Posted: 19 Aug 2010 12:30 AM PDT

For a decade now we've been chronicling the emergence of cougars in the dating jungle: women, usually over 40, who hunt younger men, or cubs, and shower them with a tantalizingly experienced kind of love - and lots of Abba music. There are cougar celebrities - 47-year-old Demi Moore married 32-year-old Ashton Kutcher - cougar books, cougar cruises and, perhaps the ultimate affirmation, cougar sitcoms, including the popular Cougar Town, starring real-life cougar Courteney Cox. What further proof do we need of this species' existence?

Michael Dunn isn't buying it. The noted psychology researcher at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff has just released a study that he insists renders the cougar craze a "myth." After examining the age preferences expressed in 22,400 singles ads on popular dating websites in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, he found no sizable cohort of women seeking younger men. To the contrary, the share of lionesses wanted men their own age or older. Nor did he find evidence for the proliferation of cubs: the overwhelming majority of men displayed their eons-old preference for younger women. "I do believe the cougar phenomenon is a myth and, yes, a media construct," Dunn, who specializes in human evolutionary psychology and mating behavior, told the Australian Associated Press. (See a brief history of cougars.)

But faster than Madonna can pick up a 21-year-old male model, self-identified cougars and their supporters are striking back. "I get angered by this silliness," says Valerie Gibson, the British-born, Toronto-based journalist whose best-selling 2001 book, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, is considered the first to identify the wave that Dunn wants to debunk. Gibson, a self-described cougar who is over 40 but won't reveal just how much over, sees in studies by investigators like Dunn - who last year presented research that men who drive expensive cars really are more attractive to women - an anti-cougar bias. "Society has always told us that the older woman who is still sexual isn't supposed to exist," she says. "We should be wrapped in a shawl baking cookies for our grandchildren and all that crap." (Comment on this story.)

What's more, a 2003 study by AARP found that while a not-surprising two-thirds of American men over 40 were dating younger women, an unexpected 34% of 40-and-older women were dating younger men. And 35% said they preferred that over dating same-age or older men. That study offers a more valid picture than Dunn's, Gibson insists, because it reflects the actual dating lives of older women, as opposed to what they're socially conditioned to tell dating websites. (Read about the science of cougar sex.)

Dunn denies any misogynist agenda, even though, when asked last year if his car research suggested that women were shallow, he was quoted as saying, "Let's face it, there's evidence to support it." He also suggested to the Australian Associated Press that the cougar craze may well be fabricated by "the 'cougar' or 'toy boy' dating agencies themselves." But Rich Gosse, executive producer of CougarEvents.com in San Francisco, said his business wouldn't be growing - next month the International Cougar Convention will take place in London - if the number of cougar-cub relationships weren't burgeoning as well.

Gosse, author of his own book on the subject, The Cougar Imperative, acknowledges that Dunn's website research is probably accurate. But, like Gibson, he insists that while women may still state a preference for older men on the Internet, on the ground, the empirical evidence suggests that traditional inclination is falling away among many older females. "What's changed so dramatically in the past few years is how much more open women are to the possibility of looking for younger men and vice versa," says Gosse.

And that, says Gibson, is largely a product of women's new Sex in the City –style economic independence. In the past, she notes, only aristocratic women could "get away with flouting the rules about being in a relationship with a younger man," not just because they could pay the champagne bill but also because their resources and education often kept them younger-looking and more intriguing to young studs. Today, she says, the middle-aged of the middle class can take that path too.

Miss Cougar Canada, Alison Brown (who "won't admit to being anything more than 45"), is a divorced single mom in Toronto who has her own online art gallery and is a personal trainer. "What I've noticed on dating sites today," Brown says in response to Dunn's study, "is that younger men are coming on to me, and it's not just because we're 'easy marks' for sex. It's because we're successful, intelligent, looking great, and we don't play games like so many of the younger girls they date."

Then again, Gibson adds, "it's also because we're great in bed." Still, while Dunn's study doesn't definitively mean cougars are a myth, it raises interesting questions about why more older women may be eager to date younger men but not be so keen to admit it on dating websites. Either way, it doesn't prove that they're shallow. Mysterious, maybe, as any cub will attest.

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Study: Cougar-Cub Dating Craze Is a Myth

Posted: 19 Aug 2010 01:13 AM PDT

Courteney Cox on Cougar Town

Adam Rose / ABC

For a decade now we've been chronicling the emergence of cougars in the dating jungle: women, usually over 40, who hunt younger men, or cubs, and shower them with a tantalizingly experienced kind of love — and lots of Abba music. There are cougar celebrities — 47-year-old Demi Moore married 32-year-old Ashton Kutcher — cougar books, cougar cruises and, perhaps the ultimate affirmation, cougar sitcoms, including the popular Cougar Town, starring real-life cougar Courteney Cox. What further proof do we need of this species' existence?

But faster than Madonna can pick up a 21-year-old male model, self-identified cougars and their supporters are striking back. "I get angered by this silliness," says Valerie Gibson, the British-born, Toronto-based journalist whose best-selling 2001 book, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, is considered the first to identify the wave that Dunn wants to debunk. Gibson, a self-described cougar who is over 40 but won't reveal just how much over, sees in studies by investigators like Dunn — who last year presented research that men who drive expensive cars really are more attractive to women — an anti-cougar bias. "Society has always told us that the older woman who is still sexual isn't supposed to exist," she says. "We should be wrapped in a shawl baking cookies for our grandchildren and all that crap." (Comment on this story.)

Dunn denies any misogynist agenda, even though, when asked last year if his car research suggested that women were shallow, he was quoted as saying, "Let's face it, there's evidence to support it." He also suggested to the Australian Associated Press that the cougar craze may well be fabricated by "the 'cougar' or 'toy boy' dating agencies themselves." But Rich Gosse, executive producer of CougarEvents.com in San Francisco, said his business wouldn't be growing — next month the International Cougar Convention will take place in London — if the number of cougar-cub relationships weren't burgeoning as well.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.

Blog - The Fear-Based Psychology of the 'Internet Kill Switch'

Posted: 18 Aug 2010 03:31 PM PDT

Security legend Paul Kocher talks about the attitudes shaping Congress's latest tech misstep.

If the Internet ever does something unfriendly to the national security interests of the United States, what if the president of said Union could pick up a cold war-era style phone - or maybe whip out an iPhone pre-loaded with a custom "kill the internet" app - and order that it be shut down?

That's what activists are saying is one potential outcome of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. The so-called "Internet Kill Switch" is not actually an outcome of that bill, by the way - some commentators have compared this meme to the "death panels" myth that almost derailed the healthcare bill.

But the fact remains that the president has broad power under the 1934 Telecommunications Act to restrict "wire communications" during a time of war - and that includes the Internet. So even under existing laws, an off switch for the United States' most important information conduit is, in theory at least, only one over-eager lawmaker in chief away from reality.

Paul Kocher, current CEO of Cryptography Research, is a legend in the field of security - one of the engineers behind SSL 3.0 and an innovator in a host of other areas. Recently I interviewed him on the subject; here's what he had to say about the so-called "Internet Kill Switch."

"It's a Rorschach blot."

"On one level it's absurd, and on others it's impractical and frightening. It's a Rorschach blot.

When you build something that will shut down a massively critical piece of infrastructure that people have tried to make reliable, that's a more frightening prospect than anything that could have inspired such a defense."

"It's a very blunt weapon."

"Networks like the Internet are critical for a lot of tasks - if you ever flipped a switch on that, you'd cause tremendous amounts of harm. It's unclear you'd get any particular benefit from doing that."

"Maybe I'm being cynical, but my read on the rationale [for the Internet Kill Switch] is that it's a fear of technology."

"The idea that people can kill the technology if they wish to makes people feel reassured that the technology won't go rogue in some way. If you had an army of robots walking around you'd like to have switch to turn them off - people still have that concept of the Internet."

"I can guarantee every teenage hacker will try to figure out how to trigger it."

[Ed. It goes without saying that Paul was once one of those teenage hackers, and knows whereof he speaks.]

"If I want my name in the paper, or to have an effect that's bad on the world, it's hard to think of something more perfectly designed for that kind of use."

Attemps to degrade the quality of civilian GPS signals shows that disabling communications networks hurts the good guys more than it hurts the bad guys.

"The whole GPS infrastructure is built with a mechanism where they can degrade the quality of location measurements. It's designed so they could have the military have more accurate GPS units than civilians.

But it turned out the military ended up using civilain GPS receivers because they're cheaper. They ended up disabling the degradation capability because the harm caused to the U.S. military exceeds the benefit to the folks they're fighting."

"Stopping a Denial of Service attack by shutting down the Internet is like trying to stop a small explosion by triggering a much larger one."

"You could conceivably come up with ways to bring down the entire Internet, by playing games with BGP protocol or bringing down the entire DNS archicecture. But you can't stop a pinpointed attack with this.... If you had a kill switch you'd either shut down entire internet or achieve nothing.

"The question this comes down to is, 'Is there some scenario where one would really want to bring the entire internet down?'"

"Everybody working from home: gone. Everybody's [VoIP] phone connection: gone. Everybody's website: gone. That's the only binary choice you can really achieve with this."

For technical as well as political reasons, no bill with anything resembling an "Internet Kill Switch" will ever be signed into law.

"If Congress decrees electrons have positive charge and gravity goes in the other direction, it doesn't mean it's possible to achieve those things.... But the reality is that if something like that came close to passing there would be a tremendous outcry.

"The government has had some misleading experience with this area, with telephone switches where there are requirements that there be backdoors so law enforcement can do wiretaps and eavesdrop on calls. But there's a lot more homogeneity in telephone infrastructure than within the packet-switched internet infrastructure.

Follow Mims on Twitter or contact him via email.

Psychology

Thursday, August 19, 2010

“Study Claims Cougars Don't Exist -- and Cougars Beg to Differ” plus 2 more

“Study Claims Cougars Don't Exist -- and Cougars Beg to Differ” plus 2 more

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