| Jennifer Ryan is an event planner, a part-time realtor and a filmmaker, but it came as some surprise to her to learn that, at least in the eyes of a group of young men, she was also a cougar.
"One day some girlfriends and I were walking down the street on 17th Avenue, a warm August night, and passed a group of boys who were probably in their early 20s or late teens, and I heard them scream out, like a catcall, ‘Hey, cougar,’" she recalls. "It was one of those moments where you look around and realize that they were actually talking about us, because up to that point my thought about the term had been that it was for older women dating younger men. And at 27 you don’t necessarily think of yourself as older."
In fact, as Ryan would learn, the term has a variety of connotations depending on who you ask. For many, cougars are overly tanned, wrinkled denizens of nightclubs with a particular interest in the young and male, while others would include any older woman dating a younger man. But as Ryan points out, even the issue of age is no clear indication when applying the cougar label.
"Now, younger and older is all in the eye of the beholder," she says. "When you’re 18, 25 seems old. When you’re 30, 45 seems old. We’ve talked to some young men who are 18 or 19 and when they talk cougar, cougar to them could be 30. But when you talk to men and women who are over 30, 30 is laughable as cougar – cougar would be 45 or 50."
From this initial ambiguity, Ryan began pitching the idea of a documentary on cougars to production companies, but quickly found that they either demanded more industry cachet than a first-time filmmaker would have, or wanted to put a seedier spin on the concept. Hoping to create "a new relatedness to the term" – empathizing with cougars not only through her own experience, but also through her mother, who regularly dated younger men while Ryan was growing up – the 31-year-old ingénue filmmaker instead set out to create a documentary called Cat Call that would put a human face on the motivations and actions of the much-maligned cougar.
Together with producer Kerrie Penney, cinematographer Lisa Fryklund, production co-ordinator Nina Sudra, and Janna Klemen, Ryan has produced Cat Call with virtually no major funding, conducting street interviews and even dramatizations, recently at one of Calgary’s premier cougar haunts – The Metropolitan Grill. Far from trying to distance himself from the cougar mythos, Metropolitan Grill owner Jeff Hanna was very supportive of Cat Call’s filming, according to Ryan. That’s little surprise, given that a mature and consistent clientele is valuable not only unto itself, but also for attracting cougar "prey," even if they are anything but.
"The term cougar conjures up this image of a predator, but what it really implies is that these young men are lying in wait like innocent sheep in the bar to be pounced upon," says Ryan. "Anyone who’s been into a bar knows that generally young men are not waiting innocently to be preyed upon," she adds sardonically.
In fact, she says, younger men often allow themselves to be "preyed on" by mature women precisely because it enables them to avoid a lot of the game playing and commitment issues that dog relationships with their peers.
Yet the term "cougar," predatory as it is, continues to stick. Despite the primarily negative connotations, Ryan has not shied away from using it in her documentary.
"I’m realistic in some ways," she says. "I like to think big and I’m playing a really big game with this because I do think we can cause a new relatedness.
There are still people I meet who have never heard of the term, so it is not so ingrained in our culture that it couldn’t have a new connotation attached to it. But I also recognize that if it’s here, I’m not expecting it to disappear, but I would like it to be something that people eventually aspire to be."
"There should be nothing wrong with being sexually empowered and independent, and not afraid of going after what you’re looking for." |
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