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The MILF is back. She’s back! With her ultra-glossed lips and valley of cleavage, smelling of Chanel and hair dye, eating men like air. The latest confirmation came hidden in the sacred text of the new And Just Like That trailer, in which Charlotte explains, over brunch with the girls: “There’s a whole brouhaha at school about this… MILF list.” This MILF list, we are led to believe, is an index of mothers at Charlotte’s kids’ school that the young boys would like to fuck. Their conversation (she lies to Miranda’s professor) is “not usually this lowbrow”. But – what could be less lowbrow than a dissection of age, power, sexual politics and the trappings of gender in 2023?
The return of the MILF was signposted last year, first by the renaissance of Jennifer Coolidge, who became famous as Stifler’s mum in the American Pie films, calmly seducing a teenager and creating an uncomfortable archetype. And then, a couple of months ago, we were blessed with a new American reality show, MILF Manor. The premise was this: eight women aged between 40 and 60 arrived at a beachside villa in Mexico to film a dating show, somehow missing quite a key twist. The lineup of young men they’d meet in the villa would include… their sons.
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Oh god it was glorious, in the same horrible way that it’s glorious to peel off sunburn or consider the apocalypse. There was one game where the women were blindfolded in front of the topless boys and, by fondling their chests, competed to pick out their son using touch alone. There was a scene in which one woman went paddleboarding with someone’s son, who said he wanted to suck “the acrylic off” her toes. She held him up in the air with her feet on his chest, later explaining she loved “to do that with kids”. There was another in which a son talked about the size of his mother’s breasts and she countered drily with: “It didn’t bother you when you were a baby sucking on them.” Even typing this today makes small screams rise in me like gas.
The concept of the MILF is a tricky and interesting one to consider, as it gives with one hand and slaps you quite hard with the other. Because of course, for all the discomfort it brings, the woman being described here is a woman who has been given an opportunity to rediscover her sexuality after decades feeling neutered and knackered, caring for people who may no longer care for her. The image is a liberating one, an image of somebody shedding the cardigan of housewifery and asking for exactly what she wants, a list which presumably ends with: three very good orgasms and then home in time for Strictly. She has raised children and seen off 40 and learned what she likes. She no longer has time for a man who is, say, intimidated by her job, or for a relationship with anyone unable to see her age and experience as anything other than fabulously attractive.
The slap however, is loud and sharp, and signalled by the word itself. MILF – the “I” places our heroine somewhere over there, an object rather than subject. We are the young male observer, not the older women in her power. Which clouds the sense of liberation, I find. As does the insistence (seen in the taut bodies on MILF Manor) that this fuckable mummy must work overtime to appear ageless, despite a large part of her apparent sexiness being… her age. Is the MILF only allowed to have sex if she modifies her body to appear as thin and un-babied as possible? Is she only allowed to feel her age if she continues to perform extreme youth?
I look forward to high-brow brunch analysis from Carrie and pals on the struggle of the lusty mother, on youth, objectification and all their variously troubling and chaotic desires, and I can only hope that Charlotte is up for digging a little deeper into a contemporary study of the modern MILF.
