With this week’s premiere of Courtney Cox-Arquette’s new show, “Cougar Town,” it looks like cougars are here to stay. Believe it or not, cougar culture hasn’t been around very long. Back in 2007, many people weren’t sure what Matt Damon meant when he called Ellen Barkin’s character a “cougar” in Ocean’s Thirteen.
Being a cougar wasn’t always a good thing. For most of recorded history older women’s sexuality was considered both inappropriate and unattractive. Ancient poems brutally mock old women as being sexually insatiable but physically disgusting.
Unfortunately, this sentiment isn’t just some relic of the past—just think of the scene in Van Wilder where Ms. Haver throws herself at Van. The same standard has been endorsed for millennia: sex is best with young virginal maidens, and older women are past their sexual prime. How boring!
Even in our modern age, pop culture hasn’t always given older women a fair shake. Before women were called “cougar” they were called “Mrs. Robinson,” after Anne Bancroft’s character in the 1967 movie The Graduate. For those of you who haven’t yet seen this classic film, Mrs. Robinson seduces her neighbor Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), who is a recent college graduate, and about the same age as Mrs. Robinson’s own daughter. Thus, “Mrs. Robinson” became the term for an older woman who goes after younger men. It’s also the name of the Simon and Garfunkel song featured in the movie’s soundtrack.
In reality, the thirty-six-year-old Bancroft was only six years senior to her co-star—hardly a cougar by today’s standards. Although the movie’s director wanted to make her look “old,” later in life she commented that she “was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen” in the role. We have to agree!
But Mrs. Robinson wasn’t a positive character, nor was she meant to be an inspiration for others. Screenwriter Buck Henry described her as “ruthless,” and the movie’s happy ending involved Benjamin leaving Mrs. Robinson and eloping with her quiet, passive daughter Anne instead.
Ten years later, sexually experienced older women continued to be a comic theme. In 1978, Animal House revived Mrs. Robinson in the form of Dean Wormer’s wife Marion (Verna Bloom). When Marion Wormer runs into young Otter at Food King she suggestively comments on the size of his cucumber. Dean Wormer’s wife even attends the infamous Delta House toga party, the better to flirt aggressively with Otter. But again, Dean Wormer’s wife (who also liked to drink a lot) wasn’t exactly a role model.
Nearly twenty years later, films finally started to recognize the appeal of older woman—perhaps because their younger audiences showed some genuine interest in the topic. The real breakthrough was 1999’s American Pie, which showed Stifler’s mom, played by statuesque blonde actress Jennifer Coolidge, as she seduces Finch and looks great doing it. During the seduction scene, while Stifler’s Mom eyes Finch and talks about her love of scotch that’s “eighteen years old,” we also hear Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” playing in the background as a sly homage to the original movie.
American Pie, in turn, was just the beginning of a larger “sexy mom” trend. Though the idea of a MILF is disturbing to many, I have it on good authority that many young men have ogled a friend’s hot mom in their time. In 2003, the song “Stacy’s Mom” commemorated this phenomenon, featuring Rachel Hunter as the mother in question.
But how much did these characters reflect reality? Probably not much, until real life cougar Demi Moore stepped out with Ashton Kutcher in 2003. At the age of forty-one, Moore started dating twenty-five-year-old Ashton Kutcher.
They married in 2005, and they’re still going strong. This seems to have been the cue for women everywhere to demand their right to date younger men. Not surprising since they’d been watching older men date younger women for centuries!
