I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately and I’ve come to two very earth-shattering conclusions.

The first is that I’m finally old enough to avoid the interest of cougars at bars and nightclubs; the second is that I’m really going to miss it.

I still remember my first interaction with a cougar. I was 18 years old and my band was playing at the Norwood Hotel in St. Boniface. A middle-aged and over-tanned lady in a leopard-skin-print unitard came up to me between sets and grabbed my ass. When I looked up, surprised at how forward she had been, I was greeted with a deep, sultry and raspy smoking-voice that said: “Hey handsome, wanna play me instead of that guitar for the rest of the night?”

I was shocked and repulsed, but as much as I wanted to tell her where she could put her leathery claw that was still gripping my ass cheek, all I could do was giggle, get flustered and then run away.
I thought about it for a long time afterward. Why didn’t I tell her off if it bugged me so much? Why is it OK for a middle-aged woman to grab a young guy’s ass like that? Who would ever buy a leopard-skin-print unitard and actually plan to wear it in public in a completely non-facetious way?

The answer I came up with to all of these questions is simple: She’s a cougar.

Cougars are a very unique group of people in our society. They have special status and are afforded a special set of rights and privileges. They can do whatever they want to whomever they want and wear whatever they want, as long as they fulfill their role in our society.

The role of the cougar, though it may not seem so at first, is a very important and politically driven one. Many people may disagree with me, but I believe that cougars are the purest form of feminists in our culture.

Sure, on the surface they seem to demean themselves and appear sort of sad and pathetic, but if you look a little closer, you’ll see that what they are really doing is something noble and selfless for all of womankind.

They are using their lives as a testament to the question that if it’s OK for middle-aged men to go to the bar and be creepy pieces of shit by sexually harassing young women, why can’t women do the same thing to young men?

What cougars are really doing, simply by virtue of their existence, is proving to the world that women can do anything men can do, including being pathetic sexual predators who hang out in seedy bars, lamenting their lost or wasted youth, drowning their sorrow in pools of gin and clouds of cigarette smoke.

Christ, I’m gonna miss those cougars.

Though he may be too old, J. Williamez invites all cougars to attend his shows on Mondays at Shannon’s Irish Pub. Plenty of young meat guaranteed.

Published in Volume 64, Number 20 of The Uniter (February 25, 2010)