By Debbie Schlussel

Last night, I attended a screening of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” the second cinematic installment in the “Twilight” book series that is all the rage for straight teen females.  I can’t post my review until Midnight, when the movie debuts, and I’ll try to have it up by that time.  Stay tuned for that.

What got me were not the many teen girls in the long lines to get into the screenings or their screams at the sight of the male 20-something co-stars in the movie.  (Though, I really don’t think I was this bad as a young kid when I liked Sean Cassidy in “The Hardy Boys” or as a teen when I liked Rick Springfield and Duran Duran.)

What got me–what I found kinda laughable and pathetic–were the many (yes, many!) grown women who lined up for this and were all gaga over it.  We’re talking 30-, 40-, and even 50-something women who go to a movie to see a 17-year-old (who was 16 at the time it was filmed) take his shirt off and show his chest.  Isn’t there something illegal about this . . . or at least, unseemly?

Yes, a fit man is more attractive and appealing, but these young guys with sculpted chests didn’t turn me on.  They made me laugh.  They were like little boys and haven’t lived.  The ripples and six-pack abs were anything but masculine to me.  Masculinity isn’t hours at the gym and laying off the mac-and-cheese.

Sadly, it is to these older women I saw, who seem to be regressing in their adulthood, forsaking it altogether to feel young and be friends with their kids and kids’ friends.  It’s disturbing.  They’re devouring the “Twilight” books–which are essentially teen “Harlequin Romances”–and it’s (at least to me) sort of perverted.  It’s definitely way beyond cheesy.  And you wonder why so many female teachers have illicit affairs with their underaged male students.  It’s ‘cuz we glorify it. And it’s creepy.

Sorry, but our society has really taken glamorizing this “cougar” Demi-marries-Ashton thing waaaaay thing toooo far.  I mean, even the chintzy Joan Collins and Elizabeth Taylor were never this gauche.  I think they had a limit to how young they would go.

If men were going to teen movies to see under-aged girls, we’d put them in the “likely to child molest” category and call them dirty old men.  So, why do the women shamelessly gush over these young boys and get away with it?

For me, there is just one word for this:  Eeeuuuuwww.

The ABC show, “Cougartown,” starring Courtney Cox, is funny, because we laugh AT these women, not with them.  Cox’s 40-something predatory character, looking to “date” (euphemism) young guys, is a joke.  A disaster.  But these women at “New Moon” actually take this lifestyle seriously.  They think it becomes them as women.  It doesn’t.  It’s sad.

So many feminists decried older men dating younger women.  But, now, the new feminism they’ve created has the older women emulating the older men.  This is “equal rights” for women? It’s disgusting.  These predatory women are the new older men.

At least with older men and younger women, there was something in the laws of nature that made it appropriate.  Older men could still impregnate younger, childbearing-aged women, and there was a procreation reason behind it.  With older women chasing after young boys, there’s really no purpose other than self-gratification.

But, hey, that’s where we are now.  That’s our world.  Hey, moms, how’d you like your girlfriend to date your son?  Or, at least, fantasize about him in a teen girls’ movie.  It’s immaturity, something we encourage more and more not just in men in our society, but also in these narcissistic females.

Grow up, women.  Stay away from your daughters’ pop culture . . . and their teen idols.