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.