Dear B-Frank...

Dear Ben,

Colonial-era sexy

My history professor, who is an old woman and frankly (that’s a pun) kind of hot, had us read a letter you wrote so we could talk about how sex worked in the Colonial era. I raised my hand and said that sex probably worked the same then as it does now, you know, with Jell-o shots and certain body parts, but my professor (did I mention that she’s hot?) means that people didn’t talk about sex the same way or maybe have the same expectations, like the guy didn’t just leave afterward, or maybe he did, but then the next day he ignored her hand-written notes instead of pretending not to get her texts.

My professor (legs like Beyonce’s!) told me we had to write you a letter back. So here it is.

If you watch E! now, you’d think no one ever went out with an old woman before Demi Moore. But your letter shows that it’s old school! I guess that proves what my professor keeps saying: history shows us we’re not so special, and what seems new is probably just unfamiliar.

I’ll tell you what’s unfamiliar. When you say old women are grateful that you date them, I can say honestly that is not my experience. I’ve hooked up with a couple of cougars, some almost thirty-two, and it wasn’t like they were grateful at all. B-Frank, let me tell you: My high school football coach was less demanding than them old ladies. You hook up with an old woman, you’ve got to meet some serious standards. Tuck your shirt in. Pick the French fries up off the car floor.

And Ben, I know your face is on the C-note, but I don’t think that means you should call sex “commerce.” It’s funny to think of sex that way, but mostly these days it’s illegal.

So, all in all, it is an interesting letter you wrote, and I admire your sexpertise. I don't have as much personal experience as you, but I'm paying careful attention when you say that old women get lax in the upper parts while staying plump and firm in the lowers, so you can’t really tell a woman's age in the dark. Let’s hope that’s true for you, too, old man. Because you’re still a couple hundred years away from Viagra.

Your affectionate friend,

Advice from the Times of India

“Would it be right,” asks the Times of India in a recent article, “to say that despite growing in numbers, the older-woman-younger-man-relationship always comes with a very short shelf life?”

My goodness. One hopes not.

Saif and Amitra

Well, the Times offers me as proof, there is the breakup of Madonna and Guy Ritchie. And Courtney Cox’s split from David Arquette. And of course the divorce of that young pup Saif Ali Khan from his 12-years-older wife, Amitra Singh, after a 13-year Bollywood marriage. Even that most famed of Cougar unions, DemiAshton, reports the Times, is in danger of disunion.

 Oh, yes. The famous couples.

Putting aside the fallacy that the lives of the rich and famous are evidence of anything except the lives of the rich and famous, I’m going to give writer Haimanti Mukherjee credit for interviewing a relationship counselor for advice that could keep a HimPlus love affair going. That advice­–mostly directed toward women–seems fairly solid. In summary, this is what the Times suggests:

1. Women needn’t act their man’s age. They need to act their own. He didn’t fall in love with a woman his age; he fell in love with you.

2. Just because the woman acts her own age doesn’t mean she gets to mother her man.

3. No couple does everything together, and that’s also true for older women and younger men. So what if she wants to watch “The Breakfast Club” one more time, and he wants to run up the side of a mountain? It’s okay to let your partner enjoy his age sometimes without you; and you can enjoy yours without him.

4. Refrain from asking over and over, “Why did you fall for an older woman?” If you keep asking, he might eventually wonder, too.

All good points, to which I might add only this:

Don’t fall for a movie star.

Sarah Palin as Cougar

Cougarish?

Sarah Palin may be losing the hearts of the American people, but she has the libidos of more than a few young men all atwitter.

In a recent poll by Bloomberg News, only 28 percent of respondents in the telephone survey, taken from March 4-7, viewed the former Alaska governor favorably, at least in a political way. Sixty percent disapproved, more than half of them telling pollsters they viewed her very unfavorably.

But over at cougared.com, an online dating website matching older women and younger men, 250 young men polled in January gave Palin their top ranking as cougar fantasy woman.

Men in the survey ranged from 18 to 46+, with almost half in the 20-25 range.

Palin, 47, was the top crush for young men, with almost 1 in 4 (24%) naming her their top fantasy cougar. Respondents were asked to rank 12 older women, including tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell (2%), news anchor Diane Sawyer (3%) , and Kim Cattrall from "Sex and the City" (6%).

Right behind Palin were TV cougar Courteney Cox (21 percent) and cougar legend Demi Moore (19 percent). Madonna, at age 52, got 10 percent.

What turns on a younger guy?

Half the young men in the survey said this: maturity and confidence. Palin sure has one of those. 

In Praise of Older Women

The recent gaga about older women-younger man relationships is much focused on the sex lives of celebrities (42-year-old Sam Taylor-Wood having baby with 19-year-old! Demi and Ashton still married! Madonna still with younger man!).

But most of us Himplus couples don’t attend star-studded parties or walk red carpets. We teach. We commute. We walk our dogs. We plant a peach tree in the spring. We wrestle with taxes, insurance, monthly bills.

I was reminded of the divide between my life and those celebrity Himplus couples when I read recently that Stephen Vizinczey’s “In Praise of Older Women,’’ initially published in 1965, is being re-released as a Penguin Classic.

Set against the backdrop of war, the semi-autobiographical book details the sexual education of the narrator through a series of relationships with older women, starting when he was 12. While the narrator discovers erotic pleasure, he also learns about life.

“Vizinczey is more interested in the metaphysics of sex than the mechanics; it is, for him, a means to forge a deep connection with another person, a way to liberate the soul,” writes William Skidelsky in The Observer.

In another recent interview in the Telegraph, Hungarian-born writer Vizinczey, now 76, says his fascination with older women was as much about the brain as the body.

“The most attractive thing about a woman is her intelligence. The older women in the book were intelligent enough to learn from experience. An older woman who is an idiot is clearly inferior to an intelligent 20-year-old but the intelligent 20-year-old will be even more interesting and exciting when she's 40 or 60."

He talks, too, more about relationships than about coupling. "Most relationships don't last,” he told the interviewer. “Enduring relationships depend not only on the ages of the couples but whether they are on the same wavelength.”

Still, there’s this too: "To be a young man and have a grown woman as your partner is not just attractive, it is paradise.”

Cherchez le jeune homme

Here comes yet another OWYM film – Chéri is set to hit U.S. theaters at the end of June.

Set in turn-of-the century France, the film follows the affair of retired courtesan Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer), and her 19-year-old lover (Rupert Friend). Adding to the drama: The young man, the Chéri of the film’s title, is the son of a fellow courtesan.

The affair lasts six years. Complications arise when the young man’s mother arranges a marriage for him with a woman closer to his own age. I don’t know how the movie ends (although I can guess), so I can’t be a spoiler.

 But I can reveal the true story on which the movie is loosely based.

The movie is based on the 1920 book “Chéri” by the French writer Colette, whose life seems far more interesting than that of her fictional heroine. (For more on Colette, see this New York Times review of a 1999 biography).

At age 46, Colette began an affair with her 16-year-old stepson.

Uncommon love was a common theme in Colette’s work and life. She had already had affairs with women, bared her breasts in Paris music halls and divorced her first husband. The stepson affair would last five years and end her second marriage, to her lover’s father. Her third husband was 16 years younger than she.

All of which is to say that the recent excitement over younger men with older women is nothing new. It’s been frothed up by all things Demi and Ashton and by TV shows like The Cougar. But it predates all of that. It predates Colette, too.

 Still, there’s something about older women and younger men at the current intersection of media and culture that gets people excited. The recent movies and TV shows (The Reader, Cheri, Desperate Housewives, The Cougar),  the popularity of Demi and Ashton as supermarket tabloid fodder, and the revelation by AARP that three out of 10 single women between 40 and 69 are dating younger men — all of that bespeaks a fascination with this kind of uncommon love. And it says, too, that it’s not so uncommon after all.

Childlessness, Part 1

The other night, I stopped for a rack of ribs to-go and waited for them with nothing to do but page through a month-old issue of the National Enquirer.

Britney, celebrity wardrobe malfunctions, Michelle Obama’s dresses, the sorrows of Katie and Tom and toddler Suri ....

The only thing I actually read, though, was an item about how Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher plan to adopt a child. Said an anonymous source: “[A]fter all the disappointments and the IVF treatments, everyone is really excited that they are making their dream come true. It's a win-win situation.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Later reports in US magazine and elsewhere noted that on a Twitter page believed to be Moore’s (but how can you be sure?), the 46-year-old movie star married to the 31-year-old movie star had denied the story. “Been asked all day so to clear up rumors,” read the tweet, “we are not adopting a child but what a gift if that at some time was something we wanted to do!”

I suspect the question of more children for Moore, and a first for Kutcher, is far more complicated than a tweet can express. And if it isn’t now, it might well become that way.

We didn’t adopt, either. We talked about adoption. I read about how it works, the tens of thousands of dollars required. I knew a couple who traveled to Brazil, only to have the birth mother change her mind. We had a small window: could we even be approved if Sheri was in her fifties and me in my thirties? Adoption seemed daunting, impossible, fraught with risk; I suppose, in its way, the dull, familiar ache of childlessness was easier.

When I fell in love with Sheri, I understood the likelihood that I’d never father a child. When I was 27, that was an acceptable sacrifice for a life with a woman as remarkable as Sheri.

Nearly twenty years later, I know I’ve missed out on something fundamental to human experience. Sheri has, too. Though I would not change a whit of my past if it meant losing Sheri, I sometimes try to understand who that young man was, and why he made the decisions he did. I question his motives, his wisdom. Was he selfish, not wanting to share his life with a child? Was he afraid of the responsibility? Was he immature?

Was I? Am I?

With age, I’ve found ways to bring children and young people into my life. I teach, of course, and I’ve enjoyed participating in the growth to adulthood of countless young people. I’m blessed to have a marvelous nephew and niece who live too far away and whom I wish could see more often. I volunteered for nearly five years through Big Brothers, which brought into my life a wonderful boy who has grown into a young man I’m proud to call a friend.

All to the good. Though none of it fills a gap I feel only vaguely, that I can’t define. I see parents with children, I try to imagine how it must be. But I can’t. I’ve no frame of reference. What I know is what it means to be childless, and I know this status in a way parents never can.

In a poem called “The Block” from her book Near Changes, the poet Mona Van Duyn opens with the line “Childless, we bought the big brick house on the block, / just in case. We walked the dog.”

Like the speaker in Van Duyn’s poem, we, too, have lived in neighborhoods full of children where instead of driving a van to a soccer game we walked dogs. We have walked three. Tinker is gone, euthanized in 1999. Kaimin is seven. Ozark, crippled and exhausted, will likely be dead this Tuesday. I’ve never treated our dogs as anything but dogs, but they are beloved dogs, and I wonder whether how I love them is something like how parents love children; both kinds of love grow for a creature that has depended on you and, sometimes, wanted to please you.

“The years bloomed by,” Van Duyn writes, “the old dogs were put to sleep. We bought a scoop to walk our new pup on his leash …”

"Then the long, warm, secret descent began
and we slid along with it. ‘We need a last dog,’ I said,
‘but I can’t face it.’ "

Not Enough Whiskey in the World

Younger Man: We worked at the same newspaper, and that’s how we met, but things really took off when we agreed to meet for drinks. She wore a short skirt and black hose, and she sat at a shiny metal bar in a dark room smoking a Merit Light and drinking a shot of Jameson. She terrified me.

Older Woman: We’d been playing on the paper’s volleyball team for a while, and sharing music and stories. So I asked Michael to go for a drink after work. At the bar, he said something about his editor. “He’s the same age I am, 26,” he said. 26????? I took a gulp of Jameson and thought hard.

YM: Thought about what?

OW: Thought I was way off thinking you were 32. Wondered if you knew how old I was. Wondered if you had laid down that “26” as a subtle way to get me to tell MY age.

YM: No. It wasn’t a hint. I thought you – I thought she, that is, Sheri – was about ten years older than I. She looked like she could be 36. This great mane of blond hair. Slim. Like Candace Bergen in her Murphy Brown days. But it was the cigarettes and whiskey that scared me. I hadn’t yet learned to drink hard liquor. I didn’t smoke.

OW: I was willing to play at the edges of conventional romance. Ten years I could handle. If you were 32 to my 43, well, we could see where that led. But a 26-year-old was a whole ‘nother country. Still, you had a certain sureness about yourself, and a calm approach to the world that I admired. Plus, you could really spike a volleyball so I knew you weren’t one of those plaid-shirted, courduroy-pantsed, bearded tea-drinkers from my past. And your kindness made me know you also weren’t one of the dangerous boys I’d often found.

YM: Edges? You were willing to dive into the gorge without a bungee. Seventeen years! When I was born you were a senior in high school. When I was a high school senior, you had been married and divorced. I like to imagine the colors and shapes that quivered before your eyes when you learned my mother is four years older than you. There’s not enough whiskey in the world.

OW: Yes, and I have nephews older than you, sisters older than your mother.

YM: These days, they’d call you a Cougar. Cougars are hip now. Older women and younger men – it’s all the rage. I saw a half-hour special on Entertainment Tonight.

OW: One of my best friends told me, “Just have a fling. If it doesn’t last, so what?” That was almost 18 years ago.

YM: A fling is easy. It’s what happens in the intervening years that’s most interesting. Right now Demi Moore is, what, 46? And Ashton Kutcher maybe 30. Now, imagine them at seventy and fifty-four. Where’s that Cougar roar? Now that you are 61, I couldn’t have imagined this life. You can retire soon. I’m still building a career.

OW: Now that you’re the same age I was when we met, I’ve watched you become the man I knew you’d be. Being with a younger man, one who’s still building a career, tricks me into thinking I’m at the same place in life. Besides, I can still swim a half-mile a lot faster than you can.

YM: Yes. That’s the interesting stuff. I trick you into feeling young. Sometimes, you trick me into feeling old. There’s so much I’ve learned about what it means to live with and love an older woman. There’s so much I still don’t understand. And there are some things waiting for us that scare me. That’s why it’s good to write about it now, to take on a shared blog, a shared book. We’ve got a past to figure out, and a future worthy of wonder.

OW: Oh my god. Joan Collins is married to someone who is 32 years younger.

YM: What are you doing?

OW: I googled older women-younger men.

YM: What did you find?