Defending Older Women with Younger Men

Countering False Assumptions about "Cougars"

Far from being liberating or empowering, the word "cougar," as applied to older women, is a pejorative term that subtly implies a predator-victim dynamic, with the woman in the role as predator.

In the old days, this was called a May-December romance, and it raised eyebrows whether the older partner was male or female. Older women were widely expected to be past all that nonsense by now, and older males often found themselves followed by whispers of, "There's no fool like an old fool."

In today's generally more tactless and overtly judgmental society, much-younger wives are still widely regarded - openly now - as gold diggers and fortune hunters. Their older husbands may be publicly disparaged as being old fools, but they are secretly envied by their same-sex peers for their young, firm, fecund trophy wives.

Older women who partner with younger men, on the other hand, are pretty much universally regarded as cradle-robbing predators, as evidenced by the pejorative nickname, "cougar."

Most people don't think pretty young men -at least not emotionally healthy ones- will pursue older women, therefore any older woman who is coupled with a nubile young man must have chased him down. And there must be some kind of aberration that makes him vulnerable to her attentions - either the woman must be deceptively young-looking or the young man must have some kind of unwholesome mother fixation.

Or she pursued and seduced him with her greater experience and perhaps openness in sexual matters, using his own carnal nature against him. Why else, after all, would a younger man seek relationship bliss with a woman a decade or more his senior?

Quite the contrary, often younger men have approached the women first and, in some cases, actively pursued them. Sometimes a man falls for a woman and her age or race or weight or hair colour or breast size is just not important enough to override those things that attract him to her.

Responses to ad reveal a surprising number of young men who quite clearly stated they were interested in a romantic meeting with an older woman.

A cougar is a predator, a cat that preys upon other creatures to satisfy its own needs. Driven by hunger, it gives no consideration to the feelings or rights or intrinsic value of their victims. They simply take what they can get their claws into without regard to anything other than their own needs.

Applied to older women who find themselves coupled with younger men, it is a pejorative, insulting term that implies that the women give no thought to anything other than satisfying their own wants and desires.