The Cougar Phenomenon Part I: An Introduction to the Cougar Lifestyle

Today, more and more women are going cougar! They’re eschewing the dubious standards society has set for mature women, saying, “So what if I’m an older woman? I’m hot. I’m sexy. I know what I want.” And increasingly what they want is a young man to satisfy their natural desire for affection, validation and wild sex romps. Women have always had a certain taste for young flesh, but their predilections were kept hidden in the recesses of their mind or acted on only in secret. But all that has changed. And thank God.

Since 2004, when urbancougar.com was launched to bring attention to what was then a mostly unknown but still glorious phenomenon, the culture has truly embraced the cougar. Perhaps we can thank Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whose May-December romance, once dismissed as a curiosity or worse, has become one of Hollywood’s unlikely (and rare) marriage success stories. For so many it made sense. Demi Moore might have been pushing 50, but she remained a world-class piece of ass. Women were like, “You go, girl!” And to young men, well, Kutcher seemed to be living their ultimate dream – taming that unattainable image from the poster in their adolescent bedroom.

Hollywood brought cougars out in the open with characters like Sex and the City’s sultry Samantha (played by real-life cougar Kim Catrall), and the wild success of the feature film only confirmed that more and more women are down with the cougar program. The public seems obsessed with the comings of goings of cougars like Demi, Mariah Carey and Jennifer Aniston, and their young paramours. And now major media is all over it. Cougars are the subject of countless television programs like the E! Entertainment Channel’s cleverly titled The 25 Hollywood Hottest Cougar Tales. They’re plastered all over the covers of paragons of journalism like Us Weekly and People Magazine. Their habits are dissected on some of our more respected talk shows like The View. And they’re of course talked about incessantly on blogs because cougars combine two of bloggers’ go-to traffic drivers: names of famous celebrities and pictures of hot chicks. Urbancougar.com alone has been featured on talk shows like The Tyra Banks Show, on respected news magazines like ABC’s Primetime Live and in countless newspapers and magazines from The New York Post to Maxim.

Some see the attention paid to the cougar phenomenon as a welcome development, a real movement of empowerment for women. It’s always been fine for older men to take on young arm candy. Why can’t women do the same? Others find it offensive, feeling cougar represents a derogatory term that should be met with derision. Others just find it funny.

There is little question that something over the last decade captured the popular imagination and transformed the cougar woman into an object of both great esteem and unfair scorn. The question is why now?

We know what you’re thinking. “Who cares? Cougars are fuckin’ hot.” True enough. Still circumstances demand we investigate. Why are women not only more comfortable openly dating younger men but embracing the cougar tag? Why are some wearing it as a badge of honor, while it is so threatening to others? How could that lucky dick Ashton bag the Demi-goddess? We mean, really?

In Part II, we will examine the some fundamental cultural changes that have made the cougar phenomenon possible.