How Hollywood defanged the ‘Cougar’
The film The Idea of You presents a no-judgment romance between a 40-something woman and a 20-something man.
The new movie The Idea of You centres on a woman who is 40 who embarks on a romantic relationship with a boy band star of 24. She is not a predator, or a mother figure, or a sexually repressed invisible woman, or even an experienced seductress with bedroom lessons to teach. Instead, she’s something more radical: herself.
“It’s not an age thing,” Michael Showalter, who directed The Idea of You, says of the romance between Anne Hathaway’s art gallery owner Solene, and her rocker beau Hayes, played by Nicholas Galitzine. “He’s physically attracted to this person. He’s a guy. It’s not complicated.”
It has been decades since the arrival of the “cougar”, slang for an older woman on the prowl for younger men, and judgments about these relationships have lost a claw or two.
In the new season of Hacks (Stan), veteran comedian Deborah Vance, played by Jean Smart, 72, has an encounter with a man around a decade younger. He’s a Hollywood titan who would surprise no one if he showed up at a party with a much younger wife.
Next month, Netflix premieres A Family Affair, starring Nicole Kidman on a sexcapade with love interest Zac Efron, who plays her daughter’s movie star boss.
And on the recent Apple TV+ hit Ted Lasso, when team owner Rebecca Welton is pursued by a youthful soccer star, their age difference is not a key plot point, it’s just a matter of fact.
Still, the age gap is not always easy. A crisis between Solene and Hayes in The Idea of You is precipitated by a bathing suit, specifically the one-piece with a long cover-up that Solene wears to a pool that’s surrounded by bikini-clad fans of the band. “Is this a funeral?” one young woman asks under her breath after spotting Solene. Already feeling self-conscious, Solene sees their perfect bodies and hears their subtle jabs that she’s too old for Hayes.
“I love this part of the movie because it investigates how hard it is to stand strong in the face of bias, and how we internalise it,” says Cathy Schulman, a producer of the film from Amazon MGM Studios.
The movie, based on a book with a more painful ending, gives the pair a hopeful future and doesn’t dwell on decisions about having children or other long-term challenges facing real-life couples with age differences.
After novelist Robinne Lee released the book in 2017, she was struck by the country’s double standard. President Donald Trump was in the White House, more than 20 years older than his wife Melania. At the same time, President Emmanuel Macron of France was more than 20 years younger than his wife Brigitte. The Macron age gap generated news coverage while the Trump one was treated as routine, she says.
Perceptions have changed. Heightened awareness about sexual harassment makes it harder to portray an older man-younger woman romance without fast entering creepy territory. Industry data shows audiences are likelier to buy movie tickets to see older female stars than their 20-something counterparts. Meanwhile, the visual disparity between young and old seems far less noticeable when so many female actors look younger than their years.
In Mrs Fletcher, the 2019 miniseries, Kathryn Hahn plays a woman who tumbles into a romantic adventure with her son’s former high school nemesis. They form a genuine emotional connection. For Tom Perrotta, who wrote the novel and created the series, age-appropriate partners in his story just didn’t have the same chemistry. At the same time, he felt like no one wanted to see an older man seduce a younger woman.
“It felt much more emotionally ambivalent and charged than it would have been if we’d flipped the genders,” Perrotta says. “In the post-internet, porn-influenced world, I think people feel like there’s a whole menu of sexual experiences and relationship possibilities that they get to choose from, and this is one of them.”
The older woman is a source of enduring fascination, an archetype who sometimes turns criminal. Recent film May December is the story of a woman who has served time for starting a relationship with a 13-year-old boy she goes on to marry. The film explores their controversial relationship.
The TLC reality series MILF Manor (Binge) looks for comic relief in the age gap. The first season plopped single mothers into a Mexican villa with bachelors who turn out to be the sons of the other mums. The women agree younger men are the solution to midlife dating. One mum criticises certain older men for being choosy when they haven’t kept up their own appearances. “It’s like, bro, you’re like 60,” she says to the other mums, describing these single men, “and you look like you’re 80.”
“Sometimes older men can be quite dull,” says Daniela Neumann, managing director of Spun Gold TV, creator and co-producer of MILF Manor. “These are all women that are taking good care of themselves and they want to have fun and laugh. The whole series is about female empowerment.” Season two features young men competing against their dads for the affection of older women.
Older female characters have evolved since 1967, when The Graduate got the ball rolling for screen entanglements between mums, their daughters and the young man they both know.
The 1998 drama How Stella Got Her Groove Back set up Angela Bassett and Taye Diggs, but the two were not equals in their careers or finances, and some fans thought Stella might have done better on her own.
Stella director Kevin Rodney Sullivan disagrees. “It was great for them to end up together,” he says, “because love is love, and I think that’s worth saying.”
Decades later, the age-gap relationship was still raising hackles. Bill Lawrence, co-creator of Cougar Town, a sitcom that ran from 2009 to 2015 starring Courteney Cox, says the show originally wanted her divorced 40-something character to relive her 20s with younger men. The premise lasted six episodes. The show then paired her up with a guy her age.
“I do think back then, especially on network television, there were a lot of minefields,” says Lawrence. “It carried with it a level of judgment and a perception of desperation for women to be with younger men that wasn’t there for men to be with younger women.”
Now comes The Idea of You and its heroine Solene, a woman who moves in fancy Los Angeles circles. She’s not alone eating ice cream on her couch, and Hayes isn’t busy chasing down 20-something groupies. She’s worldly, he’s travelling the world. When the two fall for each other, the hand-wringing over their ages is not all that fraught. “I’m too old for you,” Solene tells Hayes. “I could be your mother.”
“But,” he replies, “you’re not.”
The Wall Street Journal
The Idea of You is streaming on Prime Video.
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