I am sitting at a table in the back of the Jet Fuel coffee shop, hunting a cougar.Not just any cougar, but the cougar, Claudia Opdenkelder: modelling agency owner, 2005 winner of Dean Blundell’s Toronto radio show, Cougar Hunt, and co- founder of the controversial and increasingly popular single dating website, Cougarlife.com.
Jet Fuel is known less for its wildlife and more as an uber-cool hangout in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood for bike enthusiasts, local Toronto writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Noah Richler, and its pull-you-through-the-hedge- backward, double-shot espresso. The staff are friendly and expert; the locals, doubly so.I’ve never met Opdenkelder in person, but I’ve seen her picture so I know what to expect a killer 39-year-old blond with the body of a 25-year-old and the mind of a woman who knows how to get what she wants.
From my perch at the back of the cafe, I see her walk in with a guy I can only describe as “holy sh.” Her partner Paul is 14 years her junior, but somehow, they manage to split the difference. Not surprisingly, he’s also a model. She doesn’t immediately spot me, so I wave. She waves back, gives Paul a lingering kiss that leaves the regulars gawking, and saunters to my table.To say Opdenkelder is lovely is an understatement. A spokesmodel for various businesses, she started her adult personals agency at 21, and now books 250 models. Never married, she’s always put first her dream to be “successful and independent. I never wanted to be the girl who was reliant on someone else.”That much she’s done. With Cougarlife.com, Opdenkelder is tapping into a shift in how older women are viewed as sexual creatures and how they view themselves.
Since its launch last February, the website has attracted between 200,000 and 300,000 members and, according to Noel Biderman, co-owner and president of the Toronto-based online single dating network Avid Life Media, “we’re poised to make millions. I don’t think we’ve ever launched anything with this much traction, this soon.”Much of that is thanks to a little bit of Hollywood and a whole lot of controversy.Opdenkelder, whose liberal Dutch childhood was spent in Holland, Spain, the U.S. and finally Toronto, originally dreamt of a dating service for gals like her “over 35, confident, successful women” bored by older men with relationship baggage who are “fully grown, with no bending, no spontaneity.”
In Biderman, she found the perfect business partner. No stranger to stirring the pot with free date websites such as HotOrNot.com and AshleyMadison.com, which hooks up people looking to cheat, Biderman had owned the Cougarlife.com domain name for a few years.The time seemed ripe, especially with the current crop of Mrs. Robinson romances: Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher (16-year difference), Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer (eight years), Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon (11 years), among many others.
So, when ABC launched its new lifestyle comedy Cougar Town, starring a real cougar (Courteney Cox’s hubby, David Arquette is seven years her junior), the website realized it had the perfect advertising vehicle. Its ad features a 30- something teacher being ogled by 20-something construction workers. At the eleventh hour, however, corporate ABC stations in Los Angeles and New York pulled the plug. Although the ad still runs on affiliates, along with shows like Ellen, says Biderman, “I’m not even fully aware of why that happened. They’ve given us a ton of reasons but I’d have to say they weren’t fully forthright.”In the end,” he speculates, “you have a situation where you have an executive who doesn’t like the idea of free date services for cougars and they are caught in whatever world, and they don’t want to be associated with it.”
Maybe, but even cougardom is fraught with double standards. While Opdenkelder rebrands cougars as dynamic older women attracted to “the energy and passion of younger men who want to learn,” she says it’s been an uphill battle. The adult perosonals website has more young men registered than women (52 per cent compared to 48 per cent) predominantly because, says Biderman, older women have been slower to accept their new role as desirable beings than young men have been to “pounce on the idea of being with an older woman.”Part of the reason is the definition itself. If you Google the word “cougar, ” you’ll find UrbanDictionary.com’s description as “an older woman who frequents clubs in order to score with a much younger man. The cougar can be anyone from an overly surgically altered wind-tunnel victim to an absolute sad and bloated old horn-meister, to a real hottie or MILF.”
Yet, “real hotties” are attracting young cubs keen to learn from dirty old kitties, according to CougarHunter.ca, which earnestly advises members that “the better the lady looks, the less likely you are to succeed; go after `easier’ ladies.” It also offers a few “cougar-friendly” pickup lines: “Can I have your picture so I can show Santa what I want for Christmas?” and the always (ir)resistible, “My magical watch says you aren’t wearing any panties. Oh, you are? It must be an hour fast!”Even moderates like Valerie Gibson, the many-times-married Canadian author of Cougar: A Guide for Older dating women Dating Younger Men, describes them as simultaneously intriguing (”confident, sophisticated, desirable and sexy”) and shallow (”what she wants is younger men and lots of great sex”).
Salacious as that sounds, I reflect that it’s not atypical of how society handles sexual empowerment, so I call my favourite commentator Leslie Bennetts, a feisty Vanity Fair contributing editor and author of the unabashedly contentious Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? (Hyperion).
“We sensationalize it and trash it up,” she tells me. “This sort of rapacious name gets attached to a 39-year-old dating a 25-year-old man, whereas a 60-year-old man can date a 20-year-old woman and no one blinks an eye, much less attaches the name of a wild animal to him.”The day I call Bennetts at her New York home, she had just interviewed Meryl Streep. “When she made Bridges of Madison County, Meryl was 45 and Clint Eastwood was 19 years older. She played a 45-year-old woman, but Clint had to fight to cast her because the studio felt she was too old to play a 45-year-old. “
Fast forward 14 years, and on Christmas Day, the new Meryl Streep/Alec Baldwin movie It’s Complicated will be released. In it, Streep plays a 60-year- old romantic lead having an affair with her own ex-husband, who is bored with his much younger wife.Does that signal a paradigm shift, or a levelling of the playing field? “I think it’s a legitimate question to ask,” Bennetts says. “As with any social change of that magnitude, there are aspects of the way it plays out that makes some people uncomfortable, but overall, I think any trend that extends greater freedom of expression to dating women is pretty hard to oppose.”
Back at Jet Fuel, Opdenkelder texts Paul to come and pick her up. I pay my bill, hit the street and spot them walking away. They’re laughing and he tugs on her hand, pulling her into his embrace.The ABC executives may not be willing to dip their feet into the pool of change, but I get the impression that society and Opdenkelder are taking the plunge.As Opdenkelder says in parting, “I think women who come to the website are cougars and know what it means and will embrace it. Times change,” she says, brightly. “Why not change with it?”
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