Cougar-woman? A new phrase that is being said over and over, in the media. Supposely, talking about older single women going after young men. Below is and article from the New London Day, in regards to this question.

If you go by the original orgin, I am a Cougar, my husband (my1st and only marriage) is 5 years my junior. You can not tell because due to good genes, I do not look my age, but it is still the truth. We both waited a long time to get married, I was 40 when we got married, before him, most of my relations was with men at least 5 years younger, I did date a man 10 years and another 15 years younger than myself. Men my age seemed to always have alot of baggage, plus children and and ex-wife. I was a product of divorce, so I knew what it entailed, and did not feel I was the perfect woman to get involved with a man with children, ex-wife I could deal with, but not if children are involved. Selfish, maybe but at least I know my limitations. What do you think a Cougar is?


"What's a cougar-woman?” Barbara Walters asked recently on “The View,” in that Barbara Walters way of hers: part journalist, part socialite with a dirty mind. And thus, the archetype of the cougar — the sexy older woman who seduces younger men — reached the ears of a woman in sensible pumps. Another cultural boundary had been breached.

But don't fret, Barbara; you're not too late. If Mrs. Robinson came first, and Samantha on “Sex and the City” gave hope for broad acceptance, the cougar has now become a full-fledged pop-culture punch line. Last summer, NBC gave us “Age of Love,” a dating show that pitted 20-something “kittens” against 40-something cougars in pursuit of one hot Australian man. (The winner, no surprise, was 25.) In last fall's straight-to-DVD movie “Cougar Club,” Faye Dunaway vamped as the oversexed wife of a college grad's boss-to-be. In an episode of CBS's “How I Met Your Mother,” Neil Patrick Harris seduced Jane Seymour, who had also snarled at younger men in the film “The Wedding Crashers.”

Meanwhile on NBC's “30 Rock,” Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski picked up younger men. (Fey snagged a 20-year-old hottie, so Krakowski, to compete, corralled a teen wearing Heelys.) Most recently, Raquel Welch — who has kind of been a cougar for the past few decades — started to play one on the new CBS sitcom “Welcome to the Captain.”

By now, the cougar has become so ubiquitous — picked apart in Mark J. Penn's recent book “Microtrends,” mercilessly meta-mocked on network TV — that it's due for a reclamation. And sure enough, in self-help circles, a Take Back the Cougar movement is starting to form, complete with product tie-ins and promotional opportunities.

The cougar may be the butt of jokes, after all, but she's also an aspiration, a figure in stark contrast to some less female-friendly cultural trends.

On one hand, we're bombarded with ads for Viagra and Cialis — one current “Viva Viagra” spot features a virile middle-aged guy on a motorbike — which suggest that aging men ought to have as much sex as they physically can.

On the other hand, women are flooded with reminders that they ought to be nesting by now: celebrity pregnancy mania, fertility fear-mongering, anxious exhortations to find a mate already. In the upcoming issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Lori Gottlieb writes “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” in which she suggests that 30-something women should give up the dream of true love and hot sex, and instead choose someone reliable to help with diaper changes.

The article, now up online, has set women abuzz. Asha Bandele, a 40-year-old author and poet in Brooklyn, says her friends in their late 20s and early 30s had a recent group dinner, centered on discussing whether Gottlieb is right.

Bandele gives thanks that she's in a different place: a mother, divorced, advanced in her career, and dating a man a decade younger. It's a low-pressure relationship, she says. And compared to some accomplished, jaded men close to her age, a younger guy — awed by her experience — makes her feel good.

“You can go out with someone who's interesting, with a million and one stories,” Bandele says. “But when someone makes you feel that way? That's sexy.”

Bandele considers herself a “real cougar,” a term coined by Linda Franklin, a 60-year-old life coach who runs a Web site aimed at women aging gracefully. In December, Franklin launched an offshoot site called the Real Cougar Club, where cougars can network, celebrate their sexiness, and shed what Franklin calls the “skeevy kind of image.”

In fact, Franklin wants to expand the “cougar” definition altogether. That part about dating younger men isn't essential, she says. A cougar, instead, is “a woman over 40 who is strong and confident and sexy and independent. ... She knows what she wants and she knows how to get it.”

By her standards, Hillary Clinton could be a cougar, too.

A cougar in a pantsuit? Hold on a minute. If we're going to set Barbara Walters straight, we should admit that the whole idea started with sex. So says Valerie Gibson, a Toronto-based sex and relationship columnist who takes credit for spreading the “cougar” label through the United States.

“Cougar,” Gibson says, is a Canadian term, born in the bars of Vancouver and meant to be unkind. But when Gibson heard the insult more than five years ago, she sensed an opening. Fifteen years ago, she had written a book called “The Older Women's Guide,” which gave tips on dating younger men. It never took off: “It was just too soon,” she says.

In 2002, Gibson tried again, with a new book called “Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men.” Now, she takes credit for spreading the term through the U.S., largely by pushing her tome through the talk-show circuit. (She has explained cougar habits to the eager ears of Dr. Phil and Montel Williams, and also sent a book to Sharon Stone.)

Everyone loves a label, Gibson says, but the “cougar” type has actually existed for centuries. Catherine the Great dabbled in younger men because she could. For a long time, Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” was the typical pop culture portrayal: By lusting for younger men, she was doing something wrong, so she had to be an alcoholic.

Then came Demi Moore, who has arguably had more sway on pop culture than any other woman of our time. First, with the help of Vanity Fair, she single-handedly made pregnancy look sexy. Then, with her real-deal relationship with Ashton Kutcher — now her husband, 15 years her junior — she sparked the idea that a cougar could be cool. Before long, magazines were celebrating the prowess of older Hollywood babes, cougar-dating Web sites were cropping up, and E! had come up with a list of “25 Hottest Cougar Tales,” calling out the likes of Barbara Hershey, Susan Sarandon, and Geena Davis.

All are gorgeous in their own right, which is no surprise: Hollywood has long been packed with the agelessly attractive. The cougar, thus described, shares some spiritual ground with the much-older notion of the Mom-I'd-Like-To-(expletive) — epitomized by Stifler's mom in 1999's “American Pie,” or “Stacey's Mom” in the song by Fountains of Wayne. But unlike the M-I-L-T-you know, the cougar has agency. She controls her destiny and picks her dating pool.

And she has little to do with that other vision of stress-free aging, the pert, grandmotherly “Red Hat Society,” which promises wholesome, sexless, depoliticized fun for over-50 women. The group's Web site declares, hopefully, that wearing the right-colored hat “adds an element of fun to aging.”

The cougar is interested in a different kind of fun — the sort that must appeal to a boomer bubble that is moving steadily toward retirement age. Census data predict a 72 percent rise in adults 50 and older between 2000 and 2020 — and not all of those women want to “greet middle age with verve, humor and elan,” as the Red Hat site declares.

Self-defined cougars take their aging seriously. And they consider themselves elite, Gibson says. Gibson — who declines to give her age but allows that she “loved getting 40 and loved getting 50 and so on” — is clearly enjoying herself.

“My last husband was 14 years younger than me,” she says by phone, “and it was the best marriage out of all my five.”