The long-standing taboo against older women coupling with younger men is finally losing much of its primal power. More and more women are openly dipping into lower age brackets in numbers that would have been unimaginable in the past. Thanks to their increasing financial independence, women are freer to consider romantic options once filed under ‘inappropriate’.

Let us look at films which after all are very important in shaping our mythology about many things including relationships.

Films everywhere and not least of all Hollywood, have been largely produced by men. In films it has been traditional for older men to have relationships with much younger women. Think Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas pairing with women in their 20s like Anne Heche and Gwyneth Paltrow. Then there’s the forever green Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford, courting women in their 30s like Kristin Scott Thomas and Helen Hunt. And no one comments when 73-year-old Paul Newman is having more than just a romp with 52-year-old Susan Sarandon. I mean, he still has allure and who wouldn’t want a romp with him?

And we are still watching, on television at least the stunning 19-year-old Lauren Bacall being pursued by 45-year-old Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not the Howard Hawk wartime adventure masterpiece loosely based on Ernest Hemingway’s bestselling novel. Humphrey caught her in the end, married her and they lived happily ever after. And do you recall It Started in Naples with sexy Sophia Loren and dashing Clark Gable? He was 33 years older than her but we didn’t care. Nor did Sophia I am sure. Kissing that famous moustache brought her fame if nothing else.

The message in these films is that every damsel in distress needs a man to rescue her. It’s a dangerous world and anyway, a man feels more of a hero in the company of a woman with a low IQ and who is weaker and smaller than he is.

The pairings of men who are much older than their partners on screen is so much part of our lives that no one comments. No one calls them child molesters or says that it is indecent.

But what happens when the situation is reversed? Well, even Hollywood is changing in this regard. There was The Lion in Winter in which Katharine Hepburn played Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine possibly the most powerful woman of the 12th century. In it she married Henry Plantagenet (Peter O’Toole) eleven years her junior, who thanks to her power became King Henry II of England. She bears him several children but he is unfaithful so she poisons his mistress and turns his sons against him. Although he has her locked up in the end she triumphs, at least morally, by outliving him.

We cannot forget The Graduate and Mrs Robinson played by Anne Bancroft with Dustin Hoffman as the virginal graduate and her soon to be son-in-law. The Graduate was again making the headlines in London recently at the West End with Jerry Hall.

But although there is still some stigma attached to these couplings, film directors, sensing that society is changing, are picking up the trend and producing films about older women and younger men. Think Tadpole, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Unfaithful, Crush, Lovely and Amazing and Gosford Park.

A great deal of it is to do with the fact that more women have positions of power in the film world and can therefore control the kind of films that are being produced.

The film How Stella Got Her Groove Back is based on Terry McMillan’s own romance and subsequent marriage to someone 20 years her junior.

But from film there is the reality of these relationships. When it comes to making older-women-younger-men relationships seem like business as usual, celebrities lead the way.

Mae West, Merle Oberon, Ruth Gordon, Mary Tyler Moore, Raquel Welch, Susan Sarandon and Joan Collins instantly come to mind. They all married younger men – to the tune of 14 or 15 years younger in many cases. And let’s not forget Catherine the Great’s penchant for cradle-snatching. But then Hollywood and royalty have always received special dispensations on behaviour.

Madonna, as always, is a reliable trendsetter, and at 43, she is embracing the role of sexy older woman. First, there was her recent marriage to 33-year-old film director Guy Ritchie, and recently Ritchie directed her in his remake of the seventies Italian classic Swept Away, partly filmed in Malta, in which she is shipwrecked on a deserted island with a 31-year-old Italian working-class hunk. And they did not spend their time reciting the rosary on that desert island, either.

As the gossip columns tell us Madonna is not alone in opting for a relationship with a younger man in real life. There are bigger age gaps in these couplings than a mere ten years. Sandra Bullock, 38, star of Speed and Time to Kill is seeing Ryan Gosling, seventeen years younger. Here is a quote from her: “The key to any good relationship, on-screen and off, is communication, respect, and I guess you have to like the way the other person smells . . .”

Daryl Hannah, 42, has been spotted around Paris and London with David Blaine, 29, the magician and stuntman. And Janet Jackson, 36, was seen canoodling with Justin Timberlake, 21, the blonde vocalist of N SYNC and Grammy award winner.

But in New York another surprise relationship was that of Candace Bushnell with New York City Ballet dancer Charles Askegard. They were married on the 4 July. She is the author of Sex and the City (you know, the popular show where everyone is having it off with everyone else and making it out to be the normal way to conduct your life). Well Bushnell married Askegard after just eight weeks of courtship. The age difference? She is 43 and the groom 33. Will it be a case of ‘married in haste, repent at leisure’? Let’s wait and see.

Here are some of the latest Couplings:

Courteney Cox (38) and David Arquette (30)

Daryl Hannah (42) and David Blaine (29)

Geena Davis (46) and Reza Jarrahy (31)

Nicole Kidman (35) and Tobey Maguire (27)

Joan Collins (68) and Percy Gibson (36)

Carol Burnett (69) and Brian Miller (46)

Sadie Frost (34) and Jude Law (29)

J. K. Rowling (36) and Neil Murray (30)

Rene Russo (48) and Dan Gilroy (42)

And old standbys:

Sigourney Weaver (52) and Jim Simpson (45)

Julianne Moore (41) and Bart Freundlich (32)

Susan Sarandon (55) and Tim Robbins (43)

Francesca Annis (58) and Ralph Fiennes (40)

Goldie Hawn (56) and Kurt Russell (51)

Raquel Welch (62) and Richard Palmer (47)

Vanessa L. Williams (39)and Rick Fox (33)

The belief that men who date women half their age are normal but that women who do the same are perverts and predators persists. What’s new about double standards?

Men are usually the least tolerant. They don’t want an older woman but they don’t like someone else having them, either.

But celebrities are not the only ones to embrace a growing trend, it appears that increasing numbers of everyday middle-aged women are pairing up with younger men, often much younger men. Last October even the editor of the AARP The magazine in the States, the world’s largest circulation magazine which serves the needs and interests of people of 50 and over was surprised when a study revealed that 34 % of women between 40 and 69 had dated younger men and 12% had married younger men in America.

Well it’s chacun a son gout, I suppose. But can one converse with someone 15 or 20 years younger?

The important thing is not to allow society to dictate your life. Love is ageless after all.

Here’s to you Mrs Robinson!