So. The Internet almost collapsed recently under the weight of the rumours swirling about Cleveland Cavaliers NBA star LeBron (King) James’s mother and her alleged affair with his teammate Delonte West. (The boot-knocking allegation is practically a gospel fact, we’re told, because Terez Owens broke the story and, you’ll remember, Terez Owens was the guy who broke the first Kim Kardashian/Reggie Bush break-up, which, after much denial by the couple, ended up being true. Hard-hitting sports journalism here, you can’t deny.)

But back to the Big News of the Hour. Forty-something Gloria James getting busy with the 26-year-old West, her son’s bredren.

Again, supposedly.

Big deal, I can hear the jaded ones among us say. Well, excuse me, but yes. Yes, it is a big freakin’ deal because of two things: 1) What this so-called story, rumour or truth, reveals about attitudes toward female sexuality in the 21st century and 2) if the rumours are true, it would make Gloria James the woman who changed the game for aspiring cougars everywhere.

As speculation goes, the alleged affair, which former teenage phenom LeBron discovered, is what accounted for his atypical, some would say downright abysmal defeats in games 4, 5, and 6 of the recent playoff series with the Boston Celtics. Or, in Jamaican parlance, LeBron apparently took the affair to heart and made him lose his concentration. Which, in my opinion, is pure hogwash. That’s not something a world-class pro ball player loses concentration about. Besides, LeBron James does not the entire team make. But that’s for another kind of column.

What fascinates me about the controversy, however, are the comments by the public about the so-called May-December affair itself. There’s an undercurrent of social disapproval: the guy is young enough to be her son. Of course, there’s also the outright outrage by many who think a mother should not sleep with her son’s friend. But most surprising is the perception by many that Gloria James isn’t a candidate for cougardom. And that, more than anything else, simply gets my gears grinding.

One blogger scoffed at the affair allegation thusly, summarising the prevailing feeling: I don’t believe it. Delonte is pretty cute. She’s not even a young-looking 40.

Okay, say she isn’t, but hello? Where the hell is it written that a woman has to look like Demi Moore, in other words, like a flat, plastic 11-year-old-schoolboy, for admission into the cougar club?

I’ve seen some reverse May-December relationships, to wit, balding, paunchy older men with their young, beautiful trophy girlfriends who remind me of Beauty and the Beast, and nobody thinks twice about questioning the man’s worthiness. If Gloria James cannot exactly be thought of as a former candidate for the Miss Ohio crown, does this mean she can’t have a fling with a young man? Who makes these stupid rules anyway? Perhaps it’s the fault of movies – cougars are always portrayed as Bo Derek-perfect tens with the rejuvenated skin, bleached teeth and bodies of girls half their age. Sure, times have changed and nowadays, with the exception of a select few like Meryl Streep, no actress over 40 or 50 looks her age. But even that original cougar, Mrs Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft way back then in 1967’s The Graduate, was foxy despite what would eventually become her trademark streaks of grey hairs, and those lines at the corners of her mouth.

Speaking on behalf of mature, non-Hollywood women who’ve reached that point of their personal and sexual development when a younger man seems the ultimate delectable fruit (regardless of how long that lasts before it becomes exhausting and, well, old – but this, too, is another column), I find that the public’s strong aversion to King James’s mom’s possible dalliance is offensive. If young women can be with older men who don’t necessarily look like, say, Denzel Washington, then younger men, consenting adults, can be with women who look like Gloria James.

Even in matters as seemingly trifling as this, women are held to higher standards than men. If older men, regardless of how they look, are free to love who they love, want who they want, then why isn’t the same thing true for older women regardless of how they look?

Every time I think society’s made a giant stride in an area of thinking, along comes some nonsense to disabuse me of that naive notion. I’m not even so much irked by who people consider worthy of being a cougar as I am by the ongoing hysteria surrounding the concept of the word itself. Think I’m overstating things? Try this on for size. Google, the Internet search engine, has recently pulled ads for the dating website, CougarLife, after labelling its text and banner advertisements “adult content” and “non-family safe”. Yet ads for its inter-generational dating sites that target older men, in particular ‘sugar daddy’ services, remain up and fancy-free and not censored by Google. This is crazy. It’s as though ‘cougar’ is a dirty word synonymous with ‘paedophile’. If this had happened in 1980, I would have considered it a double standard. But in 2010? Non-family safe? It’s almost too ridiculous to contemplate.

Cougar Life defines cougars “classy confident women that (sic) already possess many of the finer things in life – but now want the young, hot guy to go with it”. This is on the money. The truth is, in modern society, the June Cleaver days where women focused first on raising a family before everything else are over. More and more women are forging ahead with their careers and not necessarily cultivating relationships with men, so that by the time they’ve established themselves, they’re forty-something and no longer desired by men that age. Not to mention that the physiology of a woman at this stage of her life is often compatible with that of a younger man’s. It makes perfect sense that cougars will be around. Listen, cougars have existed for a long time; they’ll continue to for an even longer while, I expect. Get used to it.