Puma – What’s in a name?

I used to hate the term “Cougar” for all the obvious reasons. First, she conjured up images of Mrs. Robinson in a girdle and garters, smoke billowing around her alcoholic head as she seduced a vulnerable (but willing) Benjamin. She fast-forwards to leopard-clad women over 40 showing too much cleavage, sporting 4-inch stilettos, hanging out in bars, drinking wine, and dragging home young prey. Every time the media interviewed me, she’d cringe, knowing I’d be asked the obvious questions: “Isn’t this just about sex?” “Isn’t it just about money?” I struggled to explain to them that in my 20 years of research as a research psychologist of human behavior and the world’s foremost authority on intergenerational dating and psychosexual imprinting (translation: cougar cub dating) they were wrong. The media is promoting what I coined “The Stiffler’s Mom Myth” as in the movie American Pie. Stiffler’s mom seduces a young man, but he’s not the type of GQ model with ripped abs. He is mature for his age, intelligent. He gets into his head before getting into his bed. Young men and the media who think that the young man/old woman relationship is all about sex or money have never been in a relationship with an older woman. If they had, they would know the truth.

The facts are pretty simple, and I say them with a lot of certainty, as this is a demographic of people that I have formally studied for over 20 years. If you are familiar with the bell curve, you can easily see that the bell curve can be applied to almost anything in life. Let’s plot the dynamics of the young man and the older woman and see what we find: In the middle section of the curve we have the majority of older women. “Older women” can be thought of as women over the age of 20 dating younger men. Most of these women in the midsection of the curve are in their 40s and 50s. These are the cougars. Women in their 30s are Pumas. 20-year-old women are kittens. Cougars and Kittens fall outside the center of the bell-shaped curve. Let’s say they are 1 standard deviation from the mean, to the left of the midsection. Women 60 and over are Panthers. Let’s put them to the right of the middle of the bell-shaped curve. There are fewer kittens, cougars, and panthers than there are cougars; but for the sake of argument, they are all “cougars”.

What is a cougar? Many women take offense to this nickname, as do I, for the reasons I’ve given above. People get mad at me for using the word in my articles and research. Don’t shoot the messenger. I did not coin the word and I did not mark it. Blame the media. They’re the ones who want to make the cougars look neurotic, cartoonish, wacko, wacko.

I really had a virulent reaction every time I heard the word mentioned, read it in an article, or saw my fingers typing it on my computer screen.

Not anymore.

This is what I have come to realize and this is what I have recommended to the thousands of members of my Cougar dating site: YOU define what a Cougar is to you. Don’t let the media. your friends, other cougars, younger men, or so-called “experts” tell you how to define yourself as a cougar. There are basic ingredients that make up the definition: an older woman dating, mating, and/or marrying a younger man. That is the basic criteria. You don’t have to look like Courteney Cox, have Demi Moore’s money, have Madonna’s confidence or Cher’s success to be a Cougar. People who say that a cougar is a “sexy, confident, successful, mature woman who knows what she wants” are leaving out most women who consider themselves to be cougars but may not be successful, sexy, or confident. In fact, she may be fresh out of a stagnant 20-year marriage, up to her neck in debt and feeling insecure about those extra 20 pounds, but she discovers that she is attracted to and open to a relationship with a younger man.

There are “experts” who will try to tell people that a woman can be a Cougar only if she is over 40 years old. It is not true. There are women on my dating site in their early 20s dating men 7-10 years younger who are considered cougars. Being a cougar is less about your age, financial status, body type, or confidence level than it is about your desire to date a younger man.

I really work hard to make things clear for the media; but they print the lewd angle of sex and money anyway.

In my Ph.D. research project “Childhood Psychosexual Imprinting and Its Effects on the Specific Adult Male and Female Relationships of Young Men Dating Older Women,” I interviewed over a thousand men about their desire to be with an older woman. Every man could give me a chapter and verse about a “defining moment” in his life when he was imprinted with the desire to be with an older woman: a school teacher, babysitter, friend of an older sister, best friend of her mother. , actresses in television and cinema; The list goes on and on. For these men, it wasn’t about the myth of Stiffler’s mom. It wasn’t a roll in the hay with Mrs. Robinson, it was a powerful imprint that has stayed with them throughout their lives and keeps them coming back to older women again and again.

I have interviewed men in their 30s who have been married to older women looking for their next older wife. I have interviewed men in their 40s and 50s who refuse to date women their age or younger and opt for the more mature woman. I met an 82-year-old man who told me, “I just married an older woman,” then added with a wink, “Sex with an older woman is always better.” 82!

Psychosexual imprinting is an area of ​​expertise of mine when it comes to the dynamics between young men and older women. The “psycho” part has to do with the psychological aspect of the imprint and the personality of the young person and how it is formed and imprinted. The “sexual” part is obvious prima fascia. Imprinting is a very powerful and defining moment in a person’s life. We all have footprints, some positive, some not positive. The younger man who has positively imprinted with an older woman will seek out and bond with older women for the rest of his life. It’s not a one-time thing, flash in the pan.

This is what the media does not understand about this courtship dynamic. And it’s not understood by many of the so-called “cougar experts” who are jumping on the bandwagon to sell books and speed-dating sessions. My research in this area is extensive, complete, and documented; that’s why CNN refers to me as The Uber Cougar.

So if you’re a cougar, don’t be ashamed of this term. It is not derogatory. It is not a disparagement. “Paw proudly” as we say on my dating site. Define who you are as a Cougar and dispel the myths that exist. And feel free to email me with any questions you may have about my research and this dynamic. Age discrimination is the latest barrier we’re breaking down in dating. Even if you’re not a cougar, at least now you understand a little more about what it really is… and what it isn’t.

Happy hunting!

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