David Belisle

Reformed cougar: Dahli Bennett takes a nostalgic roll in the hay with hot anonymous boy toy.

Three years ago, Dahli Bennett found herself newly single after 19 years of marriage. Despite being mired in all the various logistics that accompany a divorce, Bennett had one thing on her mind: getting laid. She'd spent the last few years of her marriage depressed and sexually unsatisfied, and although she frequently fantasized about sleeping with other men, she'd never indulged.

Bennett eased back into the dating scene through the Internet, a low-pressure way to polish her rusty flirting skills. She began exchanging messages with a local man her age; they traded photographs, and decided to meet. By then, Bennett was so horny that she could hardly stand it. At the end of the night, as they exchanged tender embraces, she blurted out, "We're going to fuck, right?"

Bennett's forwardness took the man by surprise. "But what about romance?" he replied.

Having an attractive, naked woman next to him in bed loosened him up a bit, but he still refused to have intercourse. Bennett had to make do with "other stuff." "I'm like, come on," she recalls. "I don't have any clothes on and I want to have sex with you. What are you thinking? How old are you?"

Not long after, she went out with a man in his 20s. They had been attracted to each other for a while, and one night they went to see a band together. This time, Bennett felt swept along by a current that eventually carried her back to her companion's apartment to have sex, with nary a protest from the man. "Women my age, we're at our sexual peak," says Bennett, 47. "I'm more interested in sex now than I ever was in my 20s, and I was always interested in sex. If you don't go out and have sex, you go crazy."

There's a word for older women who like to sleep with much younger men: cougars. Though the behavior it describes is as old as time, its acceptance and emergence in popular culture has been longer in coming. The term is fairly new but is far more complex than the way it's typically used, a trope loaded with imagery and connotations that range from pejorative to empowering.

For her part, Bennett rejects the cougar label, insisting that her dalliance with a younger man was an isolated incident born of desperation, but she doesn't dispute it. "As a woman, you go through a sexual renaissance in your 40s," she explains. "You've raised kids, you've kicked out your bum of a husband, you've got some money, you've got some experience. You know what you want; there's no bullshit about trying to get a man and get married. It's just about enjoying really good sex. Younger men have the same kind of sex drive. Biologically, I think it's a great match."

Horny teenage boys were throwing around the term "MILF" (i.e., Mom I'd Like to Fuck) long before Stifler's mom made her appearance in 1999's American Pie. Before that, Anne Bancroft made a generation of boys feel funny down there as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. But it was Jennifer Coolidge's American Pie character—a blond, buxom, and boozy divorcée who seduces her son's classmate by remarking that she likes her scotch and men the same way ("aged 18 years")—that cemented the term in the cultural lexicon.

Perhaps the most oft-cited example of a cougar, Kim Cattrall's Samantha in Sex and the City, actually predates Stifler's mom by a year. In fact, the archetype of the oversexed, predatory older woman stretches back to antiquity. In Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae ("Assemblywomen"), produced in approximately 391 B.C.E., Praxagora leads a group of older women who take over the Athenian legislature and pass a law that forces young men to satisfy an old, ugly woman before they're allowed to have sex with a "maiden." Near the end of the play, a young man tries to navigate a gauntlet of cougars to reach a young lass but ends up being dragged away by a pair of old women. "Let him who wishes to taste pleasure come to my side," an old woman tells the younger one. "These young things know nothing about it; it's only the women of ripe age who understand the art of love, and no one could know how to fondle the lover who possessed me so well as myself."

Though some use MILF and cougar interchangeably, cougar seems to have surpassed MILF as the moniker of choice for sexy older women. To wit, a current T-Mobile television commercial depicts two Junior League types chatting at a wedding reception. One is incredulous that the other doesn't know whose numbers her boyfriend keeps on speed dial. The camera cuts to the boyfriend talking with a giggly woman in her 50s, with salt-and-pepper hair in a simple yet fashionable cut, toned arms, and a spaghetti-strap gold slip dress accentuating her curvy body. "Because there's an old cougar chatting him up right now," the woman remarks. (It turns out the "cougar" is actually the boyfriend's mother.)

This summer, NBC debuted a new reality show, Age of Love, which borrows heavily from The Bachelor, except that there are two groups of women vying for Australian tennis pro Mark Philippoussis' attention. One, "the kittens," is comprised of women in their 20s, while the other, "the cougars," consists of women in their 40s. Predictably, the younger women dismiss the older women as past their prime; the older women respond to the youthful hubris of their competitors with indignation. Unintentional hilarity ensues.