Forty-four-year-old Josh always knew his mom was pretty growing up, but it wasn’t until he hit puberty that he realized just how attractive she was. His friends would regularly oogle her, a tall blonde with feathered hair that made her look like one of Charlie’s Angels. Being a pubescent boy himself, he also knew damn well what they were thinking. This especially hit home when the 16-year-old boy who mowed their lawn came into the house to get paid, only to see Josh’s mom sitting on the sofa nursing her newborn. “When my dad, who is a huge muscular guy, walked into the house, the guy froze,” Josh recalls. “Then he freaked out and ran out of the house, scared my dad was going to do something to him for staring at my mom’s breasts.”
Josh’s mom was a MILF. And the memory of that MILF breastfeeding was a life-altering event for the lawn-mowing teen who feared for his life that day. “I recently reconnected with him after 30 years, and he brought it up. He said my mom was his Mrs. Robinson and seeing her breasts while nursing is something he still thinks about today.”
Josh admits that growing up with a sexy mom was definitely complicated, and the constant comments by his friends could be tiresome. “I’d get mad,” Josh tells me. “I felt like I was defending my mom’s honor when they’d talk about her being hot, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was also a little bit of pride in having a hot mom.”
Adding to the stress children feel about having a hot mom is that the MILFs we see in movies and on TV are either played for comedy, as with Stifler’s Mom in American Pie, or with a kind of desperate sadness, as with the OG MILF, Mrs. Robinson, the aforementioned character played by Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. They’re rarely portrayed as being empowered. Not to mention, at a period in your life when you just want to appear normal, the last thing you need is your mom being the most popular girl in school.
I was also raised by a MILF. As such, I was constantly tortured at school conferences where my mom would show up in micro mini skirts and tight tees, every boy in my class trying to look up her skirt instead of mine. Roles reversed, I was the one begging my mom to dress appropriately when she visited me at school. (You haven’t lived until you’ve slut-shamed your own mom.)
Ben, a 40-year-old in Seattle, also had a MILF for a mom, a petite brunette with major Rachel Weisz vibes. While all his friend’s inappropriate remarks were irritating, his mom was a badass about it. “She didn’t put off any kind of ‘I want attention from teenage boys’ vibe,” he tells me. “Most of my friends were rightfully scared of her.”
He’d get especially annoyed when people would mistake him and his mom for a couple, which led to a few awkward interactions. His most embarrassing incident, though, was when his gym teacher got the hots for his mom. “He was in his 50s, the kind of guy who called all his students ‘rookie’ and still benched 300 pounds,” Ben tells me. “He met my mom at some parent/teacher thing and asked her out! She turned him down, and every time he saw me, he’d ask about her: ‘How’s that mother of yours, Ben?’”
As complicated as it was for me as a daughter, I’d imagine it’s probably harder for sons of MILFs. I just had to deal with a little insecurity, something I already had a ton of in junior high. Sons of MILFs simultaneously deal with feeling protective of their mother, while also being confronted with her sexual identity outside of her maternal one. And remember: We’re not supposed to see our parents as sexual beings.
That said, per Freud — and why wouldn’t we listen to an egomaniacal cokehead who’s been largely discredited — go there we must. He called it the Oedipal complex, named for the Greek folklore hero who accidentally fucked his mom, it was Freud’s belief that we all have a deep-seated desire to fuck our opposite sex parent. Although Freud’s work has been pretty ridiculed in more recent decades, the idea of mommy and daddy issues remain prevalent, making things even more awkward than they already are for sons of MILFs.
According to Eric Garrison, a sex counselor and forensic sexologist, the sons of MILFs deal with a range of feelings about the experience. “They feel everything from confusion (‘Why my mom?’), to disgust (‘Dude, that’s my mom!’), to excitement and pride (‘Why wouldn’t somebody like my mom?!?’),” he tells me. He also notes that it can also make these sons more progressive sexual partners later on, because they learn early in life that women are more than just sexual objects. “For them, they’ve taken the MILF to MILD, a Mother I’d Like to Date, or get to know on a deeper level,” he continues.
Ironically, it’s in the world of porn that the MILF has ascended to her final form. In porn, MILF is perennially a Top-Five search term, and these MILFs are fully in charge and know exactly what they want — usually, to help their son’s friend unwind after the big game with a hand job so good it took years to cultivate. As uncomfortable as it might have been growing up with a mom who could get it, normalizing the idea that moms are sexual is definitely a good thing. So yay, porn?
Although the porn genre doesn’t appeal to Josh, now that he’s an adult, he gets how else having a MILF for a mom has shaped his desires. “Approval and attraction from an older woman is very primal,” he says. “I think me having a hot mom maybe made me less interested than my friends were in older women. I already had the attention and approval of a hot mom, so to speak.”
Meanwhile, Ben says he still tends to think of his mom as a badass first and foremost. “She didn’t take any shit from anybody — not us, not my dad and not any of the guys she dated after my parents divorced,” he explains. “She’s really successful now, remarried and living the life.”
Ah, MILF goals.
Desi Jedeikin
Desi Jedeikin is a writer living in Los Angeles. She co-hosts the podcast Hollywood Crime Scene and has lots of things in development that will probably never happen. She wastes a lot of time on Twitter @desijed.
