by Jessica Leshnoff | Comments: 0

Editor’s note: Names of a number of the interviewees have already been changed for privacy.

Annette Wheeler didn’t recall the moment that is exact first heard the definition of “cougar,” but she did remember dashing to her computer to check it up. To her surprise and bemusement, there is a brand new term to explain exactly exactly exactly what she have been doing nearly all of her life — dating younger guys.

For all females, more youthful men — lots of them 15 years or even more their juniors — certainly are a fit that is natural.

Wheeler, a fiery redhead whom lives outside Baltimore, leaned right right back inside her seat and sighed. “i enjoy younger men,” the 60-year-old purred. “I liked more youthful dudes even if I happened to be in senior high school — like an or two younger year. I happened to be a cougar before there have been cougars.”

Certainly, Wheeler’s pre-marriage and post-divorce dating history reads just like a steamy screenplay. She listed a sequence of teenage boys with who she had different relationships, sometimes punching numbers as a calculator to find out age distinctions she had never ever considered when you look at the beginning. She never ever analyzed her attraction to younger men (or their attraction to her), however with “cougar” a ever more popular term used to describe older women dating much younger men, her longtime preference is abruptly into the limelight.

For Wheeler along with other ladies them 15 years or more their juniors — are a natural fit like her, younger men — many of. Boomer ladies are searching more youthful and feeling a lot better than ever. Widowed, separated, or divorced, an increasing quantity look for teenagers for dating and companionship. And since guys are dating more youthful ladies for a long time, what makes numerous of us surprised — shocked, even — that females would follow suit?

Sex and love

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Confessions of the Cougar

Valerie Gibson, composer of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating young Men, is perhaps all too knowledgeable about this standard that is double. The cougar that is self-proclaimed her first guide in the topic — Younger Men: how to locate Them, Date Them, Mate Them, and Marry Them — 14 years back, “and let me make it clear something,” she said in a whisper. “It caused a horrible stir — and never a good one. Everyone was horrified. These people were positively horrified that older women is making love with more youthful males.”

Whenever a lot of us think “cougar,” we visualize the greatest cougar associated with the giant screen: The Graduate’s famous, martini-sipping Mrs. Robinson. These times, real-life cougars are stars like Demi Moore (whom, in her own 40s, hitched then-twenty-something heartthrob Ashton Kutcher), the coiffed cast that is reality-show of Real Housewives of Orange County, and, yes, everyday women — suburbanites and city-slickers alike.

While there’s no denying that cougars are slinking to the main-stream, there’s still a component of taboo surrounding these relationships that are age-spanning.

“It’s definitely considered creepier for females to venture out with more youthful men,” admitted Junie Smith, a cougar that is 52-year-old lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “For a 70-year-old man to head out having a 40-year-old girl, in place of a 70-year-old girl venturing out with a 40-year-old man? a woman that is 70-year-old away by having a 40-year-old man is recognized as creepy.”

Why the standard that is double? Smith figured it comes right down to science: “It most likely has something related to the concentration associated with the types on procreation,” she quipped.