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.
     A legion of websites attends to a fascination certain men have for older women. Havens for this porn genre — called Mature — have predictable names like sexygranny.com, greybeaver.com and olderisbetter.org. Like all special interest porn sites, these destinations bring together communities of enthusiasts online, but they are hardly revolutionizing society at large.
     A different story is unfolding at the website CougarDate.com. The consolidation of the cougar phenomenon in Toronto, Vancouver and other parts of Canada can probably be attributed to the success of this Canadian-based dating service (and vice versa, of course) that specializes in older women/younger men affairs. Started by two successful, self-proclaimed cougars, CougarDate hosts personals for 25,000 men and a thousand women at last count (the number of men posting outnumbered the women from day one), and the women's

inboxes are deluged by desirous Canucks. Elspeth Sage, one of CougarDate's co-founders, tells me that most cougars have no trouble finding guys in their twenties to hook up with. If it proves not so easy to find the guys they want, Sage recommends changing their personal ad to emphasize shy-ness. Of course, I think: you want your woman to be older, experienced and on the prowl — but really just shy at heart.
     CougarDate.com makes women pursuing younger men seem like the most natural, fun, healthy way to pass your middle years; reading their upbeat manifesto or cougar testimonials, it all just seems like happy, sex-positive freewheeling. And I suspect that for many of them it is. My experience of cougaring in Toronto, however, didn't really correspond to this example. Of course, it is usually the case that if you look for paradise, you will be disappointed when you reach Shangri-La. I came to Toronto's cougar bars hoping to find a significant social breakthrough, a convenient (and rare) vehicle for older women to find companionship, to embrace their sexuality, to flirt and dance and have a good time. But finding just that, I am confused. Is cougar sex revolution or revenge, desperation or just no biggie? In what appears to be an almost global rejection of female aging, is something really important happening north of the border? And is it good?
     As it turns out, most of the women I speak to in the Toronto bars who would, under pressure, call themselves cougars say that they would prefer to date men their own age. These men, however, are typically not available, and it proves to be a lot easier to meet men considerably younger than they. This is a function of a number of factors: most obviously, that men their age want to be with younger women. On the flip side, however, younger men are drawn to older women primarily because they aren't expecting the women to want to marry them (my male friends complain about the "marriage threat" when they date women who are hovering around thirty). Finally, the young guys are looking for a good time, and, the older women are thinking: maybe that good time can be finessed into something more.
     It's an interesting gambit. Younger men do have a number of factors going for them; the women I speak to list these among the advantages: sexual enthusiasm and stamina, nicer bodies, less jadedness (i.e., "They still have a certain wonder about the fact that they're getting laid"). One woman tells me that every young man she's with says something along the lines of, "You don't look forty." "Older men," she says, "would never say that."
     The problem, of course, is that when the encounters do take place, the young men are operating under any number of misconceptions. Foremost is that they think the women are in it only for the sex. Not so, the Toronto cougars tell me, or at least, not ideally. In some instances, that's what they're after, but typically these women are looking for relationships, and they're doing their best with the men they find available — who happen most of the time to be younger.
     Furthermore, the younger men think that they're going to learn some bedroom artistry from the older, implicitly more experienced women. But the women tell me that they're often in the dark too. "Being married to someone unimaginative for fifteen years does not bring about any great knowledge," says one cougar. Another tells me that she and her friends study sex manuals in order to maintain the illusion of being experienced.
     Much of the appeal, for the men, of being with a cougar is getting to have the much touted near-anonymous sexual experience. It becomes painfully apparent that as long as this misconception endures, the business of cougaring will require a certain bracketing of emotions on the women's part. And from what I know, that's typically not most women's strong suit.

And thus it might be that the cougar phenomenon is actually more beneficial to the men than the women. The boys' illusion that cougars are permanently in heat allows them to project their desires onto the women, and then to operate with impunity. Freed from their natural insecurities, and bolstered by the belief that any kind of seduction will work, the prey goes back to being predator. The ego boost the women get from such attention can only be short-lived. One woman tells me that she's been in cougar bars and had men come up to her with the "oldest, shortest and worst line in the book": "Wanna fuck?" Whether the answer is yes or no, it's still probably not the courtship most women are looking for.
     George Burns famously said that you're only as old as the woman you feel. He meant grope, of course, and the joke was funny because he was already around ninety. But what about feeling in a more substantial way? It's not much of a stretch to say that one's success (and certainly failure) as a man is tied, in large part, to our ability to feel the people around us, and perhaps most pointedly, the women. While cougardom is bringing a lot of young men in contact with many more older women, I remain skeptical that, apart from the bump and grind, there's much connection taking place. Cougaring, in the majority of instances, seems like a desperate solution to a desperate situation.
     There is every possibility, of course, that I am misreading what's going on. So much of perception is projection, and as I indicated at the outset, I'm not experiencing these things innocently. Perhaps some residue of watching my divorced mom date loser after loser (many of them younger) colors my perception of all this; perhaps my own fear of aging (newly experienced) has me feeling tinges of a desperation of my own. Perhaps it simply saddens me that it is so hard for people to find good partners, of any age, and when the difficult becomes yet harder, optimism doesn't come easily. I'm not really sure.
     Feeling very confused and dubious about all the Canadian cougaring, my last night in Toronto I experience what would clearly be the coda to this story: a poignant example of what happens to women for whom cougardom is not an option. I am on the subway back to my hotel, and two attractive young women are sitting across from me. Still feeling flirty from all the cougar interviewing, I ask them if they've heard of cougars and what they think about the whole phenomenon (I have been told that younger women resent older women "stealing their men and making it seem like it's normal to have sex on the first night."). Neither of the women has heard of cougars, nor do they have much to say when I explain what they are. But an older woman sitting to the side of us reading a paper stops reading and pipes up loudly that in her native Trinidad, "That would never happen. You marry a man; if he leaves you, too bad. That's it. You don't go out looking for another." I ask her what she thinks about that, and she says that she doesn't know, that's just the way it is. And I ask her if she is married and she says yes. Then I say, "So if for some reason your husband dies or leaves you, you wouldn't want to have places where you could go out and meet new people? Maybe dance and have some fun?" She says she would go to a club, maybe, but she'd bring her brothers. "To defend you?" No, there'd be no need for that. Just for companionship. There is no chance that she would find someone else. "I wish your husband were here to hear you say all this," I say, "he'd be very happy." And she smiles and doesn't say anything. Then it is my station to get off, and I say a quick goodbye and am about to get off the train when she calls to me: "Excuse me?"
     "Yes?"
     "The truth is: my husband left me eighteen years ago. And there will never be another."