Kinduf a No Brainer Dontcha Think?

An excerpt on lesbian cougars from this story:
http://www.advocate.com/issue_story_ektid56882.asp

Lesbian cougars are more visible these days, largely because lesbians are more visible, but age-disparate relationships among women have “been going on forever,” says Savage Love sex columnist Dan Savage.
“That is what Sappho was: an older lesbian attracted to a younger lesbian.”

The lesbian cougar’s motivation is as age-old as the island of Lesbos itself: Being around younger women simply makes an older woman feel young.

And, as Grace Moon, a 40-year-old adjunct professor in New York City and the managing editor of OurChart.com, says, “Being able to relate to someone in their 20s—and keeping a flexible attitude—is a healthy thing to do.”

Adds comic Poppy Champlin, who gives her age as “40s,” when you date a younger woman, “you pick up a sense of their youthfulness. And hopefully they’ll want to have more sex—it’ll keep my sexual libido pumping.”

Plus, the younger your partner, the less likely you’ll have to deal with the romantic baggage and bitterness of women who’ve been around the block, says Kennedy Varellas, a Glendora, Calif.–based customer service rep for a prominent straight dating website.

Although Varellas is only 31, she considers herself a cougar because she routinely dates women eight to 10 years younger. “They have fewer stories to tell about being screwed over by somebody,” she says.

Adds comic Poppy Champlin, who gives her age as “40s,” when you date a younger woman, “you pick up a sense of their youthfulness. And hopefully they’ll want to have more sex—it’ll keep my sexual libido pumping.”

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Not every lesbian cougar identifies with the predatory image. Mariah Hanson says that the first time her production managers called her “the Coug,” she laughed.

But “I don’t relate to that,” she adds. “I’m in a relationship with someone who has so established herself,” she says of her girlfriend, Kathy Valenti, 34. “She’s so amazing. She’s just very mature and together.”

As Hanson sees it, “someone who’s 25 and taking up with a 45-year-old because she’s got a career path in mind—that’s not a cougar relationship, that’s a relationship of opportunity.”

Kiki Fries, a 30-year-old psychology researcher based in Miami, is even more blunt: “I don’t mind the term cougar, but I hate the term sugar mama.”

Although the term cougar implies a predatory relationship, Fries says it’s often the other way around. “The irony is it’s usually the younger woman hitting on the older woman, but cougar references the older woman.”