On first glance, nothing appears strange. There are thugs at the door and you pay a $5 cover to a woman with big hair. The bar is pretty large — big enough for two small dance floors — and even though it's early it's already almost packed. The walls are lined with mirrors and guys with thumbs in their jeanpockets; on the dance floors, women groove in pairs and the occasional guy substitutes an unfortunate swaying motion for dance steps. But when you get your Molson and lean back against the bar to scope out the crowd, that's when it hits you: the women here are not your age. Or they're your age and up — up and up. Up to your mom's age, and beyond. And then you finish your beer, order another one, maybe chug that one too, then wait for one of the women to talk to you.
In Canadian slang, they are called cougars: women in their thirties, forties, fifties, maybe even sixties, going after men a decade or three younger. I am one of these men, and I've taken an hour-long bus trip into an industrial suburb of Toronto to find myself at cougar central: Blue Suede Sue's on a Thursday night. There are other bars and other days of the week when a younger man can go out and expect to meet older women, but Thursday is the cougar night of choice, and Sue's is the hottest prowling ground.
Cougars in Toronto, despite the behavior of the mammal in the wild, tend to travel in packs. And, if you didn't know better, you would probably think they were groups of women from your office, in the midst of a hot Ladies Night out on the town. They are full-figured and dolled up in open blouses, push up bras, bustiers — outfits whose singular intention seems to be to say, "I have boobs." Acid-washed jeans are also de rigueur, and almost no one has denied herself the possibilities of hair bleach, teasing and spray. It's cougar night, all right, and they're out — many even wearing leopard skin.
There is a kind of insider feeling in the air. The men I talk to know what's going on; the women seem to, but deny it.  Almost none of them admit that they participate in any kind of cougaring. The women say they're just out, the men say they're looking to meet "nice girls." Everybody has a cover: "I just happened to come here tonight"; "We live in the neighborhood"; "It's a friend's birthday"; "I like the older crowd" (a phrase I'll come to hear more than twenty times). It's not that they are particularly shy or reticent; almost everyone is willing to talk to me and entertain my not-from-here-ness. At a certain point a guy I'm talking to, apparently emboldened by my foreign accent, asks, "So what do you think of Canadian beaver?" I manage to mutter, "It doesn't seem in any danger of extinction."
I don't find myself here innocently: I'm single, thirty-two years old and somewhat known for being open to a range of sexual experiences. Although I suspect that that's why I was given this assignment, I also have a very well preserved fifty-two-year old mother, and this complicates matters. When I tell my friends that my mother's age puts a ceiling on who I'd be able to sleep with, they just look at me and say Yeah, right. I also have a baby sister who's twelve, but I suspect they don't think that's a bottom limit either.
Yet the fact is, women my mother's age — or even ten years younger — have never really been on my sexual radar. But I've only been in Blue Suede Sue's for five minutes and already, as I gaze out at the crowd, I detect a change. Instead of my eye simply passing over the women above forty, suddenly I'm taking them all in, giving them the once-over as I would when seeing what I consider "normal" women at a bar. And that's when I begin to catch onto what cougardom is all about: all the women here continue to be sexual creatures, even if in my shortsightedness I would never have thought of them so. And suddenly it's like the world doubled the number of partners it offered me. Would I sleep with her? Or her? Or her? I begin to guess what it would be like to be bisexual: good god, so many options, I think I might go crazy.
So many options, yes, and yet . . . There is something about the entire scene that makes me more shy and reserved than I think I would be otherwise. And then I realize: it's the availability, the lack of pretext. It's the same feeling as being in a gay bar — nobody here is disguising their desire. And that, for me at least, makes things a little less sexy. The same does not appear to be true for the other men in attendance. It's clear that they like what they perceive to be the availability of the women. Never have I seen men lining the walls of a bar so expectantly, so passively. And never have I seen men approach women in a bar so aggressively — okay, I have, but not with much chance of success. Furthermore, the boys are out in droves for the mere opportunity. A quick glance around Blue Suede Sue's suggests the prey outnumber the cougars three to one.
By the time Sue's is ready to close its doors, I have witnessed a number of successful cougar catches. A desiccated Texarkana sestegenarian finds herself a nice cowboy half her age; a group of three roly-poly forty-somethings are hemmed in on the dance floor by a group of not-unappreciative, not-horrific young guys. Various other women are deep in conversation, not noticing when their beers spill, and the sexier among the cougars have their pick of the pack. The mood is festive, the air speckles with possibility. But your dutiful chronicler, having found himself speaking with and spoken to by more women than in any other bar evening in his allotted years, would, at each critical juncture, find himself more shy than adventuresome — not what cougars are looking for in prey. And thus, instead of being driven back to his hotel in a mini van purchased a decade ago for trips to soccer practice, he returns on the bus alone.
The next night, I am out seeking cougars again — this time in a bar called Crocodile Rock in downtown Toronto — and I am audience to a particularly telling moment of cougar culture. The bar's dance floor is dominated by a petite, attractive woman, probably in her late forties. She catches my attention by her arrhythmic swaying to the beat; with each lilt I think she is going to crash to the parquet. She keeps calling out to her friend at the bar (who, meanwhile, is getting a hand slid up her skirt), and, not being acknowledged, starts dancing with any and all single men.
I begin to worry. She seems to be having an increasingly hard time staying vertical, and, as if called by some atavistic impulse, the men began to circle.  She dances with one, pressing up against his body, then moves to another, almost tumbling into him. At one point I see her leave the dance floor, come up behind a guy waiting at the bar and begin grinding on his back — before he even knows she is there.
But the night drags on and none of the men makes any headway. She keeps changing partners, and I begin to suspect it isn't desperation leading her on, but will. The men are being tested, and she hands out rejection slips. Finally, when the bar is closing and I mill out with all the rest, I stumble on the guy I had guessed to be the frontrunner. "What happened?" I ask. "I thought you were going to make it with that older woman."
"She was all over the place," he tells me. "But it was all just teasing."
Upon reflection, I realize that this is an example of the kind of revolution I was hoping to find: a late forties woman getting all the ego gratification she wants while retaining complete control. It's a sight you'd be hard pressed to see at an American bar. Jeanie, a cougar in her forties, clarified it for me: "It's easy to manipulate a twenty year old. We're practiced. We do it with our kids all the time." And then sometimes it's a little too much like having your kid around. A few weeks ago Jeanie invited a twenty-something guy back to her house after a cougar night out. Around midnight he got hungry and ordered in a bucket of Chinese food — on Jeanie. He'd forgotten to bring money, he said.
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