from www.nytimes.com – PERHAPS no one was more eager to advertise on the new ABC comedy “Cougar Town,” which stars Courteney Cox as a newly single mother in her 40s who has dalliances with younger men, than CougarLife.com, a new dating Web site where such May-December romances are pursued.

In a commercial produced internally by the Web site to be shown during the show, young men on a construction crew nonchalantly ogle young women leaving a school before being dumbstruck by a sultry teacher in her late 30s.

But ABC rejected the commercial, a move that the gossip blogger Perez Hilton called “hypocritical” in a recent post.

“They have this show about women in their 40s quote-unquote on the prowl, and yet they reject this commercial because they didn’t want to support the idea of women dating younger men,” said Claudia Opdenkelder, president of CougarLife.com, and a self-described cougar who portrays the teacher in her commercial. “So they’re comfortable with this in fiction, but not in reality.”

“Cougar,” a term for middle-aged women who date considerably younger men, gained currency in “Cougar Club,” a 2007 film; “The Cougar,” a TV Land reality show that was broadcast this spring; and “Cougar Den,” a recurring sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”

In response to questions, ABC issued a one-sentence statement: “The ABC Television Network did not accept the CougarLife.com commercial based upon the fact that the Web site had not launched at that time of submission, and there was concern about its proposed content.”

In other words, the network did not find the commercial offensive, but worried that the Web site it promoted would be.

Now live and fully functional, the dating site seems no more risqué than the commercial. But asked whether ABC would now reconsider, an ABC spokeswoman, Susan L. Sewell, wrote in an e-mail message, “I’m told the answer is no.”

The site is still, however, urging visitors to sign an online petition to get the network to change its mind.

“Imagine that,” Ms. Opdenkelder writes in an online note explaining the petition, “a dating service for cougars is not allowed to advertise on a show about cougars.”

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The dating site sought to buy time from the ABC Owned Television Stations group, 10 stations owned by network parent, the Walt Disney Company.

The group includes WABC-TV in New York, KABC-TV in Los Angeles, and WLS-TV in Chicago, encompassing stations in six of Nielsen’s top 10 media markets and reaching 23.5 percent of United States television households, according to Disney.

But many ABC affiliates that are not owned by Disney and sell advertising independently have accepted CougarLife.com spots during “Cougar Town.”

The commercial has appeared during the broadcast on about 15 stations in cities like Miami, Denver and Pittsburgh. But Noel Biderman, president of Avid Life Media in Toronto, which owns six dating sites including CougarLife.com, said those were “not major metropolitan centers, which is not how you build dating sites. You really need to be in L.A. and New York and Chicago.”

The commercial will, however, appear in those markets on other shows that have accepted it, like “Sunday Night Football” on NBC and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” the syndicated talk show distributed by Warner Brothers Television.

Ms. Opdenkelder said the company was spending “millions” on this television, online and radio campaign, but declined to be more specific.

Mr. Biderman is no stranger to controversy, since Avid Life sites like Swappernet.com (described as “The premium online community for swingers!”) and EstablishedMen.com (“catering to ambitious and attractive girls seeking successful and generous benefactors”) are not everyone’s idea of propriety. But his most controversial site by far is AshleyMadison.com (“The world’s No.1 affair dating service”).

Commercials for AshleyMadison.com — though currently running on CNN, Fox and MSNBC — have been rejected by networks including ESPN and ABC, according to Mr. Biderman. He has appeared to discuss AshleyMadison.com on numerous television shows, including “The View,” “The Tyra Banks Show,” and “Prime News” on CNN, usually encountering hostile hosts and even more hostile studio audiences.

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“Cougar Town” drew an impressive 11.4 million viewers to its premiere on Sept. 23, and 9 million and 7.8 million for its second and third episodes, respectively, according to Nielsen.

It also has drawn — ironically, perhaps, considering ABC rejected the ad for the dating site — criticism for being inappropriate. When it had its premiere, the Parents Television Council named it the worst TV show of the week for “blatantly tawdry sexual content.” (The premiere included Ms. Cox’s character’s teenaged son discovering her in a sexual encounter with a man she had just met at a nightclub.)

Even more offended was the American Decency Association, whose Web site described the show as “filled with crude sexual references.”

The group found “equally despicable” a commercial by Halls that was broadcast during the “Cougar Town” premiere. In the spot — by the JWT unit of WPP — an ordinary looking middle-aged woman is given a Halls Refresh candy drop by her son’s nerdy college roommate, and the two stare at each other intensely while suggestively sucking their drops.

“This show and Cadbury Adams, the company which owns Halls, blatantly crosses the lines of decency, working to legitimize that which is repulsive,” states a recent posting on the decency site.

Katherine Beyer Di Benedetto, a Cadbury Adams spokeswoman, said the company had no plans to withdraw the commercial, which appears on other ABC shows and other networks.

“We recognize that there will be times when some people disagree with our choices or decisions, but we welcome different points of view, ” Ms. Di Benedetto wrote in an e-mail message.