On a recent segment of "Extra," Demi Moore balked, albeit charmingly, about being called a cougar.
She has "earned" the moniker by being beautiful, over 40, and married to a much younger man — Ashton Kutcher, in case you've been sleeping.
Moore cedes that a sense of humor gets her round the epithet, but it's not the first time she's bristled at the term. She told W magazine in December, "I'm certainly not the first person to be in a relationship with a younger man, but somehow I was plucked out as a bit of a poster girl." She suggested puma.
Well, puma or no, she's been a poster girl before, most memorably the infamous 1991 Vanity Fair cover of her naked and pregnant. Much admired and much copied, the picture paved the way for women to feel more comfortable with their baby-bearing bodies.
And like it or not, she has also paved the way for women to feel more comfortable with reversing the May-December alliance. But the cougar moniker is questionable. Who coined it? Possibly writer Valerie Gibson.
Although women have tried to embrace the term and transform it into a positive, it still leaves a sort of gamey taste. Cougar resonates as right up there with a host of other nasty names for women for which there is no male equivalent.
As David Brooks remarked recently in the New York Times: "...why do older women get a call name like 'cougars' while older men are just lecherous old coots?"
Moore was ambushed by "Extra" at the New York premier of her new film "Happy Tears," an indie endeavor which pairs her with Parker Posey, playing sisters. Although she lamented in W about the lack of roles for older women, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times lauded her role as Laura in this film as a harbinger of more "dramatic possibilities."
But still she fends off the 'cougar' attacks, this time offering 'panther' as a substitute sobriquet. "They're considered independent, strong women," she told the tabloid TV show with a patient smile.
Do you blame her?