Twilight of the ‘Cougar’
This article contains spoilers for Season 1 of Age of Attraction.
No label really existed to describe my mother when in 1965, at the age of 27, she met the man who would become my father, a baby-faced guy who had just turned 18. But there were plenty of stereotypes. In The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had written of the older woman who pursues “fresh flesh” because young men are the “only ones” she can hope will feel desire for a “maternal mistress.” The woman does so, too, to combat the anxiety of aging, de Beauvoir wrote, felt by “the one whose life is already finished, even though death is not imminent.” Ouch.
Hackneyed ideas about older women attracted to younger men have of course persisted into the 21st century. In 2003, after Demi Moore began dating Ashton Kutcher, who was 15 years her junior, celebrity weeklies weren’t the only ones that had a field day with the couple’s romance; national news outlets tossed around phrases such as “‘Graduate’-style relationship” and the derogatory term cougar. Just this past February, the New York Post declared that “cougar relationships are hotter than ever.” The Post article could be read as celebrating female empowerment; in assessing recent films portraying the older-woman, younger-man dynamic, it described them as “a far cry from the caricatures of predatory cougars from the past.” But its defaulting to the cougar label—lazy and male-gaze-y, connoting something predatory, reducing women to figures of curiosity (at best) or desperation (at worst)—nonetheless implied judgment.
Still, a newer wave of film and television suggests an evolution in the way some people are thinking about May-December romances featuring older women: movies such as Babygirl (starring Nicole Kidman) and Lonely Planet (starring Laura Dern) and, most recently, the Netflix reality series Age of Attraction, which drops a few dozen heterosexual contestants of varying ages on the grounds of a resort in British Columbia and sits back to see what will happen.
[Read: The older woman comes of age]
Age of Attraction’s creators, Rebecca Quinn and Jennifer O’Connell, told Deadline last month that they explicitly wanted to design a show that would “tell a story” from the perspective of the “female gaze.” “There have been a lot of shows out there where they label, especially women, as cougars or MILFs,” they said, “and we didn’t want this show to be that.”
You can see that effort in the series’s respectful treatment of one of its early standout relationships, between Theresa DeMaria—a 54-year-old yoga instructor, stylist, and mom of three—and John Merrill, a 27-year-old software salesman. Their pairing is not without its dramas; DeMaria, for instance, wrestles with the potential fallout of revealing the relationship to her children, the oldest of whom is two years older than Merrill. But refreshingly, the show doesn’t simply emphasize DeMaria’s sex appeal. It also allows viewers to see her energy, her openness, and her vulnerability—in other words, her humanity. “There’s a lot of things that older women bring to the table,” Quinn told me in an interview this week, “that are well beyond just if they like having sex.”
A nuanced portrayal of a romance involving an older woman doesn’t mean that sex has to be left out of the picture. Quite the contrary: Eroticism was very much at the center of Babygirl, which tells the story of a successful CEO who falls in love (and lust) with a much younger male intern at her company. The difference between Babygirl and Age of Attraction, on the one hand, and older film and TV caricatures, on the other, is that in these newer works, the women are presented as full subjects, architects and protagonists of their own passions. In Age of Attraction—where, as on other dating shows, the suspense comes from waiting to see who will fall in love and what will happen the more they learn about each other—DeMaria generates heat not as an older woman on the prowl but as a woman whose giddiness about meeting a match is so charming as to be contagious.
Credit, I think, should be given to the women of Gen X, who lately have been chipping away at stereotypes about older-female sexuality. (The creators of Age of Attraction are both Gen Xers.) More women have been openly discussing the effects of perimenopause and menopause on their sexual health. Last year, a New York Times Magazine headline made the provocative claim that “Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex.” “In so many memoirs and films and TV shows, the older women are found in relation to younger men,” the article’s author, the culture critic Mireille Silcoff, wrote. “It doesn’t track as cougar-ism; it feels more like serendipity.” She went on to describe this serendipity’s many strands. In addition to the fact that many Gen X women have reached the Age of Divorce, she wrote:
You have women who are more educated and earn more than ever. You have women who are interpersonally rugged and who can be light and easy with sex because they worked their way through so much difficult sex when they were young. And you have women who are, in certain ways, immune to the neutering forces of the 21st century—because, both sexually and socially, they were formed before it.
As an “older” woman (I’m also Gen X) who has dated younger men, this all scans to me.
With this growing interest in the lives of older women, I wonder whether we’re in the midst of a cultural recalibration—and perhaps a subtle rebellion, led by female writers and directors. Babygirl was directed by the Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, also Gen X. The Idea of You, starring Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old single mother who enters a relationship with a 24-year-old boy-band star, was based on a novel by the Gen X author and actor Robinne Lee, and its screenplay was co-written by the Gen X actor turned writer and director Jennifer Westfeldt. Miranda July—also Gen X!—gave us the best-selling perimenopause novel All Fours, in which a dissatisfied wife and mother falls in love (and becomes obsessed) with a semi-available, much-younger man she meets at a car-rental office.
Now Age of Attraction’s focus on DeMaria and Merrill’s courtship has further mainstreamed the older-woman, younger-male dynamic. In late March, DeMaria told Glamour that she hadn’t experienced much stigma over the relationship. “If I were to put a percentage on it, I would say 95% of the people out there are totally in support of me, cheerleading me, and really want us to be together,” she said. “That is very heartwarming. It just means that our world is not as dysfunctional as I anticipated it’d be and that women’s empowerment is building.” (She may be onto something: In 2023, the dating app Bumble surveyed more than 25,000 of its users and reported that respondents were “increasingly open to connections both older and younger,” and that 59 percent of female respondents were open to dating someone younger.)
As for whether things panned out between DeMaria and Merrill: well, no. O’Connell told me that although the two are now just friends, “I think they both had a really amazing experience together.” Is their split a failure, a reason for regret? I don’t think so. DeMaria and Merrill may have called off the romance, but Age of Attraction’s normalizing of their relationship, and of DeMaria’s romantic relevance as an older woman, was its own kind of success.