Cougars and MILF

I've been thinking about the trend of calling older women cougars, and calling mothers MILF.

I stumbled on a CD compilation entitled Ladies Night: The Ultimate Cougar Collection. According to the cd, cougars can't stop revelling in their cougarity as their moods swing from celebratory, predatory, empowerment and remorse.

While I understand that sexuality is a part of a person's whole life, from childhood to old age, and has peaks and troughs and that different people care more or less about it, I also know that it isn't appropriate or possible or desirable to be concerned with sexuality ALL THE TIME. It isn't appropriate while you're working, or in a meeting, or dealing with your children, or dealing with other people's children, or treating patients, or travelling on the train or just trying to get on with your daily life. You can't get on with living your life if you are constantly in a state of sexual arousal. And you can't get on with living your life if you are constantly being sexually harassed.

What bothers me is this: if young women are considered a bit silly and concerned with their sexuality and having a good time, mothers are considered MILF, and older women are cougars, at what stage in a woman's life is she going to be taken seriously? Do we have to wait until we are crones before anyone takes our views as worth listening to? Don't younger women, mothers, or older women have any wisdom to offer?

So now we're living in a society where children are sexualised (corporate paedophilia), mothers are sexualised (when often it is the last thing on their minds), and now older women, when they have education, experience and know what they want from life, are being sexualised.

Isn't this another way of trivialising and negating what women might seriously have to offer, if taken seriously?