The moment Rihanna stepped out at the Super Bowl, baby bump enclosed within a custom Loewe jumpsuit, it was official: mommies were in. RiRi and her Alaïa maternity wear marathon aside, though, mothers do seem to be everywhere right now.
Whether it’s Keke Palmer debuting her pregnancy on SNL, the indomitable awards season presence of Jennifer Coolidge (who, after all, initially rose to fame as the hottest MILF the world has ever seen in American Pie), or pregnant models on Sinéad O’Dwyer and Di Petsa’s runways at LFW, it’s clear that the matriarch is centre stage. Not to mention the fact that the queer tradition of referring to iconic women as “mother” has entered the vernacular of corporate social media accounts, ‘boymom’ Twitter discourse (culminating in SNL sketches) and high-street shop radio playlists (courtesy of Meghan Trainor).
It seems that as we were momentarily obsessed with daddies — whether glamorous podcast fathers or Jeff Goldblum — mommies have become our latest cultural fixation. And, at first glance, this seems like a positive thing. Leaving behind the notion that a woman’s value expires around the time her frontal lobe becomes fully developed, culture is catching up to the fact that women don’t have to act or look like babies to be hot. Rather, they can be grown-up, old enough to be your mother (whether they literally have kids or not) and be responsible members of society who get shit done.
But what if this fixation on mommies tells us more about the state of masculinity than it does the state of femininity? This, at least, is the opinion held by Karen Correia da Silva, Director of Strategy at The Digital Fairy. “Young men are having their equivalent to the daddy moment, embracing the idea that they want someone to nurture and take care of them,” they say.
Karen looks to Mommy GF or “mommy milky” memes to illustrate this. “We so often see this [desire to be nurtured] in the thinly veiled irony of shitposting through Mommy GF memes,” they continue. “Even though this originally started a few years ago, it came to really define men’s humour around the uncertainty of the pandemic, especially as men’s mental health conversations have begun to encourage men to show more vulnerability. Men want to be nurtured too, so many young progressive men are reimagining the power […] of being a simp, like [rapper] Yung Gravy banging on about his absolute love of MILFs.”
In itself, this doesn’t feel particularly groundbreaking. After all, there’s a reason women were wearing “stop raising him, he’s not your son” T-shirts a couple of years ago: sometimes het relationships can be a marathon of unreciprocated emotional and domestic labour for women. But one of the major issues in these dynamics can be that some men don’t have the emotional literacy or self-awareness to ask for this care; instead, it’s subliminally expected based on gender stereotypes. From the displays of ironic emotional vulnerability expressed by MILF lovers online, one could conclude that young men are becoming more upfront and honest about their emotional needs, rather than turning their girlfriends — against their will — into harried proto-housewives.
And while Tumblr has left many of us deeply aware of what daddy issues look like (read: Lana del Rey, age-gap relationships, unmet emotional needs), mommy issues are still a relatively under-explored concept. According to relationships therapist Stephanie Macadaan, what we’re really talking about here is unhealed wounds from a primary caregiver who is absent or inconsistent. Similarly to daddy issues, this then manifests as insecure or avoidant attachment in sexual and romantic connections later down the line. “In adult relationships, being anxious may look like needing constant reassurance, being co-dependent, doubting or worrying about the security of the relationship, and feeling needy,” she explains. “Avoidant tendencies in adults include avoiding emotions, withdrawing in conflict, fear of intimacy and difficulty trusting others.”
But that’s not the only manifestation of our motherly desires. Why did everyone on stan Twitter start talking about mothers mothering? Well, there’s the obvious fact that yasss, slay and queen have been churned unceremoniously through the industrial internet lingo complex and spat out the other side. That’s the easy — and perhaps truest — answer to why this language has become ubiquitous, but there’s a deeper story, too, which can be seen when we look at the origins of the phrase.
As pointed out by Nick Levine in his recent piece for Gay Times, the term is closely associated with the predominantly Black and Latinx ballroom scene, much like the words that came before it. House mothers act as community leaders for BIPOC trans and queer dancers and performers — taking them under their wing and teaching the foundations of vogue and ballroom culture. This evolved into the concept of drag mothers (if you are even the most casual of Drag Race viewers, you will have heard the song “Call Me Mother”) — whereby seasoned drag queens help teach newbies the ropes.
Once again, we find ourselves wondering if a genuine longing for a maternal figure underpins this trend. Particularly for queer teenagers who find community in music fandoms — who may have plenty of online peers, but lack safety and certainty offline — a chosen mother can perhaps provide hope and optimism for the future.
It’s also true that an interest in mommies isn’t a sign of any unresolved parent trauma in many cases, but instead a kink or sexual interest in mature women and a certain form of role play. And looking towards the wider cultural panorama, there’s no denying that there’s a decidedly sexual character to our newfound taste for motherhood at the moment. Yep, men don’t just want a mother figure to coddle them, they want a mother figure to fuck them, too. Nowhere is this put into as sharp focus as reality TV phenomenon MILF Manor.
For those who aren’t aware, MILF Manor is a salacious, Freudian slip of a show where a bunch of beautiful women in their 40s, 50s and 60s explore romantic and sexual connections with younger men — the only snag being that these bachelors are all the children of other women on the show. As well as having their children present to pass judgment on their dating antics, the women are also forced to undertake a range of hellishly oedipal tasks, such as feeling up the physiques of all the male contestants while blindfolded, in order to pick their son out of a lineup.
While the shenanigans in this particular reality show probably feel too close for comfort, some of the dynamics — age-gap relationships, “fauxcest” and powerful women — have been reflected in trends in the adult entertainment industry for years. Last year, searches for femdom content rose by 28% on PornHub whereas terms like “step mom” were popular throughout the 2010s. The taboos around maternal sexuality and dominant women have been echoing around the erotic subconscious for a while, but now, they’re being brought into the open.
As adult performer and director, and co-founder of Four Chambers, an ongoing project exploring the aesthetic and conceptual potential of pornography, Vex Ashley explains, we can see that mommy kinks are entering into the sexual vernacular: “mommy” has joined “daddy” as a kink-lite roleplay name. “It used to be a thing to call your boyfriend daddy, but it very much feels like now the new offhand sexy way to refer to yourself is mommy,” she says. Within her own work, Ashley has been exploring the potential of a mommy fetish in her films Maman and Maman II. “In the films, these dynamics are all about letting yourself be cared for, being vulnerable, being safe with somebody.”
For her, it goes far beyond binary gender dynamics (both films explore queer desire) and instead taps into something much deeper within the subconscious. “What we’re craving is just for somebody to look after us, somebody to show us the way, somebody to know what all of our needs are and then to make sure [they’re] met in a way that we’re missing in our day-to-day life,” she says. “We’re existing at the moment in such a scary, horrible world. I think that has permeated our erotic imagination.”
Ashley’s onto something. An increasingly right-wing, hostile environment, a cutthroat cost-of-living crisis, and the lingering threat of war means we’re often despondent and afraid. Regardless of what gender you are, there’s a hunger to be looked after, cared for and to be able to rely on others to be kind and protect you. Maybe it’s community, not mommy milkers we’re horny for.