Cougars We Love

Older women dating younger men? The women’s Web site wowOwow says, “It’s about time!”

The moniker “cougar” describes the older, wiser feminine half of these relationships. wowOwow defines cougar as “a woman, typically 35 or older, who is in a relationship with a man who is younger than she by eight to ten years or more.” From there, they go into a complicated formula for calculating cougardom (we won’t bore you with those numbers, but you can see it here).

Here’s the list of “Cougars We Love”:

• Cleopatra and her two younger brothers/husbands (both named Ptolemy) in the years before her conquests of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony
• Queen Elizabeth I, 48, and her one-time fiancé, François, Duke of Anjou, 22
• Mrs. Robinson, mid-40s, and Benjamin Braddock, age 21, in the The Graduate
• Joan Collins, ageless (er, 75), and husband Percy Gibson, 32 years her junior
• Mary Tyler Moore, 71, and husband, Dr. Robert Levine, 54 (married since 1983)
• Madonna, 49, and husband Guy Ritchie, 39.
• Kim Cattrall in Sex and the City as uber-cougar Samantha Jones, 50, and Smith Jerrod, 30-something (then we have Kim Cattrall, 51, in life imitating art with her real-life beau, chef Alan Wyse, 28, pictured)
• Demi Moore, 45, and husband Ashton Kutcher, 30
• Susan Sarandon, 62, and Tim Robbins, 50
• Halle Berry, 41, and partner Gabriel Aubry, 31
• Jennifer Aniston, 39, and John Mayer, 30

Here’s a bonus list about the women behind wowOwow : Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Liz Smith, Joni Evans, Mary Wells, Sheila Nevins, Joan Juliet Buck, Whoopi Goldberg, Julia Reed, Joan Ganz Cooney, Judith Martin, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner and Marlo Thomas. Quite the who’s who, n’est-ce pas?