Women on the Prowl for Younger Men

From the hoopla, you'd think 40-something women only recently looked up from their quarterly reports, household chores or pre-teen children to cast an eager eye on verdant pastures of younger men. But long before Courteney Cox prowled the cul-de-sacs of ABC's Cougar Town and tongues wagged over Demi Moore, Madonna or even Elizabeth Taylor, women of a certainage have tangled with the young and the beautiful of the opposite sex.

Remember the Wife of Bath from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? She was a medieval cougar with a mouth on her that would have made Samantha Jones from Sex and the City proud.

A glance at centuries of myth, fiction and history offers cougars enough to fill a jungle. "It's a fairly common motif," said professor Elizabeth Cullingford, chairwoman of the English department at the University of Texas at Austin. "But there aren't too many cases in which it ends happily."

Cougars may not be a new species to human mating and dating rituals, but how they have been portrayed has changed over time. Mrs. Robinson's lonely housewife of the 1967 film The Graduate was replaced in the late 1990s by the ravenous and unapologetic career woman Samantha Jones from Sex and the City. Go back even further, to, say ancient Greece, and Euripides has Phaedra killing herself for lusting after her young stepson..

With ABC's new show, viewers are being asked to be accepting enough of cougars to poke PG-rated fun at the idea. Sort of.

The show has stumbled with critics who found it silly and degrading to women. Even self-proclaimed cougars have found fault.

Valerie Gibson found the show embarrassing. And she wrote the book on the subject, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men (Key Porter Books, $12.95).As Gibson sees it, no self-respecting cougar would muddle through middle age looking for lost youth at the bottom of a shot glass as Cox's character Jules did on last week's episode.

A cougar, as Gibson sees it, is a single woman 40 or older who embraces midlife with energy, sex-appeal, independence and financial security.

A true cougar is more than willing to let men her age rely on young cuties to keep the Lipitor separate from the Viagra.

"I say women should be celebrated, too, for being vital and sexy," said Gibson, who lives in Toronto.

Of course, sexy has not always been on the tip of society's tongue when describing older women. Crone, hag and witch are probably more common descriptions.

Indeed, women involved with younger men through the ages have often wound up dead, depressed or ostracized.

A very informal survey of the UT English department faculty drew a long list of cougars who reach back to ancient Greece, Cullingford said.