Arena Magazine

Would You Like Me to Seduce You?

Older women are cultured, direct and, importantly, well up for it - or so the media tells us. Could they be the answer to our relationship prayers? Arena’s STEVE BEALE gets overly eager for the elderly…

My date takes out some half-rim spectacles to study the menu. They’re not her usual pair – those got left on top of the TV tonight – so she still can’t “make head nor tail” of it. As I recite the dishes slowly for her, she asks me to change seats because I’m on her deaf side.

The lady I am courting, Carol, is 49 years old and a physics teacher, originally from Yorkshire. Her first husband died recently from alcoholism and she enjoys “house-music clubbing” with her gay stepson. You can tell she was a right little northern minx in her day. Unfortunately, for our date she’s dressed down in jeans and trainers, but she’d ‘Reader’s Wife’ up really well (in the ‘maybe I would’ sense, not the ‘wouldn’t touch her with yours’ sense) if you put her in a cheap black cocktail dress from Oasis, some opaque tights and court shoes. But, as it is, everyone else in the restaurant thinks I’m having dinner with my mum, and bar the fact that I can probably get off with Carol if I want, it does rather feel like that.

I’m here because a couple of weeks beforehand, I thought I’d try dating older women. Much older – I’m 32 so they have to be in their late 40’s at least. But I’ve high hopes. I’m expecting them to be sophisticated rather than boorish and shallow, secure as opposed to flaky and demanding, to dress like vixens rather than surfers, boast the sexual appetite of Catherine the Great while wanting me and not my babies.

Apparently, in my desire to try ladies of a certain age, I’m far from alone. In the US, it’s claimed that one-third of women over 45 are going out with a man at least 10 years younger. And this isn’t just the result of their ability to age more beautifully than ever before. ‘Mature women’ were a staple of many a grubby under-35-year-old’s masturbatory portfolio way before botox, step classes and Sharon Stone legitimised them as modern sex symbols. Especially for those, like me, who grew up in the sticks, starved of inspiration.

But, being a serial monogamist, I’ve never really had the opportunity to date an older woman – just a couple of offers vetoed for reason of loyalty. One was a relatively prominent London gangster’s ex, who looked just like the ringleader from Eighties ‘the molls strike back’ crime drama Widows. My fidelity was compounded by the fact that the underworld ‘face’ in question was also attending the function at which she made a move on me.

The other potential older woman was a friend of one of my bosses. She was terribly forthright and sexy, and I had to leave the work event I was at lest I succumbed to her advances. So, single for the first time in 13 years, I’m going ‘urban cougar hunting’, as it’s known on the internet and to those who make a habit of talking slang.

But where does a busy young metropolitan professional go to meet women from outside of his social circle? Speed dating of course – and speeddater.co.uk actually runs ‘older women (40 plus) and younger men (under 35)’ events.

“Due to celebrity couples like Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, it’s become acceptable for women to take a much younger lover,” says the chipper blurb on various supporting websites. More candid observers would point to the phenomenon of the ‘MILF’ or ‘Mother I’d Like to ….’ a vernacular term for attractive mature women popularised in the 1999 movie American Pie.

I sign up, having had absolutely no experience of dating agencies. Getting to the venue – the satisfyingly proletarian Tiger Tiger on London’s Haymarket – early to catch everyone arriving, the difference between the genders is startling. Us boys are relatively smart (suit jackets all round), but also wearing smirks that I think are supposed to be comforting, but appear lecherous. The women, surprisingly, look terribly dowdy, like social workers or BBC production engineers on their days off; jeans, jumpers and trainers, while I was expecting shoulder pads and knee-high boots.

They look like the plain girls from university, a quarter of a century on – mutton dressed as not-even-sexy lamb. I wonder if it’s the done thing to dress down; perhaps they’re thinking, “All the other women will give me daggers if I wear high heels”? Quite how they are expecting to attract suitors? With easily answered questions about the problems they are having with their teenage sons?

I’ve always preferred to think that the ultimate older woman is more like my mum’s ‘suburban glam’ friend from the amateur dramatics society who got very tactile with me after a few gin and tonics, until my dad came over and talked to her for some reason; or indeed a famous Sixties icon called Mrs Robinson from a film that may have significant resonance for those in our generation who caught a few sense at an impressionable moment. It’s the urban myth of the strapping lad ravished by the predatory divorcee. She’s sexually voracious and desperate for the virile attentions of a vigorous younger chap.

Or that’s my fantasy anyway. But as I speed through my dates, it quickly becomes apparent that the ‘saucy middle-aged women and virile younger men’ subtext seems completely lost on the ladies themselves. After a handful of three-minute conversations, I find out why. Among my gambits is, “I’ll tell you why I fancy older women if you tell me why you fancy younger men.” The answers are all the same: “I don’t fancy younger men. I came tonight because Speed Dater gave me a freebie.”

Blood and sand. Ten middle-aged women and not a single Mrs Robinson among them. Two of them are even eastern European immigrants. None of them is there with the intention of having an unforgettably steamy night with a hunk of energetic young flesh (ahem).

Nonetheless, I strike up a bit of a rapport with Carol the teacher (who, at least, has gone as far as wearing a dress and kitten heels) and Jane, who has a not-so-glamorous career in PR for a south London council. When most Speeders slink off at the end, I hover around and pounce on Jane. The friend she’s come with makes herself scarce.

Jane is 49, has strawberry-blonde hair up, sparkling green eyes and an intelligent, questioning air. As I lean in to kiss her an hour or so into our conversation, I realise this is probably the fullest figure I have ever laid my hands on. I’m rather impressed by myself in the sense this doesn’t seem to matter to me. Indeed, Roy Stuart, erotic photographer par exemplar, once told me, “What’s interesting about the older-woman fantasy is it’s that flaws are part of its attraction.”

Walking Jane to the night bus, people actually laugh and point. I try to shrug it off; reminding myself of braver souls whose love once dared not walk through the West End at closing time. But I’m beginning to ask myself what I’m doing. The girls my own age walking past look like angels.

Next day, the Speed Dater ‘ticks’ system, where both parties express mutual interest, bags me Carol the teacher as well. She had just the right look and her penchant for clubbing at the age of 49 suggests a broad-minded lifestyle. By email and phone we arrange to meet in Soho. “Do you know any good restaurants?” she asks. Should I just come out with, “Well there’s Le Gavroche of course, plus I’m a member of that new burlesque club if you want to try if….”?

No, that’d freak her out. So we go to an insanely popular Thai on Dean Street, where they make you sit in rows with other people. Disappointingly she turns up in baggy denim and wide hovercraft-style skateboarder trainers. This is where you joined us, when the specs come out and I move so I’m not on her deaf side. From which vantage point I can see a girl I used to fancy at university, still looking about 19, dining with her parents.

But, the date goes fine – Carol is a woman of the world so we at least have a decadent streak in common. She’s come up all the way from Bournemouth for the occasion, which starts at 7pm in case she gets tired later – which she does at around 10.30pm, after I’ve seduced her into Teatro (she’s heard of previous owners Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman). Like Jane, kissing Carol is perfectly pleasant – she hasn’t got a granny smell or anything – but both are tender compared to the sexually aggressive Agent Provocateur generation my own age. “What are you doing with me?” she asks at one stage – and bar, “Well, I’m a bit of a pervert,” I do wonder. Luckily it was a rhetorical question.

However, rhetorical or not, there are perverts out there who have a very real thing for a bit of wattle on their women (remember Ally McBeal?) and there are many ‘specialist’ magazines that cater for them. Georgina England is editrix of Older and Bolder, the ‘real mature ladies’ offshoot of top-shelf Parade. “I think it’s all to do with how men have been mothered,” she tells me. “She’ll cook you dinner and seduce you, without wanting commitment,” And then there’s agreeably different priorities, “You don’t have to show older women your bank balance – the theory is they just want to have sex.

New York-based relationship experts Em and Lo are in agreement: “Younger men with an older woman might like the thought of being assessed purely on what their bodies and personalities offer, rather than on how well their career’s going, or how ready to have children they might be – major issues with a girl in her late 20s or early 30s.”

I think the problem might be that my speed dates so far have been too ‘naughty neighbour’ and not enough ‘Joan Collins’. So I turn to Berkeley Sweetingham International, arguably London’s most prestigious introductions agency with fees of £5000. BSI’s chief matchmaker, Mairead Molloy is incredulous: “We’ve got plenty of girls your own age….. You do promise to see some of them after I’ve hooked you up with a few of my mature ladies, don’t you?” But I talk her into arranging two dates with her sleekest cougars.

First up is Kate, 51. She’s best pals with a certain ‘older women’ fantasy-figure actress and runs a shop in Kensington that’s a lighter version of Sam Roddick’s tasteful erotic emporium Coco de Mer. “I’ll get us a table at J Sheekey,” she boasts and I, in turn, become equally confident about how things might turn out. In the end we meet in a regular haunt of hers, the restaurant opposite her shop, in the early evening as middle-aged dictates.

Arriving, she looks fantastic in a fur stole and figure-hugging burgundy dress, bossing around the staff who fawn over her. A former swimsuit model, she doesn’t look a day over 40, which isn’t ideal for my purposes but certainly helps in the here and now. At first, Kate seems a little cantankerous after a long day – “I thought the coat you were wearing sitting at the bar was awful,” she’ll explain later. “Gucci do the best coats for men. But at least you’re wearing cufflinks. Your watch is completely wrong too.”

The watch, for what it’s worth, is a ‘limited-edition’ Marcel Wanders for Mandarina Duck – there are only five in existence, it’s a modern classic, and the last person who lavished me in sartorial praise as a result was Burberry designer and arbiter of taste Christopher Bailey. But I rather like the way she’s trying to dress me already, and not in brown Clothkits dungarees like my mum used to insist upon, or the oatmeal Joseph jumpers seemingly so beloved of ladies my own age.

Indeed, it’s so startling how quickly the two of us fall into a ‘sophisticated older woman, horny younger man’ dynamic, with me deferring over the wine and fussing around her while she makes loud, confident pronouncements about what a “marvellous place this restaurant is”.

Kate’s icy ‘end of the working week’ demeanour thaws quickly, and we get on; she’s a total diva with a vicious sense of humour. Being rather used to pandering to this sort of personality I’m doing well – it’s frighteningly similar to indulging a lady my own age, coo-ing sympathy over the regularity with which other drivers ram into the back of her car. And for one 30-minute period, whenever I look up from my food, she’s changed her hair, at one stage staring dreamily at me through a thick fringe. Our conversation is punctuated, though, by calls to The Priory – her 20-year-old anorexic daughter’s gone missing from there.

Despite this, it’s not an uncomfortable date at all, though I’m very conscious of what people must be thinking, far more than I have been in mixed-race relationships for example. I’m sure Kate feels that it’s all rather inappropriate too, baffling even, like any other female I’ve mentioned the ‘older women, younger men’ scenario to.

Kate gets sleepy at around 9.30pm so I see her to her Jag. She won’t kiss me on the first date. She calls upon arriving home and we chat for another hour. I’m completely taken with her and begin to wonder how my friends are going to handle it, and if this article can take a US sitcom-type ending where I fall in love. I text her goodnight, hoping that she has “the sleep of the just”, assured that a lady of her breeding will recognise the Churchill quote. “What do you mean by that?” she replies, “It just sounds weird.” I presumed all posh older women would lap that stuff up. But in finding it ‘weird’, Kate was just like a twentysomething.

When I call Kate the following week, I find the diva life certainly doesn’t end at 30, like all the husband-hungry women I know who are entering that decade like to pretend. “I’ve had another car crash,” she says, and I take a deep breath and enquire, “Are you all right?” She can’t meet this week but is up for next, and Mairead at the agency says she’s had positive feedback – “She likes you, says you’re funny and sexy” is the report.

On a night out in Brighton a few days later, I leave a spectacular voicemail for Kate (“and I thought of you….”). She calls back straight away. “I can’t remember who you are,” she says. If you think your girlfriend’s PMT is an issue in your relationship, try the menopause.

Moving swiftly on, the next alpha older woman Mairead gives me a number for is Amanda, 52, a finance director from the US. “I’m not going to go out with you because of the age difference,” she says with that characteristic directness. Throwing the dishcloth on my head for the ‘Fake Sheik’ act, pen in hand, I ask why. “I can’t see how someone 20 years younger than me would be interested,” she replies, “and it certainly wouldn’t work for me either.” Admittedly, most girls 10 years younger than me – less than that even – I find irritating.

“A woman of 50 has so much more experience,” continues Amanda. She’s got a point – how often do completely different generations socialise outside of Christmas? But doesn’t she fancy a ‘fun’ date with a dynamic, ‘on the up’ professional? “It doesn’t work like that. Normally I wouldn’t even talk to a 30-year-old.”

Looking at the endless crappy media coverage dedicated to the ‘toy boy’ phenomenon, I’d have thought that there was an entire generation of seductresses ripped to the saggy tits on HRT, gagging for some young bloke action. But all the women at the speed-dating event had cone along at the invitation of the organisers, for free – and if the ladies at Berkeley Sweetingham refuse to countenance a toy boy, then who does?

Hopefully Grant Andrew, a 32-year-old male gigolo from the north-west of England, will know. “I’m yet to arrange anything with a woman my own age or younger,” he says. “And to be honest, the vast majority of bookings are done with a husband’s consent, and often with their participation – it’s more like a ‘cuckold’ fantasy between the two of them, and usually doesn’t even involve penetrative sex. The jobs I actually get are to parade me in front of an ex to inspire jealousy, or to take to a function as a bit of a laugh, playing up to the ‘toy boy’ thing that’s around right now.”

“I do think the whole thing is more in guy’s heads than anything,” says Georgina from Older and Bolder. “We get loads of older women wanting to pose for us, but they do rather like the opportunity to take their clothes off and be seen as sexy at that age. And I have to say, it’s often their husbands that egg them on.”

There seems to be vast untapped potential in being in a relationship, however casual, with a fantasy older woman. But I found that aged doesn’t mean educated or interesting, they were as needy as any graduate, our life experiences were out of sync, sex wasn’t a factor, and they didn’t want me much at all, either. I’m not doubting that spontaneous passion between an older woman and younger man wouldn’t be very satisfying for both parties. Or that love can’t flourish under all kinds of circumstances. But, it seems us horny younger men see it as a lot more valid than older women do.

Perhaps the furore is just another example of the media’s desperation for ‘sexy’ human-interest stories. Everything I worship in mature ladies – elegance, open-mindedness – I seek out in women of a more suitable age as a matter of course, even the fact they don’t require me to look after them nowadays. In fact, I’ve got a ‘normal’ date lined up for this weekend. Fashion PR, goes to orgies. It’ll be like coming back to a home-cooked meal.

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