Tiyuk's Second Life Adventures

This plurk by Merrick Thor got me thinking about the so-called “Cougar", “Puma", and “Sugar Daddy” debate: that it’s taboo for a sufficiently old person of either sex to date another person who is sufficiently younger than they are.

Merrick’s original question:
« Merrick!!! wonders what’s the minimum age you think of in association with the term “Cougar"? »

Where I personally stand on the issue is only of passing importance: my initial reaction to Merrick’s question is that it’s a matter of degree, rather than a black-or-white term. So a 30 year old dating a 21 year old would have some degree of cougar-ness, as would a 50 year old dating a 38 year old. But these are certainly not as taboo as, say, an 80 year old dating an 18 year old.

Being partially a visual learner, I wanted to model this on a graph. While mulling it over in my head, it took me over an hour to understand that I actually wanted a 3d plot, instead of a 2d plot. And it wasn’t until I started playing around in GNU Octave and Wolfram|Alpha that I started to visualize the actual graph. Then I spent some time in KOffice Krita touching up and annotating the image. Here it is, in all its glory (click for full size):

The resulting 3d plot isn’t exactly as I imagined, but it’s enough to get the idea across. For example, in real life, it seems that the younger the young person is in the relationship, the more “weight” is given to the cougar value of the older person. An 18 year old dating a 33 year old makes the 33 year old look quite the cougar, while if you take the same distance – 15 years – and apply it to a 40 year old dating a 55 year old, nobody really cares all that much. This appears to be a non-linear relationship – perhaps gently logarithmic with a nonzero starting value.

But since I only have mathematical knowledge through about Calculus 2.5, and spent only a few months playing with Octave in the past, I didn’t want to spend days getting the graph exactly intuitively right. I thought I would call it done after I was able to make a few “clear cuts” based on the color gradations that Octave automatically inserted on the surface of the graph. These are indicated by dotted lines and a nearby humorous annotation representing what that “level” of cougarness seems to indicate in a very societal-taboo way (tongue in cheek, of course!)

For the curious, here is the Octave source code for my graph:

#!/usr/bin/octave --persist
x = 16:1:80;
[xx,yy] = meshgrid(x,x);
z = (abs(xx-yy).*(0.5.*(xx+yy+sqrt((xx-yy).^2))))/500
mesh(x,x,z);
xlabel("female age");
ylabel("male age");
title("The Cougar Scale");

As you can see, the formula I chose was to plot:

I tried some non-linearity with the first term (i.e., abs(x-y)) but exponential and power functions seemed a bit too… severe, somehow – and they didn’t emphasize the younger ages enough.

One interesting aspect of this formula is the way I calculate the maximum of the current x and y values. Advanced math people might know this one by heart, but I found it fascinating. Instead of using boolean operators like “if” (composed of AND, OR, and NOT logic gates), you can actually use elementary functions to calculate max(x,y)! For me this is some kind of fascinating initial connection between elementary mathematics and boolean logic, and I hunger to find deeper logical implications inside mathematical formulae now. I might have to go back to school for mathematics.

The complete formula used for calculating max(x,y) using only addition, square root and a power function is given as the entire second term of the equation in the image above. Wolfram Alpha conveniently revealed this formula as part of its extremely insightful output, although I could swear I’ve used that formula somewhere before in my studies.

Since this blog is supposed to be about SL, I’ll throw in that I think this entire concept of age difference and taboo is irrelevant in SL – particularly for couples not planning to meet in RL. One of the conveniences of SL is that you really don’t have to care about age.

It’s probably irrelevant in general, too, in the sense that I wouldn’t personally be offended or outraged by the fact that some other couple falls, to some degree or another, into significant values of cougardom. If that appeals to them, then it’s perfectly fine by me. I don’t think I have any right to impose my cultural norms on others. I personally am reluctant to go *too* far on this scale for my own choice of partner, but this is something I will not specify for obvious reasons – and also because each specific situation depends on a lot of things, not just age.

So, back on topic: if anyone has suggestions for how to increase the accuracy of this graph, I’d love to hear your detailed analyses of applied mathematical cougarology. Bring it on!