Courtney Cox has let the side down. Her new show, Cougartown, is an attempt to detail the tribulations of the older single woman, as if any of us needed reminding. It’s hard enough to be over 35, single, and live in a small city held ransom by twenty somethings in short skirts and high heels without Cox subjecting me to a CSI style forensic investigation of her excess elbow skin on a weekly basis.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a good-looking guy in a pub. Up close I realised he was considerably younger than me, maybe by five or seven years. While he asked me questions, all I could think about was him thinking about my age. He had a brilliant view of the wrinkles around my eyes; there was that grey showing right at the top of my fringe. I moved my lips from side to side to take the emphasis off any wrinkles around my mouth. I was standing up straight and sucking in my stomach, afraid I might pass out. There was no room left in my head to muster up any sort of normal intelligent response. He was a gentleman, it has to be said, and he was very kind at dismissing me. When I finally got the hell out of there, I was struck with one major concern: am I a cougar?

The big cat predator is code for an older woman who goes after and sleeps with younger men. Cougartown’s humour is the locker room variety, and its female characters are obsessed with how they look, being single, and sex. The show seems less interested in the realities of being female and more like a warm-up to a mud-wrestling match. No big surprise: its two main writers are men. Cougartown seems to be the mutant child of Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City, both of which have teams of writers (Sex in the City’s were mostly women). I don’t expect Cougartown to be bone dry, but the opportunity for exploration and reflection seems to have gone the way of Cox’s integrity. And it begs the question exactly who is being preyed upon.

So I ballsed it up because I was too self-conscious of my age. The alleged rule of determining how low can you go in the dating game is to halve your age and add 7, which in my case is 23. Who makes these rules? How young is too young? What if the guy I talked to was 31, does that make me a cougar? What about 27? There seems to be a citywide crisis in available single men over 35, so it’s no surprise older women start looking at younger men. Only now, not only is she competing with younger women and thinking seriously about the 2 for 1 special down at the laser clinic, but also opening herself up to a vile label with a vague definition. It’s not enough to be more aware, more together, and, for the most part, more successful. The barometer of beauty is stuck firmly on youth. Cue the misogynistic male writers in Hollywood.

All this youth worship may be down to making babies. Theories have long been bandied around that fertile women are most attractive to men. For every Helen Mirren there are a hundred Penelope Cruzes. Even the hourglass figure, a revered symbol of beauty, is thought to be a predictor of high hormone levels, which in turn increases the likelihood of getting pregnant. The push to reproduce is so important and engrained that by the time a woman hits 40, hasn’t had a kid or two and is still single, there’s an assumption that there’s something wrong with either her womb or her head or both. Then so-called relationship experts tell us we’re just too damn picky and we’d better lower our expectations if we want to find a man, which doesn’t say much for what the experts think of the men. So we’re not young and fresh faced anymore, probably not fertile and less attractive because of it, and either we drop our standards or date a younger man to the chorus of distant snickering from the peanut gallery. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

The cougar label is essentially just static to defer from the real question here: do women have a sell-by date? It seems the residents of Cougartown think we do.

In places where women don’t have equality, their main role is to bear children. Despite our success in obtaining equality, this idea persists as an underlying current. Negative media caricatures and the unreal obsession with youthful physical perfection propagate the idea that once a woman has reached a certain age, she’s an old maid or over the hill. The Elizabethans feared older unmarried women, the Victorians pitied us, and now it seems we’re ripe for ridicule. Rather than concentrating on the positives of what we have and what we’ve achieved, we’re encouraged to focus on what we’ve lost, what we are not, and what hangs in the balance.

The physical ideal is represented predominately by young woman, actresses, or models; most often all of the above. These careers depend largely on looks and the women who choose them are almost obliged to undergo Botox, plastic surgery, or the odd rib removal. But in the everyday world looking good is different from looking young. Most people become more confident, self aware, and happy with age, and nothing is more attractive than that. Wrinkles: be damned.