9 Out of 10 Dentists Agree

Two of my lady pals are dating younger mans. The hot Spanish girl I used to work with, 34 year old Maria del Mar, just married a 27 year old. Not like any of us are very old so it's not a robbing of cradle, but also because none of us are very old, the younger mans are kind of quite young. I seem to keep meeting/dating young ones too. This is the (kiddie) pool we've been thrown into, in the city of New York, in the year of our lord 2010 - a pool of young mans who are neither too (old and) jaded with (bad) relationships, nor too (young and) slutty and in need of wild oats sowing. A pool of twenty-five-ish year olds who seem legitimately interested in, or at least not terrified of/fetishizingly fascinated with older women. Not just the whole "older women are so grateful" thing (and by the way I thought that whole "grateful" bit was a new-ish thing - but I just saw this old French comedy at MoMA, The Story of a Cheat, released in 1937, wherein the young protagonist referred to his "grateful" countess lover).

Nobody blinks when a twenty-five year old woman says she's dating a thirty-year old man. Or a twenty-three year old woman dates a thirty-three year old man (as another [young] friend of mine is doing). Blah blah blah, right? The other way around, you're a cougar. A desperate woman. A Demi. Or so it's been. The more I come across this with my friends, and the more I come across it in my own experiences, the less blinking my eyes seem to do. Maybe my eyeballs just don't need as much moistening anymore.