'Sex and the City' Creator Hates the Term 'Cougar'

[Brian Damage]

Don't call Candace Bushnell a cougar. The "Sex and the City" scribe, who recently celebrated her 50th birthday, is venting her frustration at being called an aging hottie in a dishy op-ed in the September issue of More magazine, which hits newsstands Tuesday.

"How come every time women manage to break out of traditional roles, someone comes along and tries to ruin it with a derogatory label?" she writes. "If you're a female CEO, you're a ballbuster. And let's not even go there with Hillary Clinton. In comparison with what she gets called, I suppose cougar is fairly harmless."

Bushnell says the first time she realized the unflattering term was being applied to her was while she was surfing the Web and she ran across an article entitled "Cougar Attack." She was, she admits, horrified to discover she was the topic of the story.

"Why was I labeled a cougar?," she asks. "Yes, my husband [New York City Ballet artist Charles Askegaard] is 10 years younger, but we've been married for seven years. And he's 40, ferchrist's sake."

Bushnell, who always seems to have had a thing for younger men, recounts an awkward moment she experienced after a hot one-night stand with a guy nine years her junior that occured 15 years ago. "[The morning after] he asked my age and when I told him, he screamed, 'Ohmigod, you're almost as old as my mother!' "

Her response? "Dude, if you were that worried, you should have inquired about my age before you took my pants off."

In what reads like an ode to the joys of younger men, Bushnell points out: "What I have yet to see is a real woman choose a younger man because he spent six hours a day at the gym trying to sculpt his abs. The fact that a man is open to being with an older woman suggests that he doesn't give a hang what other people think of him. More likely, he's confident, open-minded and willing to make his own rules. All of which just happen to be qualities that, much more than a great six-pack, make for a great relationship."

Carrie Bradshaw couldn't have said it better.



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