Rebranding the cougar
A love affair between an older woman and younger man was once seen as a salacious taboo, but a new wave of celebrity romances and films are clawing away at the old stereotype, writes Meadhbh McGrath
For decades, she prowled across our screens, hunting fresh meat to satisfy her ferocious sexual appetite. She rampaged through the tabloids too, as high-profile pairings put a celebrity gloss on the term. Now, the cougar has returned — and this time, she’s biting back.
To be a Hollywood cougar was once the stuff of scandal, a titillating taboo, from Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson in The Graduate and Joan Collins’ Alexis Carrington in Dynasty to Eva Longoria’s Gabrielle in Desperate Housewives. Jennifer Coolidge’s turn as Stifler’s mom in American Pie represented a teen boy’s fantasy: an insatiable mentor who “knew what to do” in the bedroom, and a mocking update of Mrs Robinson, played for cheap laughs.
This year, we’ve seen a new wave of films spotlighting relationships between older women and younger men. In May, The Idea of You became a massive streaming hit and Amazon MGM Studios’ biggest romcom ever, featuring Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old divorcee swept up in a romance with the 24-year-old frontman of a One Direction-esque boy band, played by rising star Nicholas Galitzine. In June, Netflix’s A Family Affair cast Nicole Kidman, 57, as a widowed author who falls in love with an action movie star, played by Zac Efron, 36.
Kidman had another age-gap drama at the Venice Film Festival on Friday: erotic thriller Babygirl follows Kidman’s high-powered CEO as she navigates a BDSM relationship with her intern, portrayed by Harris Dickinson, 28. And when Bridget Jones returns to screens in February’s Mad About the Boy, she’ll be moving on from the late Mark Darcy with 30-year-old Leo Woodall.
It seems to chime with shifting attitudes in our culture. On dating apps, users are widening their age range filters: Bumble predicted “generational-blend romance” as a key trend for 2024, reporting that 59pc of women surveyed said they are “more open to dating someone younger”. Even celebrity age-gap relationships don’t seem to draw the same salacious “cougar” headlines as they once did. Sienna Miller, 42, recently had a baby with her boyfriend, the actor and model Oli Green, 27. Yet the response to their 15-year age difference is markedly different from the sensationalist media treatment of Demi Moore, whom the tabloids gleefully branded a cougar in 2003 when she started dating Ashton Kutcher, then 25, at age 40.
Compare that to the excitement surrounding recent reports of the “flirty new friendship” between Moore and pop singer Joe Jonas, 34, or the candid paparazzi photos of newly-single Natalie Portman, 42, having a smoke with Paul Mescal, 28, which captivated the internet this summer. Coolidge has enjoyed a career renaissance too, eclipsing Stifler’s mom to become a cultural icon in her own right. What’s changed? Is the “cougar” undergoing a Hollywood rebrand, or has the stereotype been put to bed entirely? “I think ‘cougar’ had to happen in order to make space for older women to be sexual and sexy,” says Emily Power Smith, a clinical sexologist and educator. “We always have to push an extreme version of things in order to settle somewhere more realistic.”
“I suppose the cougar stereotype had predatory connotations — there was something dangerous and transgressive about cougar characters. Despite that, it was an acknowledgement that women do have sexual lives after the age of
40,” says Dr Susan Liddy, a lecturer in media and communication studies at Mary Immaculate
College and editor of the book Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries: Falling Off a Cliff? “It was refreshing in a way to see portrayals
of older women satisfying their desires with younger men. It was certainly a change from the staid representations of older women we were used to.”
While these earlier stories may have portrayed their characters as sexy, it was rarely a flattering depiction: they almost always had that distinctly predatory air and more than a whiff of desperation about them. In the 2009 sitcom Cougar Town, Courteney Cox played a self-loathing 41-year-old chasing younger men in a frantic bid to recover her lost youth; “Stifler’s mom” became a punchline.
Desperate Housewives reliably served up a parade of “cougars” for shock tactics across its eight seasons, including love-to-hate-her neighbourhood villain Edie Britt. “With Cougar Town, there was a negative tone to it, and Desperate Housewives was very much a kind of satire where you were supposed to be judging these women,” says Dr Jorie Lagerwey, associate professor in television studies at UCD. “Definitely in this new crop of movies, there’s no judgment. You’re supposed to be on side with these women. There’s nothing predatory. They go to a lot of effort, I think, to show that they are making emotional connections with these younger men, and that it’s not just sex.”
In fact, in The Idea of You and A Family Affair, it is the younger men doing the pursuing. On top of that, both male characters are celebrities, resetting the power imbalance between the cougar and her startled prey. #MeToo,
Lagerwey notes, highlighted “vastly unequal power dynamics” between men and women, and whilst these films are not a direct response to that movement, mainstream Hollywood is eager to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past or risking cultural unease about predatory age-gap relationships.
“These romantic comedies with older women and younger men go to great lengths to establish that the men are old enough to be established in their own right, or at the very least acting on their own career plans and ambitions, and therefore aren’t using the women to get ahead,” she explains. “But this isn’t a simple rebalancing of the scales because the women are also not using the men. They are played as relationships, ultimately, of equals. The movies are clear that these are lasting emotional relationships, not quick sexual encounters.”
This does, however, play into other stereotypes, such as the notion that while men can have sex without strings, women need love and commitment. But then, most of these films are romantic comedies, and the conservative rules of the genre still apply.
“Romcoms are not a radical genre, they’re a comfort genre,” Lagerwey explains, adding that in each case, the female characters have already followed the traditional template of marriage and motherhood. “It’s really important that these women are either divorced or widowed, and they have kids, so they have done the quote-unquote ‘correct cultural script’ already. And I mean, I love romantic comedies, but I do think that they are showing a really circumscribed, really limited way in which women get to be seen.”
Even their jobs, she points out, are classics of the genre: they are writers and art gallery owners, working in creative industries.
“These women have these amazing careers, and even that is very romcom, they’re very feminised professions, but that’s not the focus at all, the focus is on: ‘Oh, they still get to be sexualised by young heterosexual men.’”
For these heroines — and their viewers — the fantasy isn’t just romantic fulfilment, but being seen. “There’s this wide cultural narrative that women become invisible after they’re 40, so here »
Definitely in this new crop of movies, there’s no judgment. You’re supposed to be on side with these women. There’s nothing predatory
» you have these wealthy, beautiful, skinny, youthful women — a lot of money has gone into making them look young, have no wrinkles and no grey hairs and all the rest — and they get to be acknowledged sexually by these young men who supposedly aren’t giving them any credit anymore. That’s really fun, and I love it. Is it a particularly rich way for midlife women to be valued and be their own person? Maybe not really.”
Hollywood has historically been an unfriendly place for women over 40. In the youth-obsessed film industry, actresses often found their careers began to dim as they reached midlife, yet advancements in the beauty industry have enabled — and compelled — women to preserve a preternaturally youthful appearance. Liddy refers to it as a kind of “ageless ageing” that can undermine efforts to disrupt stereotypes about mature female sexuality.
“Kidman is ultra slim, has ‘a pilates body’, flawless skin and while her chronological age is 57, she looks, at the very least, a decade younger. Indeed, one of the first remarks Zac Efron’s character makes relates to how young she looks,” Liddy says. While male characters present the audience with the possibility of a more dynamic old age, less restricted by the passage of time, there’s a sexual double standard at play. However, it’s good to see the film represent a character in her late 50s as vibrant and sexual, challenging widespread portrayals of women as asexual once they hit middle age.”
Lagerwey notes that A Family Affair also includes a glimpse of Kathy Bates’ character cosying up at home with a man, indicating a broader recognition of women’s sexuality in later life. “There’s no sex, but [we see her] on the sofa with a man her age, so we’ve got women in their 70s as well as women in their 50s in that film,” she says. Even in reality TV — where Love Island including a cast member as ancient as 30 made headlines — things are slowly shifting, with Lagerway highlighting the success of The Golden Bachelor, a 2023 spin-off of the American dating show featuring contestants in their 60s and 70s. “There is, I think, a move towards specifically affluent white women getting visibility in a manner that they hadn’t had before, in midlife and past midlife.”
It helps, she adds, that there are more women in positions of power behind the camera. The Idea of You was produced by Oscar-winning heavy hitter Cathy Schulman, actress Gabrielle Union and Hathaway herself, while Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have established their own production companies, although Lagerwey points out that they have often used their producing power to tell stories about similarly wealthy white women, albeit a little older than the Hollywood standard.
“I think it’s really significant that they are all slender, beautiful, affluent white women — there’s not a lot of cultural challenge happening here,” she says. “It is women who had power, who are continuing to have power.”
There’s also a financial incentive: the industry is starting to take notice of the “grey pound” and the untapped potential of this neglected audience. A market has been discovered. Women who were watching Sex and the City in the 90s and 2000s, they’re all midlife now,” Lagerwey explains.
“It is wonderful that Reese and Nicole have the ability to make these movies, but at the same time, it is playing to a market that was underserved, and so now it is a way
to make more money. You didn’t lose the old market, you just found a new one to exploit. This is still those same people, 20 years on.”
The original Sex and the City series presented a rare exception to the dominant version of on-screen “cougars” in the form of Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones, offering a perspective that reflected women’s fantasies rather than men’s. She was sexy, she knew it, and she wasn’t afraid to show it.
Today’s heroines, by contrast, are only willing (or permitted) to reveal so much — this is still the Hollywood version of midlife sex. “One thing that irked me [in A
Family Affair] is that [Kidman’s character] is clearly of menopausal age and that is not shown,” Smith says. “Maybe she just breezes through as some lucky women do, but I’d love to have seen a bit of nice lube on her bedside table, for example, and maybe a sex toy giving her shivers, versus the usual neck kissing that seems to bring Hollywood women of all ages to the edge of orgasm in seconds.”
Liddy adds: “It should be noted that Kidman’s body is always partially concealed during sex, something that is commonplace with portrayals of older female characters, arguably suggestive of an ill ease with the older female body. It is, of course, dramatically different when a younger woman occupies the role!” Both Smith and
Liddy cite the 2022 film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which stars Emma Thompson as a retired teacher who hires a young sex worker, played by Tipperary actor Daryl McCormack, to help her finally experience an orgasm. “I love that film because it showed the more flawed, human and vulnerable parts of older female sexuality,” Smith says.
“It’s one of the very few films in which the older female body is visible on screen,” Liddy observes. “For the most part though, the ageing female body is concealed on screen; the sexual encounter is depicted as already having taken place and the expression of female sexuality may be no more than a passionate kiss.”
These latest films signal a welcome start, but there’s still a long way to go. Liddy points out that midlife and older women are still “wildly under-represented” in film, as evidenced by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s annual report. “In 2023, not counting ensemble films, only three women over 45, and only one woman of colour, were leads or co-leads in the top 100 grossing Hollywood films,” she says. “In 2023, for every one film led or co-led by an older woman, there were 10.7 films led or co-led by an older man. Our culture continues to frame the ageing female body with greater disdain than the ageing male body. When female sexuality is absent from the screen, it exerts a powerful meaning.”
There is great scope for change, which can seem doubtful, yet Smith urges filmmakers to sink their teeth into some bigger ideas when it comes to older women’s relationships — with younger men or otherwise. “I’d write a movie or show where women are both strong and weak, can be beautiful while wearing a Tena pad, can have the best orgasms of their lives while needing lube and topical oestrogen. I still don’t feel we are represented in our complexities — I think older women are generally more comfortable and accepting of their foibles, but when it comes to sex, it’s still not easy.”
It’s really significant that they are all slender, beautiful, affluent white women — there’s not a lot of cultural challenge happening here. It is women who had power, who are continuing to have power