don't call me a cougar

Following on from my Evening Standard blog last week about Sam Taylor Wood, 42, and Aaron Johnson, 19 who have announced they are to be married, I think we will probably be seeing more and more marriages where the woman is significantly older. It’s no longer just a celebrity thing, it’s now going mainstream according to Parship, who have just published a new study on the changing desires of women in their 40s. According to their survey 34% of women in their 40s and 50s want to date and even marry a younger man.

This is a dramatic change from their last survey in 2005, a mere four years ago, when only 8% said they were interested in younger men. Back in 2006 when I first started thinking of launching my own dating site, it was this particular niche that I felt was not catered for. I looked around and saw that more than half my female friends had either married or were dating younger men, and from my own experience (I’ve always had younger boyfriends) I felt this was a trend that would continue to grow.

When I launched www.toyboywarehouse.com in Jan 2007 I thought to myself how are we going to get enough attractive young men on it, but to my amazement that has never been the problem. We’ve been inundated with wannabe toyboys ever since the beginning, and that includes men in their 40s, although the main demographic is between 20 and 40. The stats confirm that there has been massive growth on this side of the sexual divide too as the survey finds that 18% of men under 40 are looking to date an attractive older woman, whereas it was only 5% five years ago.

When the site went live I thought the main female demographic would be 35 – 55 and so it was in the beginning but I’m finding more and more women in their late twenties and early thirties are following the trend and choosing younger men and this is also something borne out by the survey. Now 17% of women in their thirties are looking for a younger man. Society changes when women are financially independent. The feisty, independent women of today are going to make different choices from those their mothers made. The younger men of today, often sons of liberated women, see all the advantages of the attractive older woman. Vive la difference! Go for it girls!

By Julia

The New York Times published an article this week which is one of the first I’ve read that is both interesting and intelligent about the whole older woman/younger man trend. What is interesting is both content of the article and some of the comments, but please do read it in full yourself.

Intelligent:

“But marriage tells only part of the story. Researchers and relationship experts say that a growing number of men and older women are dating, or at least contemplating it. The women tend to be highly educated and have been married before and are not necessarily seeking out marriage or even cohabitation.

Another study by Dr. Caron, in 2004, comparing the dating preferences of women 35 to 50 with those of women 20 to 25, found that the older women were much more open to younger men and to crossing lines like race, religion and socioeconomic status.

Prior research, Dr. Caron said, had suggested that women of all ages were looking for the same things in a partner, research that led to the famous Newsweek cover story in 1986 that declared a single woman over 40 had a better chance of being blown up by a terrorist than marrying. That conclusion ricocheted through the culture as a defining fate for women of that age, but 20 years later the magazine issued a retraction, in an article entitled “Rethinking the Marriage Crunch.

The term cougar raises hackles among women who say the image of a wild animal, however sleek and beautiful, prowling for victims — or an army of Mrs. Robinsons on the march for men young enough to be their sons — is demeaning. Ms. Moore, who has been married to Mr. Kutcher for four years, has been described as a cougar, but so have sex-starved women slinking through bars for young men to satisfy nothing but physical needs.

According to the Urban Dictionary, which lists many definitions of cougar too unsavory to print, the cougar woman is generally at least 35 — and always on the hunt — while many of the Hollywood and tabloid depictions put the women in their 40s, 50s and even 60s. Sociologists studying these relationships generally are looking at women of those ages involved with men 10 to 15 years younger.

The older woman, if she is what some relationship experts refer to as the “Samantha prototype,” a reference to the “Sex and the City” character who has a strong sexual appetite for younger men — and anyone else for that matter — may well be looking merely for a boy toy. There is plenty of research on the notion popularized by Alfred Kinsey that women reach their sexual peak much later than men do, so older women and younger men may be especially sexually compatible.”

Interesting:

“Linda Franklin, a former Wall Street executive who is the author of a new book, “Don’t Ever Call Me Ma’am! The Real Cougar Woman Handbook” (Advantage Media Group), said she had decided to take what she thought was an insulting term and use it to empower women.

“What you see on TV in no way bears any reality to women in real life,” Ms. Franklin said. “These women take very good care of themselves, they are financially independent, and they are making different choices. That certainly does not make them desperate.”

Personally, I don’t believe in reworking the word ‘cougar’. It’s not so much that it’s insulting as inappropriate in most cases.

From a female reader:

“Unless a bald head and a pot belly is attractive, most men do NOT age any better than women. Sorry to point out the obvious.”

By Julia

I was on Woman’s Hour (for those outside the UK it’s the main BBC radio show for women) last week doing an interview with Jenni Murray on the whole older woman /younger man and discussing the C word. The best part was the Vox pop with women’s comments that were taken from interviews done on the street. The feedback I got afterwards was “What sort of question was ‘what do you talk to these young men about’?” I think the feeling with a lot of older people are that you’d have nothing in common with a younger man. My view is that if you are intelligent and interested in the world you can have things in common with anyone of any age. Anyway here’s the interview:

Woman’s Hour

By Julia

As I was coming of age and hanging out with the arty crowd, there was one piece of gossip that repeatedly came up: a renowned artist and columnist has “found herself” – gasp – a builder in his twenties. Can you believe it?

These people were either liberal, very liberal or extremely liberal, so on analysis it was a surprising view. Admittedly, this was a group of people that would notice and comment on a man friend’s choice of an “intellectually inferior” mate, that was the kind of snobbism that was socially acceptable, but even for them, a woman choosing a mate who was not her social / intellectual / economic superior was considered worth pointing out. The relationship was deemed all the more curious in more conventional circles, those that in turn did not turn heads at a 60-year-old successful professional dating the 25 –year-old waitress. Women, as much as men, though, regularly expressed their awe even at a union of an older woman with a younger man of equal status.

Obviously both men and women look for multiple benefits in a relationship and there are few that take only social status into account when choosing a partner (having said that, observing the mating game in SW3 you’d think that percentage was way up in the 80s or 90s!). Arguably, we look for a level of visceral attraction and visual appeal. Given that most of us don’t hit the jackpot of intellectually stimulating / beautiful / sexy / adequately sensual / socioecomically equal (or better), the more realistic tend to prioritize. Given predominant frowning upon the older woman / younger man scenario, it would seem to be that a woman is expected to prioritize socioeconomic status over sensuality. Biologically, women nearing forty and men in their twenties are incredibly compatible, but we are expected to negate that and take the expected turn to a “secure” (until he hits his midlife crisis) union.

It seems prioritization is less compelling for the male part of the population that tends toward satisfying their requirements in parallel – social status in a (semi) permanent relationship and other wishes in more transient set-ups. The parallel script is apparently less acceptable for women – just look at mainstream culture representing Unfaithful women – those films inevitably end in universal doom due to the wench ruining everyone’s lives through her adultery. I was once quoted for saying that a woman needs multiple sexual partners at any point in her life and it made headlines as quote of the week – I doubt any male pronunciation of the kind would make the small print of a local paper – it would seem to be the norm.

The woman, however, should prioritize and she should prioritize as expected – status over beauty and sex, that is. Preferably with a man her age or a bit older, such is the expectation, someone to take care of her. What about the woman who doesn’t need to be take care of? Who is more than happy to take care of herself, build her own social status and financial security – surely her priorities can be inverse, i.e. beauty before age?

It is the miniskirted Georginas (and Svetlanas)  in their twenties, barely able to hide their agenda of finding-a-husband-with-appropriate-status-and-income-buying-a-house(him)-and-having-two-kids-to-send-to-the-right-school who are the real cougars, waiting to dig their predatory claws into an unsuspecting  – doh! – (finance) professional about to buy into a depreciating asset. They are the hunters. I know quite a few older woman / younger man couples and invariably, the (younger) man is the hunter, the chaser, the adorer who finds the scent of independence irresistible. There is a very bearable lightness of being about these couples as they don’t in any way resemble the often contract-like conventional bonds held together by the kids and property. There is nothing Mrs. Robinson like about these women, no evangelizing feminist ideals, just a taste for life unencumbered by the need to fill a social and financial gap through a partner.

So, why is it so unacceptable to choose adoring over snoring? It challenges the false security blanket of convention, the very cover that protects the majority in its belief that they’ve chosen the best option, regardless of the many downsides it brings. Once the cougar has gotten her hands on the house-kids-in-the-right-school deal she may just found there was a gap in the contract – Mrs. Robinson, anyone?

By LHeure Bleue – guest blogista

Founder and was CEO now Marketing Director of www.moonfruit.com

J: What interests me, first of all, is how you got to do a degree in computer science at Imperial College. What was your background as that was pretty unusual for a girl?

W: I went to a girl’s grammar school and it was in the Thatcher years so we had a belief that you could do anything and women could get out there and get on in the world. We were ball breakers, but that was OK!

J: And what about your family background?

W: My parents were immigrants to the UK, my father from Burma and my mother is Chinese from Malaysia. My maternal grandfather refused to pay for an education for my mother as in those days it wasn’t considered appropriate that a woman should have an education. He did give her the money to go and study to be a midwife in the UK, so she seized the opportunity and came to the UK. She met my father here and he sponsored her through a technical degree and she was one of the very few women at that time to work in IT.

J: So it didn’t seem too abnormal for a woman to go into computer science?

W: Yes exactly. A lot of my female contemporaries might have thought a degree in computer science a bit boring and geeky, but I thought it might be fun, and it was! For a start we were 7 women and 120 men at Imperial College! I enjoyed the degree and met people who I worked with later.

J: What happened next?

W: I left Imperial College and went to work for Arthur Andersen as a tax consultant. It wasn’t a very exciting job, I found it constraining, but having done it, it stood me in good stead later on when I wanted to raise money for my business. I stayed there a year.

J: And what did you do next?

W: I started working for a banking software company doing programming. It was actually great fun and I travelled a lot doing project management all over the world.
I really enjoyed it. After I had been there a while a client, who became a great friend and mentor,  Richard Duvall, who had become IT director for Prudential decided to set up Egg, which was a very original concept at that time. Nobody was doing online banking and he brought me into Egg as head of CRM. That was ’97 and I was the youngest female manager. They were heady times as it was all a completely new concept. Richard was an inspiration and later gave me seed funding when I wanted to start my own venture.

J: So how did you come up with your own idea?

W: At Egg we were doing a lot of work around communities and the idea behind Moonfruit was really enabling people to share their passions online. A place that people could easily create online communities as we enabled them to build websites easily in a very visual way. I set it up with an old friend from Imperial, Eirik, Richard, friends and family gave me seed funding to build the prototype, while still allowing me to work part time at Egg while the company got going. I was very supported. We then joined forces with Joe and Tony who had a web agency Sixzeds. This was 1999 and we raised £500k from Bain Lab which was the incubator for Bain and Co. and we built the launch product. Before launching in 2000 we raised £5m from LVMH which had a tech fund. It was the height of the dot com boom and everyone wanted to invest in the internet.

J: But then there was the dot com crash.

W: Yes things got really tough between end 2000 and 2003. In a way we had got too much money too soon and we had too many staff, which we had to lay off. We were a company based on an advertising revenue model and the income wasn’t enough. The model simply wasn’t working and the tech world was crashing around us. From being a company with 50 employees we went back to 2 people! I was going out with Joe from Sixzeds and I had to lay him off too! We married in 2002 and after he left the company he went to work for McKinsey which turned out to be a very good thing as later on he came back to the company with greater expertise.

J: So what happened to get the company going again?

W: We had to change the model, so we started charging. We were always a community based site so tried to explain to our users why we had to start charging and it was only £4.99 a month. We slowly build it up again relying on freelancers and worked really hard. By 2005 it was profitable but I was feeling the grind so went off to Central St Martin’s to do an MA in textile design.  At that time Richard set up Zopa a peer to peer lending company which I consulted on. It’s been doing very well since nobody trusts the banks anymore.

J: So how did Moonfruit develop?

W: Joe came back to the company in 2004 and together with Eirik my original partner in Moonfruit and Stephan Ramoin who was head of Lycos Europe, set-up Gandi Group, having raised 13m€. Gandi Group bought leading European domain name registrar Gandi.net  and Moonfruit and I became marketing director. It has doubled in value and recently launched a cutting edge virtual hosting service for SME’s while Moonfruit has grown 70% since this time last year.

J: What are your plans for the future?

W: Possibly to sell in 3 – 5 years, if we carry on enjoying growing the business who knows! In the meantime Joe and I have had 2 children and they take up quite a lot of my time. As a woman I don’t think you can have it all, all at once, but you can phase it.

J: And how do you find being married to your business partner?

W: Joe has always been grounded and wise beyond his years, we share responsibilities. He’s 6 years younger than me and I think the fact that we shared many formative life experiences, the company getting funding, going through a very  difficult phase, then building it again and raising our children has created a really strong bond.

J: Lastly, Wendy, is there one thing you would have done differently?

W: Yes I wouldn’t have scaled it so quickly and had a clear business model with income!

By Julia

As a female internet entrepreneur myself, I know we are a relatively rare breed, so I was very impressed with Caroline Beau de Lomenie, French, married, mother of three, living in London who has set up her own site to supply fashionable clothes for dolls.

Here’s my interview with her…

J: Caroline, so how did you get the idea?
C:I was talking to a friend who asked me where to find clothes for her daughter’s Barbie. I looked and there wasn’t anything on the market, online or off. There was very little available and what was out there was bad quality and bad design. The only fashionable clothing available was on the Barbie site, but you couldn’t buy the clothes without the doll, plus they were collectors items priced over $50 not really for little girls to dress their dolls.

J: Had you been thinking about setting up your own business?
C: Yes I’d just had my third child and was looking around for an idea. Various ideas were marinating in my head and when I saw this gap in the market I knew I should develop it.

J: How did you fund it?
C: I had inherited some money which really wasn’t enough to do anything with, like building a new bathroom, but my brother had inherited the same amount and so we put the money together and went into business as a team. It was enough to start something decent. We went to see an accountant and he set up the company very easily.

J: What was your next step?
C: The next step was finding the name. I liked dollita.com but asking around I realised that dollita had too many Lolita connotations and in the UK that is more negative than in France where it just means a sassy young girl. Then we hit on fashionette but the dot com was taken so we registered fashionette.co.uk and fashionette-dollswear.com.

J: What was the next step?
C: We needed to find a designer to do the first samples. We found her through personal contacts and then we had to decide where to get the clothes manufactured. We decided against China, and started looking for somewhere in North Africa. We felt it was nearer to home and we wouldn’t have a language problem. We contacted the chamber of commerce in Morocco who put us in touch with several clothing manufacturers. None of them wanted to do the work for us but several of them suggested we try a manufacturer in Tunisia who specialized in dolls clothes and soft toys. We went to see him and it worked out well. He is an honest man, with good working practices and has a group of women working for him who seem happy.

We took him the fabric, patterns, technical drawings and samples made by the designer to try out to see if he could do what we wanted. I then had to source wholesale fabric so after a holiday in SW France, left the kids with my parents-in-law and went off to Paris.
I tried the Marché St Pierre, which is a well known place for fabric sellers, but it was way too expensive. Then I tried Sentier which is the area for fabric wholesalers and that was far more within my budget.

J: Did you not think you could find fabric in the UK?
C: It was more that with the traditional links between France and North Africa it would be easier to ship the fabric to Tunisia.

J: What was next?
C: We had to find another designer as the original one was too busy with her day job, so I put an ad in the London Fashion School and was inundated with replies. For some reason one email stood out. I always follow my instinct and decided to meet her first. I couldn’t have told by her name but it turned out she was French-Tunisian. She brought her book of designs along and I had no idea how to assess whether she was good or not, but I liked her and she did our first set of full designs and they turned out very well. I returned to the wholesalers in Paris to choose which fabric should be used with which outfit [that took a month!], had it shipped and then went out to Tunisia myself to make sure everything was clear.

J: What about the site, how was that coming along?
C: By the time I went to Tunisia the site was almost finished and I needed photos of the clothes to put on the site and was hoping it would all be done by Christmas, but things always take longer than you think, and the outfits to be photographed are only ready now. We’ve had to redo the packaging and find different printers as I wasn’t happy with the Tunisian samples.

We hope to launch in May. It won’t just be Barbie clothes but all clothes for fashion dolls between 10” and 12” for little girls in the 5 – 9 age group.

J: One last question, aren’t you afraid of encouraging a generation of difficult little fashionistas?
C: Isn’t that what all little girls are anyway?!

By Julia

Check out the site: http://www.fashionette-dollswear.com/

The idea behind Sussed and Sassy came from the forum on www.toyboywarehouse.com. I started TBW in 2007 because I didn’t find a dating site that I wanted to join. It wasn’t just about toyboys! I thought so many things should be different from other dating sites: they should be more fun, have more ways to interact and the women should be able to talk to the other women. So we set up a forum and a virtual bar so people could interact. It soon turned out that women with a similar attitude were joining the site. They were smart, sexy, witty, sassy, sussed and equipped with finely tuned bulls**t antennae. They weren’t going to take it lying down! Well….only if they wanted to! Lifelong friendships started on the site and weekends away and girls nights regular events. The forum is a great place share your views and have a voice so we thought we’d take it to a wider audience, not just the women interested in a younger man but all women who’ve got sassitude or want to get it!

We have regular blogistas on S&S but if you’d like to guest blog send us an email about it info@sussedandsassy.com

By Julia