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Lee DeWyze is officially the winner of the ninth season of American Idol.  The triumph of Lee, the third scruffy, low-key, guitar strumming, regular Joe white guy in a row, over the dreadlocked and husky voiced Crystal Bowersox will no doubt cause a certain amount of consternation amongst the incredibly devoted Idol commentators and fanbase.

Many will blame tween girls and their mothers for voting with their eyes instead of their ears, and many will claim that Crystal deserved the win. But Idol is a voting show, a show about giving the people what they want. And if “the people” are young girls and middle-aged women, why shouldn’t their desires count?

ABC currently has a sitcom called Cougar Town, about a recently divorced woman who finds herself dating younger men. TV Land had a reality competition called The Cougar, in which a group of 20-something men fought for the affections of a beautiful woman in her 40s. 30 Rock had a second season episode called “Cougars,” which followed Liz’s relationship with a man 17 years her junior. As these examples indicate, “cougar,” a slang term which has gained enormous popularity in recent years, is generally defined as an older woman who is attracted to younger, handsome men.  The concept of a woman being interested in a gorgeous man who is in his sexual prime is apparently so surprising to the culture at large that we needed a special name for it.

I was really hoping that as a culture we were just going to let this one go, but as I just read a series of blogs and gossip sites attacking someone for criticizing Susan Boyle’s album, I guess we’re not yet done with this particular sob story.

For the uninitiated (and extremely lucky), Susan Boyle is a singer who shot to instant fame when a YouTube clip of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent went viral last April. Though she ultimately finished the competition in second place, her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, was released in November and immediately sold an obscene amount of copies, breaking all sorts of records and becoming 2009′s highest selling album in the world.

Why has this shy, middle-aged Scottish woman so captured our society’s attention? Basically, because she isn’t very pretty.