Of late, there has been an explosion of older women getting hitched to young studs. I do not know most of these celebs-seeing that I rarely engage in celebrity gazing. My main interest in such is how different cultures perceive such unions.
I often follow various discourses about such unions, at times playing the devil’s advocate. Women are the most vocal in defending the couple, saying that old men have been marrying young girls without raising equivalent furore. They argue that the sitting French President is married to a woman many years his senior. Valid arguments, until you interrogate how the West views such unions.
In my community, such women are often lablled ‘Mama Kiwinya.’ This derogative term is borrowed from a popular song from way back about such liaisons.
In the UK, they call them ‘cradle snatchers’. Americans are less crude at it; they call them ‘cougars.’The name conjures the image of a wild cat, sleek and beautiful, prowling for victims.
In 2009, there was an explosion of female celebs marrying younger men. Newsweek, taking stock of the explosion of on-screen romances between older women and younger men, declared 2009 “the year of the cougar,”. But they concluded in a June article that “by this time next year, the cougar will be extinct.” That sums it all up for you.
Are we witnessing the year of the cougar here in Kenya?
Anyway,social scientists have always been intrigued by the older woman-younger man relationship. It is one that has long been taboo, heavily influenced by the Freudian notion that the older women are mother substitutes or “robbing the cradle.”
Various reasons have been advanced on what motivates such unions. One of them is that women like the vitality the younger man bring into their lives, and men like the maturity and confidence in the women.
Another theory posits that women reach their sexual peak much later than men do, so older women and younger men may be especially sexually compatible.Among our folks, this theory is distilled in one pithy truism: kigwa giakura, murio ucokaga gitina.The older the sugarcane, the sweeter it gets.
Whatever the case, women are gradually challenging the double standard of ageing that penalizes them more than men.