehow got caught on someone else. The chain snapped and it all went flying into the night. Several people helped me look for it. We found the chain, but the cross was lost forever. I probably would have been inconsolable, had it not been the magically golden summer of 1978 and That Boy.

Oh, and the show we were doing? Fiddler On The Roof – OY!

NEXT TIME: His name was Jeremy…

Further reading: Here’s the article that inspired me to explore my inner cougar

Click to read The Cougar: Progressive or Exploitative? on BlogHer

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The baubles he brings, part 2

Erin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:00:14 +0000

We ended yesterday’s post with:

My first installment of insight from K is advice designed to enable me to judge a person’s character. I should first observe how a person treats service people like drivers and waiters, even if they are not nice to him. Two, I should observe what the person says about people who are not present. Third, and I need to quote this because he put it so succinctly – “money or time, which is more important? Would you rather have the gift of company, or just a gift?”

Now, the first two things are just common sense things that I already do. I am all about observing behavior to determine what makes someone tick. But number three, this gives a girl pause. With number three, we not only observe, but we measure too. Number three is all about the scientific method, all about believing in that which is observable and measurable.

Women are socialized to value the showering of gifts. We learn this from other women – our mothers, sisters, friends – and we start doing it basically from the moment we start dating. It becomes important to us because it is important to them; that is to say, I don’t think we’re born this way, I think we’re socialized this way. Everyone is judged by the value of the gifts. We judge the man by the gifts he gives us for our birthdays, Valentine’s Day, or “just because”. We judge each other by how good the gifts from men are. Remember the girls in HS who wore ankle bracelets on chains around their necks? Remember how much the other girls envied them? There were also girls who had “his ring” on a chain around their necks (I was one of those briefly, but not in high school). Or the girls who wore the guy’s letter jacket, how about those? Oh, I have another good one, from later in life – the parade of flowers in the office on Valentine’s Day. The women who don’t get any are envious and curse the sight of all those 1-800-FLOWERS vans parked outside the building.

So, the jewelry, the flowers, the branding of her with his letterman jacket – these are all outward signs of his esteem for her, which in turn contributes to her own self-esteem. It also elevates her status among her peers, which is another boost to her self-esteem. Later on it’s engagement rings, cars, houses, vacations… things, always things.

You know what, I think this is a throwback to the times of dowries. A dowry is money, goods/property that a woman’s father would provide so she could establish her marriage household with her new husband. The more “stuff” that was associated with her, the more valuable it was to marry her. See, it wasn’t the woman herself that was valued – it was the stuff. No stuff, no value!

In some cultures, there was even a tradition of the groom settling a monetary gift on the bride the morning after the wedding night. This gift would help to ensure her future should something happen to him, and it was also an indication that she’d proven satisfactory and that he intended to keep her.

A woman’s worth to herself and to others has probably been all tied up in the tangible, the material, basically since the invention of patriarchy. Some man – either her lover or her father – was always either giving or receiving STUFF in connection with her. To this day,we women still seem to be measuring ourselves and each other by the baubles he brings. I want to make it clear that, although I think without a doubt that patriarchy was initially responsible for this, it’s we women today in 2009 that are perpetuating it, foisting it upon ourselves and each other. We need to cut this shit out, and start walking the talk of self-worth.

For many women, having a man – ANY man – is the ultimate proof of their own worth. It’s proof to themselves as well as to the world at large. On a certain level, I get how seductive this is. I’ve been single a long time, and I know that there have been situations whereby my lack of a man – ANY man – has made me seem “less than” in the eyes of those around me. It’s worth so much to some women, they have actually expressed sympathy for my “plight”. Some of those times, I’ve wished fleetingly that I had a man – ANY man – to make me seem “more than” in their eyes, to wipe that smug, pseudo-sympathetic look off their faces. I get over this feeling pretty quickly. It gets replaced with the desire to kick their asses for making me feel that way – even fleetingly.

Well, it IS lonely sometimes. But you know, lonliness is not THEIR reason for not wanting to be manless. Many women, some of the very ones who have pitied me – these women are sometimes the ones that see a man as a means to an end, not as the end itself. They want the THINGS, the candy and flowers and jewelry, so they can feel like they are worth something, and they believe this is the ONLY way they can feel like they are worth something. Stuff, things – these are tangible proof of his esteem for her, and therefore of her worth.

I make a good living and I can buy STUFF for myself. Those who have known me for a while know that this is true – I deny myself basically nothing. Veni, Vidi, Visa I don’t need a man to give me things. His gifts will, of course, make me feel good, but my self-worth comes from different places. It comes from accomplishments. It comes from going back to school and getting another degree while in my 40s, and from having a successful career on Wall Street. It grew from all those operas I memorized and performed in foreign languages, and all the applause and praise that resulted. My self-esteem comes from knowing that my friends and family think the world of me, and from knowing when I’ve done the right thing.

Now mind you, I would not turn down the gifts; I would appreciate him a lot for gifting me with them, but really, that’s not what I would need him for. ‘Way back then, when I was a teenager, and even into my thirties – yes, I wanted the ankle bracelet and the esteem that went with it. But now? Yeah, it’s the gift of company. Here and now, in 2009, that’s what I want. And it can’t be just ANY man, either – but I think this is long enough, and that’s a post for another day.

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The baubles he brings, part 1

Erin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:00:18 +0000

One of the delights of Facebook has been reconnecting with K. He was my friend back in high school, friend enough that I referred to him as “my big bro”, even though I already had quite enough brothers, thank you. K and I have been having a daily, continuous conversation for several weeks, entirely via Facebook messaging. It’s been fun getting to know him as an adult and having the occasional quasi-deep, philosophical discussion.

K says he’s going to ‘splain to me where I’ve gone wrong in my relationships, why I have chosen wrong. Seems he thinks getting it right is not as complicated as I think it is. He must be doing something right – he’s been married for roughly 20 years.

By way of background, I hereby inform you all that a)K is married to someone my ex-husband dated before becoming involved with me, and b)in high school, K was THAT boy‘s best friend. It was K who said to me one day at the lunch table, just at the beginning of our senior year, “Hey, THAT boy has gone away to college and he’s lonely. Why don’t you write to him?”. To be honest, I didn’t exactly recall at the time what THAT boy looked like, but I liked to write, so I began dispatching letters in the direction of the Midwest as soon as K suggested it. To this day, I wonder if THAT boy had a secret crush on me and arranged for K to put us in touch… I just knew them both as boys who sat together at the end of The Table (where all the music and theater geeks lunched) and studied a lot.

K entered the military upon graduation from high school, and I wrote to him too, pretty much faithfully for at least the first two years he was “lost in Germany”, maybe even longer. I would have to check The Box to be sure, but I don’t want to just now.

In business and many other types of situations, I’m intuitive and usually dead on about people. It’s useful being able to discern what will motivate someone, especially in a management situation. But if I’m very attracted to the man, and I want him to be attracted to me too, all bets are off. Radar instantly jams, and I find myself 2nd guessing a lot. Happens every time! Now, there’s a certain thrill to being all twitterpated all the time, but it does tend to cloud my judgment. By virtue of this, I’m quite willing to hear what K’s got to say on the subject.

to be continued…

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The choice to be childless

Erin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:04:00 +0000

Niece No. 2, aka my God-Niece, updated her status on Facebook this morning and has not been back to elaborate. Her status currently declares that she “never wants to be a parent”.

Never is a pretty long time. I’m intrigued, and looking forward to asking her what brought this on when I see her next. She’s coming to spend a week with me “doing nothing” on the beach next month. I’m sure it will be an illuminating conversation!

It started me thinking, though, about all the reasons I’ve had over the years for not wanting to have children. All these years, I’ve given the impression that it does boil down to that simple, declarative statement – I never wanted to be a parent. But in reality, nothing is ever that simple.

Growing up, my dolls were never really my babies – they were my friends. I never clamored to be the mother whenever the kids in my neighborhood played “house”. I just never had the drive toward motherhood when I was little.

I was babysitter of choice in my neighborhood when I became a teenager. The kids adored me, and I them. I wrote fabulous tales of adventure and heroism, and put them in starring roles in these epics. I played the best games, and kept their secrets while still keeping them out of harm’s way. I was their friend and guide – but NEVER their mother-figure.

In my late teens, I indulged in a little pipe-dreaming with a particular boy (yes, THAT boy) about “some day” and how it would be when we established our home and our family together – right down to “two cats in the yard”. The scenario included a vague quantity of children, at least two judging from a sketch he drew for me one time. At this point, though, I feel it fair to point out that for me, it really WAS dreaming; I felt very little real identification with the possibility that it could actually come true. At 17-18 years of age, I’d already had a number of experiences that taught me the rug would be ripped out from under me as soon as I became comfortable and happy, so I don’t think I ever actually believed that “some day” would manifest into reality.

Later in life, I had what turned out to be an ill-fated marriage, to someone else. But in the beginning, when I still had every intention of going through life with him, I picked out names; Julie for a girl (Julianna, actually, like the queen of the Netherlands) and Jordan for a boy. This was a nod to the name of the female lead in the musical Carousel. It was my first role after starting to study with Gloria, a radical departure from the roles I’d been playing – I’d learned how to sing like an ingenue. I thought it was neat that “Julie Jordan” had two first names instead of a first and a last. Anyway – eventually, I accepted that I was married to the wrong person, and actively sought to prevent the manifestation of children. I believed he would not pull his weight as a parent; he wasn’t pulling his weight as a partner, and I saw no reason to believe a baby would change any of that. I already felt overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being an adult, having a household to tend to along with a full time job and a budding stage career. I felt responsible for everything, and I didn’t see the sense in adding to those responsibilities.

I recognized, fortunately, that many men want children for the same reason they’d like a Porsche in the garage. They love being able to brag about having one, but they want nothing to do with the maintenance. I further recognized that a woman who is married to this sort of man is in for 18 years (minimum) of indentured servitude, self-sacrifice and subjugation of all her wants, needs and desires, always putting the needs of the children first, never getting an assist.

I grew up in a very restrictive environment. I didn’t get to make the simplest of decisions for myself; everything was controlled to the nth degree. I had no say in the clothes I wore, the way I styled my hair, the friends I was allowed to have…. no freedom of choice at all. I was tired of external sources dictating every little detail of everything for me. I wanted freedom. The idea of living under restrictions again was not at all appealing.

I feared that, under virtual single-parent conditions, I would become resentful and miserable. This would leak over onto the children. I’d been on the receiving end of something similar. I knew what it was to really hate being treated that way.

Bottom line: I knew it would break my heart to have any child of mine hurt so badly that they would come to hate me. I could not bear the thought of it. I’d been trying to prepare myself for a long time to not make the same mistakes my parents did. I started a diary at age 13 or so, for the express purpose of never forgetting what it is like to be a kid. I thought that would help me to be a better parent. Probably, it would have. Definitely, under the “some day” scenario, with the right partner, it would have worked. But once I piled the wrong partner on top of my fears that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… there was no way I was going to introduce children into the scenario. They would only suffer for it.

So, all these years, many of you reading this have had the understanding that I didn’t WANT children. That is not necessarily the whole truth. As is typical for me, I knew far better what I didn’t want. What I didn’t want was to feel used and trapped. What I didn’t want was to make children who were destined to suffer and to resent me for it. What I didn’t want was to gift someone with a Porsche that I would then be forced to maintain solo.

God is good. Some women who go through chemo lose their ability to reproduce. I was 33 when they finally decided that those episodes whereby my head felt like it was spinning into orbit were actually hot flashes, and that meant I was entering menopause. I was not a candidate for estrogen replacement, because that’s what my tumor ate for a living – estrogen. Therefore, I believe that God picked the right person to visit with this condition. It would have been a real tragedy if God had picked a woman who would have been devastated by infertility. From that perspective, I’m glad God chose me. And it really kind of settled the question once and for all. Want or not want, it was moot – “can’t” was now the operative word, and aside from a mild twinge now and then, I’ve really been ok with it, with the finality of it.

All of this led to my ability to focus some individualized attention (not to mention disposable income) in the direction of my nieces. And now I’m wondering if it also led to an example being set for them of an alternative option. Even growing up in the 60s and being exposed to media coverage of “women’s liberation”, Gloria Steinem, fish having no need of bicycles, etc., I still had some notion that one grew up and got married and had children because that’s what one did. I’m sure the extremely conservative way in which I was raised contributed to that; my parents often said that a young woman did not leave her parents house unless it was to move into her husband’s house.

This hasn’t been true for my nieces, thankfully. They actually get to leave the house and go away to college – without first having to get married! Although I would never want to discourage them from having a family if that’s what they wanted, I do hope that my life has somehow served to let them know that a person can be legitimately productive and happy leading an alternative lifestyle, that there is another choice besides wife and mother. There’s the choice to be childless. When I ask about the mysterious Facebook status update, I might find that this is the case, or I might find that she was just in a very bad mood. Either way – it’s satisfying to know that there are children in this world whom I love, that I’ve not made them suffer and they don’t hate me So maybe it was the right choice after all.

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Having a life and still being successful

Erin — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:45:04 +0000

How Women Are Redefining Work and Success – BusinessWeek.

Found this article in BusinessWeek and realized I had stuff to say about it!

“They yearned for a path to success based on results, not hours clocked.” This resonates with me because I have felt the pressure to stay online until the boss logs off, regardless of whether or not there was any work that was pressing enough to dig into MY time. And yes, at my rung on the ladder, overtime is MY time, which I generously donate to the Firm on occasion. How much and how often can be the result of a trickle-down effect. If the boss is doing it, the worker feels some obligation to do it, too. If the boss talks about having a life and leaves early sometimes to attend a school function, the workers will feel comfortable doing that too.

All of you who are The Boss, remember this – you are leading by example! If you want your staff to be well-rounded and able to perform at peak, you must model the right behavior, the behavior that says it’s not only OK to have a non-work life, it’s mandatory.

burnout and the “enormous lattitude to move sideways, backward, in and out” – I might be one of the few downshifting success stories at the Firm. Normally, one would have to change firms if they wanted to downshift, but I was fortunate enough to have management that recognized burnout didn’t mean I wasn’t any good to them any more. It meant I needed to not work so much any more, to put some perspective back into my life, to have the luxury of down time.

“So rather than try and get them to conform to rules and guidelines from the 1950s, we should listen to them, and let them lead the way for what this future will look like.” – I don’t see this happening in the current environment. Jobs are not plentiful. It’s not like the worker has another place to go, at least not easily or readily. The worker will have to conform to the mores of the workplace, whatever decade those mores are from, or they will be fired and replaced with one of the thousands poised to step over the bodies and take their places. In a less competitive environment, the workplace might very well need to conform, but as things stand, I think the workplace will continue to be “my way or the highway”.

additional expectations of the single rider – Yes, it happens. We, the single and childless of either gender, are often expected to pick up the slack. I’ve actually been told, “Well, it’s not like you have to pick up the kids or anything like that” – as if that’s any more legitimate than my own non-work priorities and obligations.

backlash against telecommuting – currently happening in my firm, and the reason I won’t be transferring back into the technology group any time soon (I’m currently in corporate finance). Apparently, there was a moonlighting incident. So now, in the tech org, all of the “outlyers” (yes they actually call us telecommuters that!) are slowly being brought back into the offices. This incurs cost – real estate, phone lines, LAN connections all cost money.

Honestly, I view the moonlighting thing as a management problem, not a telecommuting problem. How could you not know that your people aren’t on the job? How can you not know that they are not producing the way they should be producing? Still, management has become allergic to telecommuting, and removing this as an option is going to throw people back into imbalance between work and home life. When I started telecommuting full time in 2005, I was able to reclaim four hours of my life a day. FOUR HOURS. A DAY. Incredible, isn’t it? I cannot imagine going back to that old life. Ever.

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