Urban Dictionary: A 35+ year old female who is on the “hunt” for a much younger, energetic, willing-to-do-anything male. The cougar can frequently be seen in a padded bra, cleavage exposed, propped up against a swanky bar in San Francisco (or other cities)waiting, watching, calculating; gearing up to sink her claws into an innocent young and strapping buck who happens to cross her path. “Man is cougar’s number one prey”

Question: Women do you pursue younger men or do they pursue you?

Ground breaking movie soon to be released in the UK showing an older woman /younger man relationship that actually has a positive ending and doesn’t just show it as ‘a bit of fun’….can actually be love too!

“He thought I was younger, I thought he was older. (And there’s a 13 year difference!) I had to explain the term “cougar” because he didn’t know it. Nevertheless, I don’t like it. Granted, most of the significantly younger/older relationships I see are older man, younger woman, but I’m not a dirty old woman at 45! And even though this is turning out surprisingly well, my biggest concern is the negative image older woman/younger man couples seem to generate. New label, please!”

Comment on The Washington Post

This does not mean that I hate the solitary wild cat who feasts on deer, elk and sometimes armadillos, in regions across North and South America. Nor does it mean that I hate women who have sex with younger men. What I hate is the never-ending cutesy-pie conflation of the two.

Enthusiasm for the word “cougars” as applied to women, and not simply to high school football teams or John Mellencamp, seems to have begun around the millennium, with the 2001 publication of “Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men,” by Valerie Gibson. But the term caught fire in 2005, fueled by the marriage that year of then-42-year-old Demi Moore to then-27-year-old Ashton Kutcher.

Four years later we are still awash in knee-slapping, claw-bearing, never-gets-old cougar mania! Rowr!

In addition to the reality show “The Cougar,” which premieres Wednesday on TV Land, Courteney Cox-Arquette has produced and stars in a pilot for an ABC sitcom called “Cougar Town.” The independent film “Cougar Hunting,” a comedy about young men chasing older women, was prevented from shooting at the Aspen courthouse because it was deemed too racy. “Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men,” was reissued in 2008, and has been joined on shelves by titles like “Cougars, Poptarts & One Night Stands: 101 Essential Wingman Tips” and “Hot Cougar Sex: Steamy Encounters With Younger Men.” There are cougar hunters. There are cougar Web sites. There is a recurring “Saturday Night Live” skit called “Cougar Den” — which always seems to star Cameron Diaz, whether or not she’s the host — in which hilariously menopausal but libidinous women act like ninnies in pursuit of Zac Efron, the Jonas Brothers and youth itself. There are also self-proclaimed professional cougars, women who are apparently just “smart, sexy, independent … and proud to be over 40,” whether or not they’re jumping over couches to grab crotches.

By Rebecca Traister read the rest on http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2009/04/15/cougars_madness

Taken from http://womensissues.about.com/u/ua/femalesexuality/CougarPositiveNegative.htm

The ad from air New Zealand, to advertise their grabaseat deals, that had to be banned from the air due to people’s complaints about the use of the term cougar….

THEY won’t see 40 again, the menopause is on the horizon – for some, it has been and gone – and they’re closer to their pension than they might prefer to think. Yet a new breed of sex-hungry women – dubbed “cougars” – are increasingly on the prowl.

nd their prey is, of all things, toy boys.

News that Irish First Minister’s wife, MP Iris Robinson, recently did her own “Mrs Robinson” and hooked herself a lover an astonishing 40 years her junior is startling enough.

Kirk McCambley was just 19 – an age when most lads are more interested in the latest Call of Duty video game, binge drinking and fantasising about Megan Fox – when he bedded the flame-haired Belfast politician 18 months ago.

Indeed, church-going Mrs Robinson, now 60, was old enough to be her secret boyfriend’s grandmother. But it didn’t stop the pair – who have known each other since he was just nine – having a fling that has now rocked Northern Irish politics.

What is just as astonishing, however, is that Mrs Robinson, whose namesake in the sixties’ movie The Graduate lured a youthful Dustin Hoffman’s character into bed, is hardly alone.

For a new generation of 40-plus women, from desperate housewives bored by years of marriage to high- earning city businesswomen, celebrities to, indeed, politicians, are giving their love lives a youth injection courtesy of more than willing toy boys.

Last week it emerged that filmmaker and artist Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, is pregnant by teenage actor Aaron Johnson. The pair hooked up after she cast him as the lead in her John Lennon movie, Nowhere Boy. She now plans to marry Johnson, who is just seven years older than Taylor-Wood’s daughter, Angelica, aged 12.

Yet she’s only following in the footsteps of the likes of Hollywood actress Demi Moore, 46, and her husband Ashton Kutcher, who’s still only 31. Even Jade Goody’s mum Jackiey Budden, 51, has recently swapped 37-year-old lover Jason Cooper for the even younger 30-year-old father-of-three Aaron Woolhouse.

Scots psychologist Cynthia McVey believes women are simply enjoying the benefits of a more broad-minded society – and grabbing a bit of what men have enjoyed down the years.

“This trend reflects changes in society generally,” she explains. “It used to be that men were the breadwinners, and women were attracted to status and the ability to protect and provide for their family.

“Now women no longer need those kinds of services. They can provide for themselves and for their children.

“With that sorted, they can then go for looks and for youth. They can behave the same as men and choose someone much younger if they want to.”

Society’s response to women and their toy boys is changing too, she says. “Society in general might still regard it as a bit odd, but younger people are very accepting. They say that if it’s OK for a man to have a young glamorous woman on their arm, why not for a woman to have a young, attractive man?

“As we see celebrities doing this it becomes more generally accepted within the general population.”

The trend is also partly fuelled by women now having more control over their looks thanks to cosmetic surgery, Botox and gym-honed bodies.

But while all that may boost a middle-aged woman’s confidence, according to online dating website boss Julia Macmillan, 49, looks aren’t always the big issue for their younger partners.

“Women are very hung up about their looks. They see every line, every detail. They’re in their mid-40s, they probably haven’t had sex with their husband for years and self-esteem is at rock bottom.

“They can’t understand how a younger man might find them attractive, but they do. For many men, it’s not about a wrinkle or too many curves or age. They see overall attractiveness and sexiness.”

Julia launched Toyboy Warehouse (www.toyboywarehouse.com) in 2006 after a searching online dating sites and finding herself paired with “boring” middle-aged men.

“It’s not just about six packs and looks,” she insists. “And there are plenty of young men out there who are intelligent and mature and able to hold a conversation. They’re not all sitting about playing on an XBox all day. And a lot of them find girls their own age irritating and annoying.

“I’ve dated men in their 20s who are so intelligent and mature and perfectly able to talk about all sorts of things. Likewise, I’ve had older boyfriends who have been unbelievably boring.”

Julia, a painter and sculptor, has more than 22,000 members on her website – around 1,000 of them Scots. And while the website is aimed at finding a toyboy for women, there are more men registered seeking love with an older woman. Demand is growing so quickly that she is now planning a series of events in Edinburgh and Glasgow to bring older women and younger men together.

“A generation ago, a woman had kids, she’d kind of let herself go and she’d stay at home, twiddling her thumbs and getting older. But today women have more.

“This is like the last stage of feminism. The first was the pill, then comes the political changes and the social changes in the workplace. Now it is about relationships.

“And there are a lot of women coming out of long-term relationships, with grown-up children who married young and feel they missed out on their youth. They’re free again and they want to make up for lost time.”

Of course, it’s worth remembering too that the male of the species hits his sexual prime in his late teens – a woman in her late forties. Which, according to one IVF specialist, can create it’s own toy boy dilemmas.

The Barcelona-based Institute Marques announced last week that at least 12 per cent of the British couples it helps involve a woman who is at least six years older than her partner.

Dr Raul Olivares, the IVF centre’s international director, said: “Starting a new relationship with a much younger man makes these women feel rejuvenated, and at a time of such physical and emotional plenitude, it can be difficult to accept that one’s reproductive train may already have left. Often they cannot understand that, at 45, you can have a fantastic body but it can be too late to have a pregnancy.”

Please understand, I’m not saying that every older woman/younger man relationship is inherently progressive while every older man/younger woman coupling is oppressive and reactionary. A great many young women do exercise great agency in relationships with older men. But there’s no escaping the reality that the potential for abuse and exploitation is likely to be much higher in an age-disparate relationship where it is the man who is the elder of the lovers. We must note, too, that we live in a world where men are seen as growing both more “visible” and more powerful as they age — while women, past a certain age, are either desexualized or mocked. “Cougar” was not coined as a compliment; “silver fox” was.

Same-sex relationships can replicate unhealthy dynamics from the dominant culture. But by their very nature, same-sex relationships “subvert the dominant paradigm” in a very healthy and important way. A romantic relationship between two men and two women reminds us that biology alone isn’t destiny, and that while a certain degree of complementarity is surely present in any enduring relationship, that complementarity doesn’t require radically different genitalia. The age-disparate relationship, while certainly quite common in gay and lesbian communities, doesn’t reinforce an unhealthy norm. Even a wealthy older man with a beautiful young (but broke) “boy toy” is a fundamentally distinct phenomenon from that of a wealthy older man with his hot young girlfriend. The latter relationship reminds us all of women’s relative powerlessness — and of older women’s disposability — in a unique and infinitely more damaging way.

Critics on this blog frequently accuse me of double standards, and of being harder on men. By noting that, all things considered, older men/younger women relationships are more problematic than any combination of partners of a different age, I open myself up to that familiar charge. Yet it’s simply absurd to pretend that we have, even now, achieved full equality for gays and lesbians; it is equally untrue that women, despite the tremendous advances of the past half-century, don’t still get the short end of the stick in virtually ever area of human activity. No matter how well-intentioned the parties involved, every older man/younger woman sexual connection sends a clear and visible signal to the outside world that the patriarchal norms are left untouched; every older woman/younger man bond sends the exact opposite signal. This doesn’t mean a good feminist can’t be involved with an older man, or a pro-feminist man with a younger woman. But it does mean that they will have to work twice as hard as anyone else to keep unhealthy cultural discourses out of their relationship.

For the rest of the piece read Hugo Schwyzer’s great blog

This is a dramatic change from their last survey in 2005, a mere four years ago, when only 8% said they were interested in younger men. Back in 2006 when I first started thinking of launching my own dating site, it was this particular niche that I felt was not catered for. I looked around and saw that more than half my female friends had either married or were dating younger men, and from my own experience (I’ve always had younger boyfriends) I felt this was a trend that would continue to grow.

When I launched www.toyboywarehouse.com in Jan 2007 I thought to myself how are we going to get enough attractive young men on it, but to my amazement that has never been the problem. We’ve been inundated with wannabe toyboys ever since the beginning, and that includes men in their 40s, although the main demographic is between 20 and 40. The stats confirm that there has been massive growth on this side of the sexual divide too as the survey finds that 18% of men under 40 are looking to date an attractive older woman, whereas it was only 5% five years ago.

When the site went live I thought the main female demographic would be 35 – 55 and so it was in the beginning but I’m finding more and more women in their late twenties and early thirties are following the trend and choosing younger men and this is also something borne out by the survey. Now 17% of women in their thirties are looking for a younger man. Society changes when women are financially independent. The feisty, independent women of today are going to make different choices from those their mothers made. The younger men of today, often sons of liberated women, see all the advantages of the attractive older woman. Vive la difference! Go for it girls!

By Julia

“This social phenomenon is a fad. Nobody wants to admit that these young men are motivated by a) lack of a suitable mother figure in childhood due to selfish self-absorbed baby boomer parenting b) money, property, resources, etc.. c) weariness of sex being used by younger women as a manipulation device and a bargaining chip. Many of these so called cougars have faces pumped full of botox, breasts full of silicone, and surgically rejuvenated vaginas. The rhetorical question I have for the readers is this: What do you think is going to happen to this trend when these men get the clue that there is no such thing as a satisfactory mother substitute, the economy improves, the fake enhancements wear off or become grossly freakish in contrast to the physical traits that are aging right on schedule?”

As we know, on the internet, no one knows a dog is a dog, but I have a faint suspicion that this particular gentleman is not of the perfect-abs-six-pack-shiny-black-mane-of-(natural)-hair variety. I’ve never heard a young, confident, sexy guy speak that way about an older woman. Accent on ‘confident’, here, I’m not talking about the poorly endowed ones who find fault in the most angelic of creatures. As for the older guys, they never seem to get why a young man would date an older woman, even if it’s rare to find one who didn’t have that fantasy as  a young man.

Until forty, I mainly dated older men, so a male friend in his fifties didn’t hesitate to voice his view regarding younger men dating older women: “Oh, it just makes them feel good that the women are so grateful for the sex.” It could only have been an analogy: are men so grateful for sex with a younger woman that they’re willing to pay up with lavish gifts and even marriage, that institution to be most avoided in the mind of the average male? Does the gentleman’s comment on the cougar piece reflect his own insecurities? Is he, at least in theory, if not from experience, aware that his no longer perfect abs cold only be made up for by a dignified cheque? Or that the only role he could ever play in a young beauty’s eyes is that of a father figure? Well, fear not, Sir, for all known millennia, the end of a recession or the disillusionment of not being able to replace a father figure hasn’t stopped young women to continue to search for sponsors, just as the older woman experience will continue to fascinate young men, not always for the same reasons.  In most cases familiar to me, the younger man is enthralled by the older woman and is not looking to compare her with her younger counterparts, quite the contrary, he finds a mature woman more beautiful and is attracted by her confidence, and that is unfortunately ever more pronounced due to increasing body image insecurities in generations hitting their twenties and thirties now. Yes, the economic uncertainties the gentleman commentator indicates are pushing girls to ever more clingy measures. I understand, Sir, that it’s disconcerting that the available pool of women is shrinking before your eyes now that you see it doesn’t go without saying that the forty and fifty year old ladies are at the mercy of those older gentlemen who can’t afford a younger woman – as your laws of exchange seem to indicate – but no need to take it out on us. Really.

By L’heure Bleue, guest blogista