When I had my first son, I was able to “bounce back,” as the horrible saying goes. It took about six months or so to lose the baby weight, and once I did, people acted as if I’d won an Academy Award. I was a MILF, my friends joked. “A mom? No way. I never would have guessed,” strangers at bars would say. “Seriously. I don’t believe you. Show me your C-section scar.” It was inappropriate and bizarre, and I hate that I loved every second of it.
After my second child, however, all that changed. Almost a year postpartum, I was 15 pounds heavier than I’d ever been, slightly balding, haggard, and feeling like Demi Moore midway through The Substance, except with a greater appreciation of Ms. Rachel’s oeuvre. I felt like I was surrounded by reminders of my failure to keep it tight: tabloids screaming about Emily Ratajkowski’s post-baby bikini shoots and Hilaria Baldwin’s lingerie selfies 12 days after having her fourth baby. As much as I had expected the self-abnegation that comes with early motherhood — the sleepless nights, the chafing nipples, the postpartum hair loss — I did not expect to also be consumed by grief over the loss of what I could only think of as my MILFdom.
Hollowed out and hollow-eyed, I started meditating on the concept of the trope. What distinguishes a MILF from a mere woman-with-children, that sexless breeder? Women are taught from an early age there’s the Madonna and there’s the whore, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Yet the cultural emergence of the MILF, a term popularized by the 1999 movie American Pie, collapses that dichotomy and creates a new binary along the lines of desirability. There are fuckable women and then there are moms. Somehow, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the MILF is both.
We have the adult-entertainment industry to thank for popularizing the term. It originated from a 1995 post on the online forum Usenet in a thread about a pictorial from an issue of Playboy featuring women at 40. The guy who coined it, Warren, was a former engineering student who, when I reached him on the phone, said he remembered hearing it around his frat house. (He was also deeply embarrassed by his association with the term and requested to have his real name withheld.)
Since then, MILF has become one of, if not the most popular subgenres in porn; in 2023, it was the second-highest-ranking search term on Pornhub in the world. It also became firmly integrated into mainstream popular culture, inspiring countless reality-TV shows, big-budget movies, and marketing campaigns. The term is so widespread that there is now an entire MILF Cinematic Universe of subvariants, including the cougar, the GILF (“grandma I’d like to fuck”), and the “yummy mummy” (basically a MILF but in the British Commonwealth).
Even as it has proliferated, there has remained one torchbearer of the term, the Ur-MILF without whom all other MILFs in the MCU would not exist: Jennifer Coolidge as Stifler’s mom in American Pie. She may have had her predecessors — hello, Mrs. Robinson — but it’s Coolidge who established the template for the sultry, sophisticated older woman who’s somewhat nonsensically horny for a younger man and makes no apologies for it. In the movie, she’s a statuesque blonde in a skintight lavender sheath, seducing her son’s friend Finch, played by Eddie Kaye Thomas, after he takes a wrong turn at a teenage house party. Finch finds Jeanine Stifler drinking Scotch in her study — “aged 18 years … the way I like it,” she purrs — and though he does little but sweat and stammer in the face of her leonine sensuality, she deflowers him on a pool table.
Coolidge plays an obviously exaggerated caricature — bringing to life an adolescent boy’s fantasy in a teen movie about someone who sticks his dick in a pie. But oddly the response to the archetype led to a kind of cultural embrace from another group entirely: moms themselves.
According to a 2007 piece in this magazine, the movie marked a “tipping point” in discourse about female sexuality and motherhood. One 35-year-old single mom said she felt “liberated” by the MILF label and its attendant implication that motherhood is, as the authors posited, “more than the death of desirability and the birth of bad haircuts.” The authors of the story declared themselves “suckers for the MILF: She may be glossy, she may be goofy, yet we can’t help but cheer for her.”
The 2017 clip “Hot Stepmom Brandi Love Catches [Stepson] Jacking Off to VR and Helps Him Out” begins with the stepson in question reclining on his bed, stroking his monstrous member while wearing a VR headset. Love, a blonde, hypersculpted adult performer in her late 40s, walks in on him. Instead of reacting with horror or mortification, as any normal parent would, she smiles gamely and strips down, shaking her butt in front of his face. Approximately three minutes into the clip (which is, all things considered, way too long to not realize someone’s butt is in your face), he finally registers her presence. She kneels between his splayed legs. “Mommmmmmm,” he says petulantly, like a kid who’s angry their Switch has been turned off before dinner. “Sssssh,” she says pointedly. “Stepmother.” This is, apparently, a compelling enough argument, and the rest of the clip proceeds as you’d expect.
Love is one of the reigning queens of MILF porn and is frequently ranked among the most searched-for performers on the tube site Pornhub year after year. She specializes in what is commonly referred to as “fauxcest,” or pornographic depictions of staged, semi-incestuous relationships — not just stepmother-stepson, but also stepfather-stepdaughter, stepsister-stepbrother, and all the step-combinations in between. (All of these fictionalized depictions are consensual, and none of the parties are under 18.) Fauxcest has inexplicably exploded in popularity over the past decade, even though many people, including Love herself, find the implications of the genre disturbing. She has played a mom who celebrates her divorce by having sex with her stepson, a mom who has a threesome with her stepson and his girlfriend, and a porn parody version of the Game of Thrones villain Cersei Lannister. “At first I didn’t get it. I was like, ‘What? You want me to say what?’” Love told me in a 2018 interview. “But then I got into it because my job is to be an actress and have fun and make that fantasy believable. It doesn’t have to be mine.” She attributes the rise of fauxcest to the inherently forbidden nature of the dynamic. “The more taboo something is, the hotter it’s gonna be. It’s fantasy,” she says.
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But what, exactly, is the transgressive desire behind fucking one’s own hot stepmom — or watching someone else do it? It’s all very Oedipus complex, of course, but there are seemingly more basic (if not equally disturbing) dynamics at play. “A ‘wife who is also your mom’ is something I think a lot of men unconsciously want,” a male friend told me when I asked him why he thought MILFs were popular. “Not only will she cook and clean up after you but she’ll never complain and also sexually gratify you for the honor.” The MILF is also a corrupting force, making a sexually inexperienced young man’s dreams reality, possibly for the first time. In this sense, the MILF fantasy is just as defined by the patriarchy as the stereotypical “good” mom is.
Still, there is a transgressive appeal inherent to the MILF fantasy that becomes more obvious as you get closer to the target-age demo. In watching American Pie, one thing I am struck by is just how little Finch actually has to offer to Stifler’s mom. He’s inexperienced, awkward, and not particularly attractive (and, lest we forget, playing an 18-year-old). It’s hard to come up with reasons why this gorgeous, sophisticated woman would be interested in him, unless you consider how incredibly stultifying it can be to become a mother and be consigned to a lifetime of catering to other people’s needs without considering your own or how thrilling it must be to see the desire of others reflected back to you.
That doesn’t mean the MILF gets to be multidimensional. Rarely will you see the term applied to anyone other than a specific type of woman — namely, a thin, fit, white, cisgender, conventionally attractive mother. This is especially true in porn, where it’s not uncommon for women who have never had children, or even women in their late teens and early 20s, to be cast as “MILFs.”
“Mainstream pornography presents a very, very narrow view of what a woman is supposed to look like once she has kids,” said MILF porn star Eva Lovia. “They don’t have fat where it’s not supposed to be or have dimples. They always have their makeup on, [they’re always] in heels. They always look like J.Lo.”
Avatars of MILF fantasies are policed in a much more literal way too. “For a lot of the actual moms playing MILF roles, a lot of the criticism online is ‘Your poor kids; you’re a terrible mom; you’re a terrible wife. I can’t believe you’re in sex work,’” Lovia told me.
Brandi Love, the queen of the MILFs, founded the organization Parents in Adult in 2006 after a family member, irate at her choice of profession, called local police to get them to search her house and take away her then-4-year-old daughter.
“When I started to talk to people in the industry about it, they’d say, ‘I’m fearful of my ex-husband,’ or ‘I’m fearful of my parents,” even though what we’re doing is legal,” she told me. “Just because we’re porn stars doesn’t mean that we’re doing inappropriate things at home.”
At the end of the day, Jeanine Stifler gets off relatively easy. She doesn’t lose her husband and her daughter, as Mrs. Robinson did in the 1963 novel version of The Graduate; nor is she subject to a police investigation. When you consider the alternatives, her arc—ending up with Eugene Levy’s character, as she does in the cash-grab 2012 reboot—is a pretty good deal.
Intellectually, I know that I should not have cared about losing my sexual desirability after having a second child. I have other priorities beyond getting compliments and free drinks at bars; I’m not a model or an influencer or anyone else whose body is a form of currency, and I’m happily married to a husband just as exhausted and stressed out as me.
I realized, somewhat ashamedly, being hot felt like one way to combat the feeling that I was being subsumed by the identity of “mother” after my first child was born. Ultimately, I learned what my friend Annie, whose daughter is 3, put much more succinctly: Being a MILF is “just another way they put you in a bucket of being solely identified as a mom.”
When I asked Warren, the fratty engineering student who inadvertently coined the term more than 30 years ago, if he had any regrets over what he’d unleashed, he said he did feel bad he hadn’t tried to trademark the acronym. But he felt worse that he’d introduced it into the lexicon in the first place. “When you get older, your views on these things change,” he told me. Still, he conceded, he understands the MILF’s appeal: “They’re out there taking care of themselves and living their best lives.”
As exhausted as I am by some aspects of the MILF trope — the one-dimensionality of it, the suggestion that folding laundry in one’s lingerie is a fun and cool thing to do — that is ultimately what I find aspirational about the concept: They reject the self-denial that so often comes with the territory of motherhood. Brandi Love wears a thong while mowing the lawn, unworried about embarrassing anyone (or potential yeast infections). Jennifer Coolidge drinks Glenfiddich straight and hits on her son’s friends. The fictionalized ideal, really, is a world in which motherhood doesn’t “cost” a woman anything.
It’s not the flat stomach or taut ass or HBO extra-quality breasts or any other superficial marker of MILFdom that make the MILF alluring. It’s how she embraces herself and rejects the burden of stress that comes with caring for others. I don’t want to always put myself last. I don’t want to lie in bed after a long day of chasing after my kids, too exhausted to do anything but watch The Great British Baking Show. I want more for myself than a life of servitude to others, even if such an admission puts me in danger of being thought of as a bad mother. And if there’s one thing you can say about MILFs: They’re not afraid to serve themselves first.
Excerpted from One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate. Copyright © 2026, Dickson, Ej. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
