The Fine Art of Poaching

The Girl was blonde, sexy, beautiful, and the way she fondled her Heineken seemed to beckon, Take me home. But when Michael met her at a college party ten years ago, he wasn't sold. After half an hour of dancing, he abandoned her by the bean dip because of one unforgivable flaw: She was only 19 years old.

"I was twenty-two, a month away from graduation, and I didn't like to date younger girls," says Michael, now a 32-year-old video producer in New York. "Back then, I thought there was this huge gulf between nineteen and twenty-two--she was only a year out of high school, but I was about to go out into the world. Why waste my time with some kid?"

So it came as a shock last year when Michael's friends met his new lover. He'd found her on the set of a commercial shoot and had wined and dined her for weeks before introducing her to his gang. Julie shocked his friends not because she looked so perfect--she was blonde, sexy and beautiful--but because she was only 19 years old.

When Julie left the room, Michael's friends closed in for the grill.

"I don't know--I just like her," he said helplessly. "I can't help it if she's nineteen." Since college, he'd had three long-term relationships with women his age; he lived with two of them, almost married the other. He'd never been interested in younger women. So why was he suddenly dating a girl just this side of jailbait, a pouty-lipped plaything who was five years old when he was a freshman in college? Julie ate Cocoa Krispies, watched endless MTV, had homework to do and waged constant fights with her mom and dad. It was like--like dating a teenager. What was Michael doing?

Whatever it was, he wasn't alone. His best friend, a 30-year-old photographer, had dated a 21-year-old for nearly a year. Three of Julie's girlfriends also dated older men. Sometimes Michael and the guys got together at the corner bar, toasting the wonders of coeds. But while he outwardly joked, inwardly he wondered if he were going screwy. Some of his friends called him "cradle robber" and said he needed years of therapy. Now even he wondered what the hell he was doing.

It took an article in The New York Times to clear things up. Michael and his friend weren't cradle robbing--they were "poaching," a sociological phenomenon that's sweeping America and may be the dating trend of the Nineties.

Men have dated younger women since cave-man days, but poaching has a modern twist. The Times says it's caused by a variety of sociological factors:

• There's a shortage of single women in America. For every six single men between 20 and 29, there are only five single women. In a kind of sexual musical chairs, many men are forced to "date down" in age to find desirable partners.

• Women are having babies at a younger age. Since the Sixties, many women have put off childbirth until their mid-30s, focusing first on careers. But late childbirth has medical and psychological risks; in a post-feminist backlash, more women are now having children in their late 20s or even earlier. Many men are forced to date younger and younger women if they merely want sex and fun or relationships with low levels of commitment.

• The single-women shortage causes stiff competition among single men 18 to 24, but their problem is compounded by yet another threat: older, more affluent men like Michael who swoop down to poach young girls away from them. These poachers have formidable advantages: They're more confident, successful, sophisticated and worldly. Some even drive Porsches.

Finally, the Nineties may be so high-tech and speedy that the mid-life crisis strikes men earlier than ever. Instead of going on a tear when they're 42 and divorced, American men today feel frighteningly old at 30. They see 21-year-old screenwriters cutting million-dollar deals, Brat Pack sex symbols who barely need to shave, novelists and software czars who've made it big at 22. Poachers breeze through their 20s, sure they'll be young forever. When their 30th birthday hits like a brick wall, they do the only reasonable thing: They have affairs with sexy young girls.

You'd think this would solve all their problems. Michael has a cool job, an expense account, a loft in downtown Manhattan. He's constantly jetting from New York to L.A. and, on top of that, he's dating a wrinkle-free babe who could have leapt from the pages of this magazine. So why is he anxious? Because poaching has perils as well as pleasures. Sleeping with vibrant, beautiful young girls can be dangerous, embarrassing, humiliating. Michael has endured torment, practical jokes and what may be an ulcer since he set his sights on a college girl. And compared with some guys, he has gotten off easy.

Why Men Poach

What's so great about college girls? Patrick, a 34-year-old Dallas architect, has a simple answer.

"Fresher minds and fresher bodies," he says rapturously. "When you've dated women for fifteen years or so, you start getting stale romantically. With younger girls, everything's fresh again. Women my age get narrow about what they can or can't do, everything from sex and drugs to just going to a movie on a moment's notice. But you can call younger girls at the last minute on a Saturday night or drag them to hear some band at midnight on a Monday, and they'll think it's great. They're almost like a tonic--when I'm with them, I feel more stimulated, alive."

Dan, a 32-year-old Los Angeles copy writer, likes having the freedom to romance younger girls without worrying that he's leading them on. "With women my age, you have to be careful how close you get. If you give a thirty-year-old woman flowers, it's almost like a proposal of marriage. But with a younger girl, you can make all kinds of gestures. You can let yourself go, indulge in the kind of whirlwind romance you used to have all the time in your younger twenties."

Poaching can be like moving to Paris or Berlin--there's a whole new culture to be absorbed. College girls speak a different language; their CD players pump out bands from another galaxy, with names like the Buck Pets, An Emotional Fish, Chickasaw Mudd Puppies and the Goo Goo Dolls. Their look may change radically in 24 hours, from a Deadhead tie-dyed shirt and rose-tinted glasses to bicycle pants and a push-up bra. Their lives tend to be frantic, jammed with dates, classes and curious jobs. A poacher may arrive for a date to find one of her roommates gulping pills while clutching The Bell Jar, another doing yoga nude on a fold-out couch, while the poachee herself slips a diamond stud in her nose and says, "Won't be a second."

Coeds may ask a poacher to lick acid from a blotter sheet of Bart Simpson heads, climb a water tower at three A.M. or eat Ethiopian food out of a can. These things just don't happen with 30-year-old women, who'd rather phone out for Chinese and watch Ghost on the VCR.

Michael felt as electrified as Patrick when he started dating a younger girl. Julie had an alarming level of energy and an appetite for food, drink and sex that kept him reeling. Racing the streets of Manhattan only an hour before dawn, he'd gather Julie in his arms, clutch her slender, almost anorexic rib cage and kiss her just to catch his breath. The years seemed to fall away from him; he bought cooler clothes, went out every night. Other young women began to flirt with him, and soon he wasn't going out with just Julie. After 15 years of being someone's longtime, dependable boyfriend, and to the astonishment of his friends, Michael became a sex god.

Who's Poaching Whom?

When coeds get entangled with 30-year-old men, it's not always clear who's poaching whom. Many college girls aren't content with schoolgirl romances--they see frat boys chugging beer and mooning passers-by and shake their heads at such juvenile nonsense. What these coeds want is a man, someone with a level of politesse few college boys can attain. And they aren't shy about going out and finding him.

"I haven't dated guys my age since I was fourteen," says Laurie, a 21-year-old University of Texas junior. "I watch my friends with their boyfriends, and I'm glad I don't. It's a drag when a guy is still living with his parents or still in school or broke all the time. I'd much rather date a guy who's more established, who makes a living and knows what he's doing. Older men have been around more and done more. They have more to offer. They're more respectful and more polite--they aren't just concerned with getting drunk and getting laid."

Kate, a 22-year-old graduate of Columbia, couldn't agree more.

"A girl has to be crazy these days to go out with guys under thirty," she says. "Guys in their twenties just don't know whether they're coming or going--it's a kind of confusion that fades away later on. Guys my age are like, 'Maybe I should do this, maybe I should do that,' and these are all questions I answered long ago. They just have very little to offer at that age."

Kate finds it perfectly normal to date men ten years older. "It's no big deal. Relating-wise, it just works better. It's also what I call the work issue: Who's doing the work? With younger men, I get so tired of suggesting things, pointing out things, saying, 'Perhaps we should do this.' It's just a vast and incredible relief to date older guys, because they know what to do."

Sex and The Single Poacher

Nabokov's Lolita was blessed with a curious mixture of innocence and eerie vulgarity. The same can be said for many college girls, who may have blind spots in the most basic areas--such as groping or undressing in a provocative way--but be marvelously skilled in the most advanced, unlikely perversions. Poachers may not encounter any coed virgins (70 percent of women have had intercourse by the age of 18, and girls who date older men are probably even more likely to be sexually active), but they're certain to find some surprises. One girl told Dan that she lost her virginity at 16--while wearing handcuffs. And that was just for starters.

"Women my age aren't into recreational sex," Michael says. "But college girls are at that experimental stage where they want to try everything. It's almost like they're more like guys when it comes to sex. They can have an affair just for the excitement, without its becoming a big deal."

Patrick has had many carnal coed adventures. One girl shared him with her roommate on a cold winter night, after the heater broke in her apartment. Their ménage à trois progressed to the music of chattering teeth, and everything Patrick touched had goose pimples. Another time, he spent the weekend with a girl who, in an apotheosis of poaching, took out her retainer before performing oral sex.

But not all coeds are wild and kinky--some approach sex with a shyness and eagerness to learn that make poachers grow faint with longing.

"Sometimes I feel like an explorer," (continued on page 145)Poaching(continued from page 88) Dan says. "Women my age have tried everything. You can't find an inch of skin on their bodies that some guy hasn't drooled over. But college girls have usually had only a few inept lovers." He gets a far-off look, dreaming about all those untouched ankles and unnibbled buttocks.

Coeds seem to appreciate the poachers' interest; the admiration is decidedly mutual. "Men over thirty are better lovers, hands down," says Kate. "I had a boyfriend once who was my age, and mysteriously enough--what's a nice way to say this?--he'd never, um, administered oral sex before. It was just his thing. He just didn't.

"If we're going to be technical--and sometimes that makes all the difference--the men I've been with who are older really know what they're doing. It's not younger men's fault that it's this way. Women's bodies are complicated."

Kate described how one man, while kissing her good night, made a sudden deft movement underneath her skirt and stole a furtive caress. "I have to say, whatever he was doing, it felt thoroughly incredible. It's just amazing to be with somebody who knows what you need better than you do. And that's happened to me only with older men."

Kate's naïveté reflects the poacher's only sexual complaint: A coed's inexperience can lead to mishaps in the sack--lethal teeth and fingernails, elbows in the eyes, tumbles off the mattress. Michael and Dan even admitted that they missed the comfort and ease of sex with women their age.

A Howl from The Gallery

What happens to a poacher's old life once he descends into the frantic world of coed romance? Well, it's still there--the only difference is, everyone in it is laughing at him. When a 32-year-old man starts sleeping with a 19-year-old girl, his friends, family and co-workers gang up on him like so many shrinks, priests and stand-up comics. Their comments range from disbelief ("You can't be serious--she's nineteen?") to jocularity ("Is her mommy paying you to babysit?") to outright hostility--especially from women the poacher's age.

"I think they tend to be a little threatened by the whole thing," Patrick says. "They react especially harshly if you've gone out with them in the past. Several women have accused me of dating young girls because I'm afraid to grow up. They want me to accept something predictable instead of what I really want.... They want me to buy a Buick when I'd rather have a Lamborghini."

Some poachers simply drop out of sight, unable to bear the endless taunts and ribbing. This can be disorienting, since it means immersion in a world of college kids. Since the poacher no longer sees his friends, he's constantly surrounded by hers. Not all of them will be as poised and sophisticated as his girlfriend--in fact, some will be certifiably teenaged, unconscionably young. On a date at a pizza parlor, he may be the only one not wearing Oxy 5. Every teenager in the place will stare at him, wondering, Is he somebody's uncle? Is he chaperoning a church youth group, or what? His lover's friends will giggle, stealing rolled-eyed looks at their friend's "father of the month." Sleeping with younger girls may once have made him feel 19, but nights like these make a poacher feel closer to 60.

Disillusionment sets in

No matter how grown up a coed may seem, sooner or later she's bound to slip up. New Kids on the Block will blast accidentally from her tape deck; Twinkles will tumble from her Anne Klein bag. But these are just tremors compared with the true horror to come. Sooner or later, every poacher of coeds 18 to 20 hears the Dreaded Five Words: "May I see your I.D.?"

In a dark Manhattan night club, Michael looked up to see a man grilling Julie. They were with a crowd of his friends, celebrating the wrap of a video shoot; he'd already been nervous about their reaction to her. Now, as they watched Julie fumble through her Batman purse, he felt a growing wave of panic. No, not panic--humiliation.

"It's here somewhere," she stalled, finally producing a battered college I.D. from Iowa or maybe Idaho--an I.D. so badly faked her picture drifted around inside the plastic, like one of those moving pictures at the top of a ballpoint pen.

The manager aimed a flashlight at the I.D. for interminable seconds, while Michael tried to shrink inside his leather jacket. God, to be carded in front of all his friends. How could he ever live it down? He soon got a chance to find out, when the manager escorted Julie and him to the door.

"I told my friends we'd meet them later," Michael says, "but I told Julie I was beat and took her home. I knew she couldn't help being nineteen, and I knew it was stupid, but I was mad at her. I mean, the last time I was carded on a date with a girl, Jimmy Carter was President. That night, I wondered, Who needs this? Give me a grown woman, a legal woman!"

Dan had his own bottom-out moment with a college girl. One night, he took a 20-year-old home from a date and pulled a bottle of Moët from the fridge. (He'd learned months before that coeds weren't always big on liquor.) But this one wasn't much on bubbly, either. She told him that all she really liked was Boone's Original Strawberry Hill wine.

"I'd just met her," Dan says, "and filling this girl with strawberry wine seemed like a good idea. So we went to a liquor store, but when we got to the door, she stopped kind of nervously and said, 'Should I wait out here?' It was cold and rainy, and she was going to wait out on the sidewalk. I felt like an old drunk buying liquor for a teenager. And I was!"

When they aren't buying fake I.D.s or slurping bright-red wine, many coeds are displaying their generation's astonishing ignorance of geography and history. They think Nicaragua is in Africa someplace; they place Canada smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Dan likes to trip coeds up on the simplest historical points.

"I tell them that when I was born, there were only forty-eight states. Their eyes get all wide, like I used to live in covered-wagon days. They don't know that Alaska and Hawaii became states just thirty-two years ago. Another time, I asked a girl whose side we were on in the Vietnam war. She said, 'Well... Vietnam's, right? Is this a trick question?'"

Patrick is one poacher who has yet to be disillusioned. As he sees it, coeds are much brighter than women his age. "They're being exposed to learning in a structured way," he says. "Things are still percolating around in their brains. If I want to talk about Hegel and Proust with a woman my age, she'll be straining to remember some lecture from 1977, whereas a college girl may have just read them this morning."

Poaching's Gravest Danger

For ivory poachers on the plains of Africa, it's government troops who blast AK-47s randomly into the bush. For a poacher of coeds, it's something even more terrifying: her parents.

When a poacher clashes with a young girl's parents, perhaps for the first time since his senior prom in 1978, he'll discover a striking contrast in the way his girl and her parents view her maturity. His girlfriend sees herself as a woman, wise and proud and 19, old enough to vote and die on desert battlefields. Her parents see her as a little girl just a year out of high school who has "fallen in with a bad element"--namely, her 30-something boyfriend.

One night last summer, Patrick was in bed with an 18-year-old he'd been seeing for months. They were still awake at five A.M., half-drunk, still caressing and talking, when a jangling phone made them jump out of their skins.

"It was her mother," Patrick recalls, his face still aghast months later. "Sarah had just started college and still lived with her parents, but that night, she hadn't wanted to go home. She was always having tussles with her parents about curfews; they were trying to retain their influence over her and she was trying to deny it to them."

Sarah wouldn't get on the phone, so Patrick talked with her mother himself.

"It seemed like ages," he groans. "It might have been just two and a half minutes. She said something like, 'Sarah's father and I are concerned about her because she spends so much time away from home and she's supposed to come home early and we don't know what she's doing....' I tried to take the tone of another person talking about Sarah from a perspective similar to theirs, pretending to be circumspect and responsible and not the kind of guy who would have their daughter in his bed at five A.M." He laughs nervously at the memory. "I talked as if I had nothing to do with Sarah's being there, but since I happened to be there and observed it, I would report on it."

Sarah just sat in bed with the sheet pulled up to her naked breasts, the gray light of dawn on her face.

"And of course it looked lovely on her," Patrick says, sighing.

Did the ordeal make him wonder whether young girls were really worth the trouble?

"No! I wouldn't have missed it for the world! How could I possibly have such a scene with an older woman? I live for things like that. It's a drama, an incident, which is my life goal--to live a life of incidents."

The coeds get restless

Men aren't the only ones who have second thoughts about poaching--coeds are just as likely to feel, well, creepy and gross about dating someone a decade older. Their illusions are just as fragile. For a while, an older boyfriend makes them feel worldly, sophisticated, grown up. But inevitably, he makes a fatal slip. He'll treat her like a kid, laugh at something she meant to be serious or say, "Boy, when I was your age...."

"I've heard that so many times, I'm like, 'Fuck you!'" Laurie says. "Some older guys act like everything I'm going through is a phase. They have this condescending attitude that they're wiser and older and know everything. It gets on my nerves."

Pointing out their girlfriends' youth is a mistake many poachers make. Another is expecting them to be impressed by a fat wallet, a sleek car or a high-powered business card.

"Some men think I'm supposed to be impressed by their jobs or by how much money they have, all kinds of dumb things that don't impress me at all," Kate says. She mentioned one rather wealthy man she'd had a date with. "He seemed to think I was supposed to just naturally fall on my face for him because he was rich and older. But he was unattractive, not very bright and, frankly, balding. There were just so many assumptions going on there."

Many poachers make the mistake of acting interested in their girlfriends' youthfulness instead of in who they really are. Laurie and Kate bristle at the thought of being merely fresh young faces.

"I'm suspicious of men who can't deal with people their own age," Kate says. "If they get too much of a kick out of this youthful stuff, it grosses me out. You should like people for who they are. I like older men because relating-wise, it works better. And that's how they should feel. The problem is when you start to feel like a trophy. If they're like, 'She's cute and younger, wowee!'--ugh, that's just gross!"

Perhaps the worst poaching mistake is expecting young girls to act like grownups. Some poachers win young girlfriends and immediately set about turning them into 30-year-olds. Laurie abhors men who tell her things like, "Everyone's gone through what you're going through, so get over it."

Kate bolts when men try to change her behavior. "The idea that, like, I couldn't sit around listening to rock and roll, for instance--that would be it for me."

The Long Road Back

Poaching, like all vices, is handled better by some than by others. Men such as Patrick know how to handle it--they steer calmly through the uproars and escapades of coed life, accepting their young girls' naïveté and shortcomings with good humor. They never panic, like Michael, or complain when their young lovers misplace continents, like Dan. But it may be men such as Patrick who'll ultimately find it hard to let poaching go--especially if they see it as a way to escape their 30s. On many levels, that's just what poaching is--an escape, whether it's from women who want to settle down and many, from the ever-increasing responsibilities of adult life or from even darker worries, such as a fear of death.

Michael, for one, admits that turning 30 filled him with terror. For the first time, he-realized he wouldn't be young forever, that he'd hit his 40s, 50s, 60s and eventually die. Poaching provided a way to blow olfsleam for a while, to hold back the rushing tide of time.

"I mean, I work in a young business, I dress like a young person, I wear my hair long, I do everything I can to reject the idea that I'm thirty-two years old," says Michael. But there are signs that he's coming to terms with his Zeitgeist. After almost a year of poaching NYU girls, Columbia girls, girls who rode trains in from Wellesley and Smith, he recently started dating a 29-year-old woman. "We just clicked immediately," he says. "She really may be the one."

At last word, Dan was in the midst of a frantic weekend hosting a visiting coed who'd brought two girlfriends along unannounced. "It's a madhouse," he yelled into the phone, over the blasting chords of the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies or the Goo Goo Dolls, he wasn't sure which. He sounded harried but still hooked on the thrill of poaching, though he says he realizes it can't go on forever.

Only Patrick swears he'll be a poacher for life. He can even see himself marrying one of his young coeds one day, if the timing is right and he's overwhelmed by romance. He says this knowing full well the fickleness and changeability of the girls he loves. "After being married for three months, she might decide she loves someone else, and I'd be crushed and never show myself again. But it would be more dramatic and adventurous than marrying a thirty-year-old."

Why does Patrick cling so tight to the poaching ropes? He's heading into his fourth year of it, plummeting into his mid-30s, leaving behind many of the friends his age he once had. Is he running away from something, or is he just having a good time?

"I may be trying to conquer my age," he admits, "but is that such a bad thing? Maybe overlooking the fact that I'm getting older isn't sensible, but trying to retain a bit of freshness and a spontaneous attitude seems good to me."

In the end, poaching may offer more than it seems to. It's not just about sleeping with sexy young coeds--it's about rediscovering the young man inside yourself, reclaiming things you wish you'd never lost and discovering aspects of your self you never want to give up. As a poacher, you may gain a renewed longing and admiration for women your age and find enough vigor and enthusiasm to revitalize your grown-up life.

"One more thing," Dan says. "You get to sleep with sexy young coeds."