In popular culture, the ideal woman is usually portrayed as thin, young, and most importantly, childless. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio’s infamous inability to date women over 25 (Although we may want to roll back that judgment. His fiancée is now 26).
But not everyone seeks the same attributes in a partner. Many people are attracted to older women, some of whom are mothers. Enter MILFs.
A MILF is an attractive mother. The acronym stands for “Mother I’d Like to F*ck.”
While the term MILF does acknowledge the attractiveness of moms, it’s vulgar. The term itself positions these women as sexual objects — ones the speaker wants to have sex with. Since its inception, it has been used to mock attractive women or discuss them sexually without their interest or consent.
But as the word has become more popular recently, it has grown to hold more meanings for different people. While some women find it offensive, others proudly claim the title, seeing it as a way for them to feel sexy as mothers. I’ll walk you through the background of the word, what it means today, and its implications for women’s empowerment.
The Origins of the Term
The word “MILF” may seem like it sprang up in the last five years, but it’s been around since the early 1990s. Still, its popularity has ebbed and flowed, taking on different connotations at different points in its usage.
Cultural Roots
While it’s unclear where the first use of MILF came from, most people remember learning the term from the 1999 film “American Pie”, in which Jennifer Coolidge plays a MILF.
A few years later, in 2003, the group Fountains of Wayne released “Stacey’s Mom,” a song about a teenage boy’s crush on his friend’s mom.
In both of these pieces of media, the MILF is positioned as an older, but still stunning woman who becomes a sexual fixation of sorts for a teenage boy. There is an aspirational quality to these crushes. The moms are women the boys “would like” to have sex with, not that they likely will.
Initial Connotation
Initially, the term described a sexualized stereotype of older women, often mothers, who were considered sexually attractive. It wasn’t necessarily critical of these women, but it was diminutive. Most women don’t want people casually discussing whether they’d like to have sex with them, especially not while bringing up their status as mothers.
Defining Women’s Empowerment
Feminism is defined as “the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.” Because almost every society is patriarchal and men are in a position of power, feminism is mostly focused on empowering women and improving their positions within society.
Historical Context
Most people consider feminism to have begun with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, in which women gathered and affirmed their beliefs in gender equality. This became the origins of the suffrage movement, in which early feminists campaigned for the right to vote. White women got the right to vote in the US in 1920.
In the mid-twentieth century, feminist writers such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir began to highlight women’s oppression in their homes and society at large. They pushed for equal pay, the right to work outside the home, and notably, autonomy for wives and mothers.
From the late twentieth century and onwards, feminists have focused more on sexual liberation for women, protection from sexual violence, and equality in the workplace. Many feminists have also worked to make their activism more intersectional, seeking to right injustices from all systems of oppression within society.
The various waves of feminism and their influence on women’s autonomy, sexuality, and representation.
Reclaiming Sexuality
While women have always been treated as sexual objects, feminists encourage women to actively reclaim their sexual agency. Women are not just desirable to men; they’re independent beings with their own desires.
For many women, sex and sexual expression can be empowering. When women get to control how they are portrayed sexually, sexualization can be both fun and subversive. The problems come not from sexualization itself, but from sexualization without consent.
How “MILF” Has Evolved Over Time
“The Golden Girls” was about four older women living their best senior lives in Miami. But despite the show’s focus on its characters’ advanced ages, three of the girls were only supposed to be in their fifties. Today, contemporary actresses like Sarah Jessica Parker are in their mid-fifties and are redefining the image of an older, attractive woman.
Until recently, women were treated as undesirable and unsexy by early middle age. Now, women style themselves as sexier for longer and seek empowerment at any age. There is a decided rise of older women in media, fashion, and entertainment defying traditional standards of beauty.
Sexual Liberation and Female Desire
Women are allowed to take charge in dating and sex. Gone are the days of waiting by the phone for a man to call. We understand that women also want sex; they’re not just there to fulfill men’s desires.
Many women, particularly older women, are prioritizing their sex lives, both with long-term partners and strangers. They’re challenging the idea that women lose their sexual appeal — or sexual agency — after motherhood or a certain age.
Consider the women of “MILF Manor,” a reality show in which moms date younger men (the sons of the other women in the house). While the question of whether the show is empowering or not is still up in the air, these women are certainly sexually liberated and comfortable taking the reins romantically with much younger men.
The Term’s Role in Popular Culture
Today, MILF is often used humorously or satirically in popular culture, contributing to a lessening of its negative stigma. One often gets the sense that the MILFs are in on the joke.
Consider, for instance, the musical artist Yung Gravy. He has had plenty of popular social media posts and videos about his love of MILFs. Much of his music is about older women (Check out “Cheryl”).
But much of Yung Gravy’s MILF-content seems to be alongside the admired women themselves. He has leaned into his friendship with Martha Stewart, and he even accompanied Sheri Easterling — famed mother of Addison Rae — to the 2022 VMAs. While he is still certainly objectifying moms, it seems to be in good fun.
The Feminist Response to MILF
Feminists’ responses to the term “MILF” are mixed. Many see it as an obvious instance of objectification, positioning women, due to their status as mothers, as sexual objects. Men want to have sex with them, not the other way around (within heterosexual usage).
Others see it as an opportunity for sexual empowerment. It’s an acknowledgment that mothers can still be sexy — an important acknowledgment when women are often cheated on while pregnant or treated as less sexually desirable after motherhood.
As a feminist, I believe that it’s important for women to feel both sexually desirable and capable of sexual desire at any stage of life. I can see how claiming the MILF label could help moms feel sexy, and I’m glad for that. I just wish the term didn’t position these moms as objects.
Examining Modern Sexuality
While feminists and LGBTQ+ activists have done a lot of important work for sexual liberation, we still have a ways to go. Many people feel pushed toward the sexual and romantic mainstream, and moms may feel that more than most.
Age and Sexual Appeal
Women encounter ageism in all facets of their lives, especially when it comes to their beauty and desirability. As women age, they’re pressured to conceal signs of aging, sometimes spending extreme amounts of money to preserve their youthful looks.
But the MILF archetype disrupts this. As moms, MILFs are usually older. They’re experienced in both age and life. They may not be thin — their bodies have often experienced pregnancy and childcare.
These facets of women’s experiences and maturity are part of their sexual identity, and they’re celebrated as such.
The Role of Social Media
While social media certainly isn’t perfect, it has done a lot for showing different types of people and giving voices to different experiences. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have the power to change narratives around women’s bodies, attractiveness, and age.
Thanks to social media, older women are increasingly in unconventional roles, such as influencers, models, and activists. I, personally, get fashion advice from several older women on TikTok. They dress and present the way that I — at 24 — would like to present myself.
Plenty of “momfluencers” have large social media followings, and while some of them are focused solely on parenting advice, many of these women present as beautiful and aspirational — consider the extraordinarily beautiful model and mom Nara Smith.
MILF as a Term of Empowerment or Degradation
It’s difficult to say with any certainty whether MILF is an empowering or degrading term. Many elements of sexuality are like that; sexual agency is empowering, while sexualization is degrading. When claimed for yourself, being a MILF can be empowering, but it’s degrading to have the term thrust upon you.
While it may seem empowering for mothers, some point out that its existence suggests that most mothers are not desirable.
“The term can be harmful to women who have children, as it reinforces the idea that motherhood is incompatible with sexuality,” Anant Kadambh writes. “It suggests that women who have children are no longer desirable, or that their sexuality is somehow inappropriate or shameful”
Far be it from me to say that any term that makes women feel better about themselves is wrong across the board. MILF may have some harmful implications, but it does empower some individual women, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The Future of MILF
While the term appears to be prevalent in the popular lexicon right now, slang tends to move fast. The future popularity of MILF — and its use cases — is still to be determined.
Trends Toward Respect
As we grow and change as a society, we can only hope that more types of people will receive equal respect. There isn’t just one type of person who deserves empowerment and attention.
The portrayal of older women in the media will hopefully continue to change, including the potential evolution of the MILF trope into a person with sexual agency.
In the future, I think that women will be treated as attractive and desirable for more of their life, and like men, their attractiveness will be further divorced from their parental status. No longer will they be “hot moms,” they’ll just be “hot.”
Reclaiming or Moving Beyond the Term?
It’s unclear whether women will continue to reclaim the term MILF, or perhaps society will evolve past it as part of a broader change in how female sexuality is understood. If women are attractive without regard for their status as mothers, will it even seem relevant to point out that they’re parents?
MILF may be added to the ongoing debate between reclaiming terms of oppression versus leaving them behind to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Words like “queer” were once terms of hate, but have since been reclaimed as powerful tools of resistance and proclamation of identity.
Terms Like MILF
The term MILF has shifted from a derogatory label to — when used in certain contexts — one of empowerment. Instead of being used to mock and sexualize women, modern mothers use it to claim their sexual identity and joke among themselves.
When determining whether any word is empowering or degrading, we have to first see how it feels for the group it describes. Moms feel mixed about MILF, and we must use it carefully as a culture. The same is true for plenty of reclaimed words.
MILF may seem trivial, but language is important — it shapes how we view the world and the people in it. So choose your words and wield that power carefully.
