Cougar MILFs: The Cougar Riddle
What can older women teach younger men, and society as a whole?
Proof and evidence are scant, but anecdotally at least, it seems that the ‘cougar’ experience —meaning when older women choose to have sexual relationships with younger men is growing by the day.
There are a number of likely reasons for the phenomenon of older woman-younger man couplings.
Some explain this as a kind of ‘marriage squeeze’, in that single, middle-aged women have a shrinking pool of potential age-appropriate partners (older, well-educated men with high incomes) so become attracted to alternative arrangements.
Others highlight increased, rather than decreased, opportunities. After all, women are more financially independent today than ever before. In the UK, for the first time in history, the number of successful women in employment is close to that of men. In addition, the wage gap between the sexes has lessened and even reversed in some sectors. Young women (20 to 30) now earn on average as much (or more) than young men, mainly because women are better educated, according to some figures. Women now flood our universities medical and law schools, and Masters and PhD courses. In many UK families, women are earning as much or more than their partners.
When women become more financially secure and independent, they have added power, which gives them greater choice, and more control. Social change always results in changes in realisation. The classic wife track (find a husband, have children and raise them) is all but dead. Those with money, knowledge, social freedom and confidence can grasp broader aspirations, and shape their own paths regardless of their gender.
Historically, women partnered with men who could support them. Now older women are quite (financially) independent, so they will hookup with men because… and here’s a radical thought, they like them and are attracted to them.
In this new age of greater gender fairness, some women—like men—find the company of a young and beautiful partner far more appealing and rewarding than the alternative. Good-looking young men are now playing the role long assigned to young women, entering into an understood relationship: ‘Be sexy, beautiful and obedient and I’ll teach you a little bit about how the world works, parade you in front of my friends, buy you nice clothes, and have sex with you.’ An eye-pleasing younger partner may even become a show-off asset for the hard-working and powerful cougar MILFs.
In this situation, young men can learn a great deal from mature, experienced, women.
One successful businesswoman, in her fifties, who describes herself as, ‘a cougar MILF with the means and appetite for kinky sex’, uses her sexual conquests with younger men to further her sexual desires. However, everything isn’t quite as perfect as it might be: “young guys tend to learn about sex from pornography on the Internet so their understanding of what real sex looks like in the real world is nil. In my experience, there’s a generation of young men coming of age who know how to do porn, but haven’t got a clue how to make love.”
Her criticism is not directed at watching pornography, as she admits to watching porn herself and considers it to be a justifiable and supplementary form of sexual entertainment. Her criticism is directed instead at society as a whole, which refuses to educate and teach young people about real sex.
Due to the sexual education vacuum, pornography has de facto turned from entertainment to education. In the lives of many young men, porn has taken over the role that parents, schools, and the innocent, halting experience of young romance were supposed to fill: real-life sex prep. Pornography’s vision of sex has usurped real-world sex in young people’s consciousness and imagination.
Porn can result in some grim and even funny (depending on your nature) consequences for women.
For instance: in porn, all women love, want and can’t wait for a man to cum on their faces. In the real world, not every woman longs for a man or men to ejaculate in their faces.
According to pornography, no women have pubic hair. In the real world, many women have pubic hair (some women have a hairy pussy actually!).
In the world of porn, women climax every time they have penetrative sex, and in any position. In the real world, most women need good clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm.
In pornography, every woman seems to be portrayed as loving anal sex. In the real world, some are, but many are not.
The main and often only contact in porn is between the participants’ genitals. In real sex, however, partners often enjoy touching each other all over their bodies, before, during, and after genital contact.
In porn, all women crave deep, choking and gagging oral sex, and can’t wait to swallow the male’s sperm. In real life, this is simply not the case.
In pornography, all women scream and squeal with delight, constantly. In real life sex, there are times when you want to go quietly, so you don’t wake your children!
The issue with using pornography as a sex education tool is that not all online porn is harmless sexy fun between consenting adults. Even individuals who like to watch a good car chase in movies wouldn’t want or expect young people learn how to drive from viewing extreme driving. At the end of the day, porn is (or should be) considered sexual entertainment, titillation, distraction, or a source of masturbation material, pornography should never be taken literally as an accurate reflection of how people have sex in real life.
Those who follow the teachings of porn are more likely to get a concussion than have an orgasm.
Cougars can teach a sexual sense, manners and real-world skills to today’s clueless young men and a cougar experience can serve as a useful social function, while both parties have a rollicking good time.
Some see the cougar MILFs experience as perverted, because (according to them) it crosses a line and abuses the basic belief of growth, as men are expected to prefer younger women for their fertility, while women are expected to favour older, high-status men, better able to provide for their offspring.
However, biological reasoning is especially ill-equipped to clarify social behaviour. I have long argued that patterned differences in behaviour between the sexes are not formed by evolution, but by the differences in social roles. Social roles over time produce differences in abilities, expectations, and opportunities, which are then wrongly alleged as being inherent and expected. According to this argument, inherent biological differences between the sexes do exist, but they are more responsible for the launching of certain gendered patterns than for maintaining them in the present.
What initiates a progression is not always what maintains it. The reason you (may) started smoking is not the reason you’re still smoking. Likewise, social structures can shape how biology plays in the social world. A society can decide to improve or suppress genetically-based gender differences. For example, the average man is more muscular than the average woman, but the culture may still decide to forbid him from using his biological advantage to impose his desires violently on a woman. (Society, in fact, may undermine evolutionary mechanisms altogether. Evolution works by killing the weak before they reproduce. Our society is dedicated to saving the lives of even the weakest individuals and seeing them through to and beyond their reproductive age).
Gender stereotypes, which we attribute often to evolution, are in reality shaped and maintained by the social order. We think of wealth as a masculine quality not because most men are naturally rich but because most of the rich in our society are men. Division of labour establishes the stereotype and reinforces it. When social roles change, so do stereotypes, and with the social opportunities, expectations and norms, and with that also social consciousness. If women achieve the social status that was previously reserved for men, many of them will behave as men have been behaving. In this situation, the definition of femininity itself will change, without any genetic change. Evolution provides the hardware. But the culture produces and updates the software.
The cougar MILF’s experience might support this idea. The expansion of the known historical pattern by which women prefer older, high-status men may have been learned by evolutionary pressures, but the attendant stereotype evolved and focussed on a society where men were rich and powerful and women poor and dependent. Now we see that as the social roles change, and women assume the positions of empowerment and freedom once held for men, some of them are simply drawn to pretty young things and find them of interest. The attraction is not evolutionary, but social. These women do not turn to young men for their protective or reproductive promise, but because it’s satisfying to win a younger man’s interest and appreciation, flaunt him, exercise power over him, and sleep with him—at least after he’s sufficiently instructed how to make love, not porn…