How things change. Air New Zealand, which was scared of
seating unaccompanied children next to men, now appears to be
celebrating sexually predatory behaviour.
While I don't go along with the suggestion the cougars
promotion could encourage harmful behaviour, I am bored with
unimaginative advertising in which it is supposedly hilarious
for women to treat men as sex objects when ads with men
behaving similarly to women would be unlikely to get to air.
For the mercifully uninitiated, cougars are women possibly as
young as 30, but more likely to be much older, who go
clubbing to pick up 20-something men and have their wicked
way with them.
In its clumsy wildlife mockumentary on the cougar scene for
its recent Grab-a-seat promotion, the national carrier (and I
am not referring to sexually transmitted diseases) portrayed
young men as pathetic victims.
Some of them even pretended to be gay to avoid the cougars'
clutches, it suggested.
This was not my understanding when I wrote about the cougar
phenomenon nearly nine years ago.
Then, I had the impression that cougars, who seemed to often
be wealthy divorced women in their 40s, got along pretty well
with their prey.
I gleaned that from information put out on a website the
scarily-named Canadian woman Elspeth Sage helped to set up,
registering the women and their "willing prey".
Being in my 40s and at a bit of a loose end at the time (no
pun intended), I was prepared to embark on a research project
with the Old School Mate from Feilding to discover the cougar
capital of New Zealand.
Had Air New Zealand had the foresight to support it, we could
have provided a tasteful documentary with boredom scenes
rather than anything involving a bedroom.
It was likely to have consisted of me endlessly attempting to
engage young men in conversation at bars around the country.
There would have been many shots of the young chaps knocking
back the free drinks provided by the research funding, while
they tried not to look at me in my cougar clobber - clothes
too tight and revealing, heels too high, make-up too thick
and jewellery and jowls too jangly.
As I talked too much after one-too-many gins, there would be
close-ups of their eyes glazing over and, in the most serious
instances, their heads crashing to the bar as they passed out
from sheer boredom.
There would have been no suggestion of anything sexy filmed
through lenses smeared with several thick layers of petroleum
jelly.
If nothing else, the footage could have been used for
education on the perils of drink.
My lack of success in getting support for any of my wacky
ideas is almost enough to send me in search of a drink with
Rodney Hide.
Donning the sunnies to avert blindness from the dazzle of his
tanned pate and his mouthful of porcelain veneers would be a
small price to pay for some tips on how to get people to
ignore commonsense.
He and the Act party have managed this feat by persuading the
Government to incorporate a watered down version of the three
strikes policy in the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill.
Under this regime, which will apply to a variety of violent
and sexual offences, if convicted on a third offence, a
defendant will receive the maximum prison penalty with no
parole.
The court can, however, decide not to order this last step if
it would be manifestly unjust, something the politicians
expect to be rarely used.
Politicians love riding on the public's horror at individual
hideous crimes to convince us we are all about to be murdered
in our beds, that tougher penalties are the answer and,
miraculously, our three strikes version will succeed where
other countries' attempts have failed.
If harsh penalties were the answer, the death penalty would
have stopped anyone ever committing murder.
Does anyone poised to commit any sort of violent act coolly
stop and weigh up the consequences of their actions before
proceeding?
What about a cost-benefit analysis comparison to see if the
$27.5 million this is expected to cost in five years might be
better spent on literacy and drug rehabilitation programmes
in prisons or something similar?
Has there been consideration of the possibility more
defendants will enter not guilty pleas when charged with any
of the plethora of crimes involved, further clogging up the
creaking court system?
While we all might question the rulings of judges from time
to time, rigid mandatory sentencing suggests a dumbing down
of their role to consider cases on their merits and make just
judgements.
On second thoughts, perhaps I would find my eyes glazing over
and my head hitting the bar after a few minutes of Rodders'
wisdom.
The vision is enough to make courgardom seem almost
attractive.
Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
