Sleeping With Younger Men: Women’s Accounts of Sexual Interplay in Age-Hypogamous Intimate Relationships

Abstract

Influenced by cultural representations of “cougars,” society commonly imagines women who date younger men as challenging some of the gendered expectations regarding appropriate sexual desire and behavior. Based on 55 semistructured interviews with women ages 30 to 60 who date younger men, I explore how having younger male partners relates to women’s desire and ability to reproduce/disrupt the traditional cultural script for heterosexual sex. I found that compared to their experiences of sex with men of their own age or older, women perceived age-hypogamous intimate relationships as a context in which they can more easily disrupt some facets of that script, namely those regarding (a) the expression of sexual desire, (b) sexual assertiveness, and/or (c) the importance of female pleasure. However, the participants reproduced certain facets of the cultural sexual script, such as the emphasis on penile–vaginal intercourse. In light of women’s experiences, I show that younger men’s stamina and erectile capacities influenced women’s ability to challenge certain facets of the script. Furthermore, I argue that women’s perceptions of younger men as fantasizing about sexually experienced women altered the gender power dynamics, ultimately facilitating the modification of interpersonal sexual scripts. This study contributes to improving our understanding of the way age, age differences, and gender interact and influence interpersonal sexual scripts.