No label really existed to describe my mother when in 1965, at the age of 27, she met the man who would become my father, a baby-faced guy who had just turned 18. But there were plenty of stereotypes. In The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had written of the older woman who pursues 'fresh flesh' because young men are the 'only ones' she can hope will feel desire for a 'maternal mistress.' The woman does so, too, to combat the anxiety of aging, de Beauvoir wrote, felt by 'the one whose life is already finished, even though death is not imminent.' Ouch. Hackneyed ideas about older women attracted to younger men have of course persisted into the 21st century. In 2003, after Demi Moore began dating Ashton Kutcher, who was 15 years her junior, celebrity weeklies weren't the only ones that had a field day with the couple's romance; national news outlets tossed around phrases such as ''Graduate'-style relationship' and the derogatory term cougar. Just this...
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