Google kills off cougar ads, but sugar daddies are still on the prowl

Google, the
search engine giant, has banned CougarLife.com, a website promoting
relationships between older women and younger men, from advertising on
its “family friendly” pages, while taking no such action against
websites that offer to match young women with “sugar daddies,” such as
DateAMillionaire.com.

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher made the May-December romance so mainstream that we now have a prime-time television show, “Cougar Town,” on the topic. Even Demi’s ex, tough guy Bruce Willis, is cool enough with it to show up at family gatherings.

But CougarLife.com, which isn’t particularly
salacious compared with other dating websites, is banned from having
its ads appear on more than 6,700 websites, including My Space and YouTube, because it was deemed “nonfamily.”

This news first appeared in The New York Times,
which scoffed: “So cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and
sugar babies are in,” and pointed out that ads for a website that
offers a chance to “date a hot cheating wife” are still appearing on
PG-rated sites.

There is so much that is infuriating about this that it is hard to know where to begin.

I am thinking that the Google founders, wonderboys Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
were so creeped out by the idea of someone their mothers’ ages dating
some surfer dude that they freaked and banned anything “cougar.”

“It’s just wrong all around,” CougarLife founder Claudia Opdenkelder told the Times. “It’s age and gender discrimination. It’s just about
older, successful, independent, strong women who enjoy someone that’s
younger.”

It is worth noting that Opdenkelder is 39 and lives with a 25-year-old boyfriend.

It is also worth noting that Google
is still running ads for CougarLife’s brother company,
ArrangementSeekers.com, which proposes to hook up “ambitious and
attractive” young women with “successful and generous benefactors to
fulfill their lifestyle needs.”

Does that say “sex for money” to you, or is it just me?

It has always been OK for silver-haired alpha males
to have their pick of nubile young women. Anthropologists will tell you
that is how the species has survived.

But it’s still not OK for women to present any
sexual appetite once they are no longer fertile. It’s considered, like,
gross. The Miss America ideal of sexually attractive womanhood
prevails. The rest of us are just so much gray hair and tennis shoes.
Undesirable and invisible.

I might be less irritated if Google weren’t run by a pair of Stanford-trained brainiacs in their 30s who, if Ken Auletta’s biography of the company is accurate, have some serious God complex issues.

Page and Brin actually sound like several of the
adult male children I know, who think they will turn to a pillar of
salt if they see their mothers in so much as a full-length bathrobe.

The Google motto, by the way, is “Don’t be evil.”

Maybe the company thinks that should apply to women with an eye for a younger guy.

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