Charting the origins of cougar mania

Casting has begun in Manhattan for an online reality show called Cougars: NYC, which is not set at the Central Park Zoo. It's about five women over 40 who—unlike the large, reclusive cat whose ideal date is a quick sprint after a weak ungulate—stalk only men at least 10 years their junior. You know, that kind of cougar.

According to Elizabeth Mwanga, the show's executive producer, that kind of cougar (not to be confused with "PUMAs") is a term "meant to symbolize empowerment. This isn't just horny older women chasing younger guys," she insisted to the New York Post's Page Six. "It's women who are beautiful, successful, and hot, who can get these younger guys because they are hot."

Empowerment? Well, okay. I mean, the cougar is a majestic beast. But for every woman who says, "Rrrowr!"—and there are plenty—there's another who says, "Cougar? Bite me."

The term, generally traced to a rash of attacks in the 1980s in, depending on which Canadian you ask, the Vancouver Canucks' locker room or the area bar scene, has indeed become common, if controversial, parlance. You may have heard it on 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, and One Tree Hill, not to mention on the 2007 cougars versus kittens reality show Age of Love (winner: kittens), on VH1's Kept (cougar: Jerry Hall), and in the 2007 movie Cougar Club (Faye Dunaway: what?). You may have noticed the cougar theme on We Are Scientists' After Hours album (but not if you're over 40). You also may have encountered cougar dating guides, cougar dating websites, even cougar-hunting websites for their randy young prey.

Nomenclature aside, there actually may be some demographic and sociohistorical truth to this trend. According to a 2003 survey by the AARP, 34 percent of women over 40 are indeed dating younger men. Today's high divorce rate has increasingly put older (if you call over 40 older) women back on the prowl, many of them financially stable and able to afford, you know, $15 cocktails. But no matter what their actual net worth, social and gender mores have changed enough that, even if these women do want to remarry, they're looking for baggage-free love, drug-free boners, and girlfriend-still-got-it companionship (not necessarily in that order), not for a man to take care of them.

That's why, according to Valerie Gibson, author of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, cougardom represents nothing less than a revolution. As far as she's concerned, these broads are not burning their bras, they're burning their elastic-waist pants.

"Older women have always been discarded, invisible, considered unsexy, undesirable," she says. "This is the first time in history that they have gotten up and said, 'Yes, I am a sexual being.'"