What is an adult? America’s laws usually say an adult is an 18-year-old — if she wants to vote, fight in a war, have sex, and take on debt — or a 21-year-old if she’d like to enjoy a beer or cigarette. America’s citizens can’t seem to make up their minds either, as we saw last week after a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio sitting next to a 19-year-old Israeli model at a party resurrected the “age-gap” discourse. The “age-gap” discourse is an eternal internet argument in which one side posits that legal adults can have sex with whoever they like, and the other side posits that if the age between two consenting adults is too large, the relationship is predatory on the part of the older person, and effectively non-consensual on the part of the younger.

The older, “predatory” partner in question is always a man, and usually a straight one. For example, no one alleges that lesbian actress Sarah Paulson, 48, is being preyed upon by her 80-year-old partner Holland Taylor. Even in heterosexual world, an older woman who sleeps with younger, adult men, might be seen as wild or desperate, but never sinister. When Cher dated a man 40 years her junior and tweeted “love doesn’t know math,” people rightfully laughed.

In contrast with how young heterosexual women are portrayed when they date older men, the young men with whom older women sleep are seen as able to fully consent — somewhat ironic given that on average, men’s brains fully develop about two years later than women’s. Real-life cougars might be predators, but the women we call cougars are never perceived this way. In fact, Valerie Gibson, the writer who popularized the term in 2001 through publication of her book Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men said she “deliberately set out to turn the word into an empowerment image for older women.” Like careerism, bullish assertiveness, and many other qualities deemed “empowering” for women, the word cougar symbolizes an appropriation of stereotypically male behaviors. Toxic masculinity for thee, female empowerment for me.