suburban mamas to strip down in an upcoming issue of the magazine. (Perhaps the recent layout featuring actress Denise Richards, a new mom, whetted the appetite). In 2005, look for the books To Love, Honor and Betray: The Secret Life of Suburban Wives and Undressing Infidelity, both of which promise to expose this newfangled breed of adulteress.
   These new chronicles of bourgeois sexual angst have ample precedent: think of The Graduate, Peyton Place and Judy Blume's not-so-young adult novel Wifey, while TV's most recent attempt to pull the covers off suburban sexuality was HBO's short-lived The Mind of the Married Man. While competently written, the series floundered because it failed to deliver anything new: Men feel trapped in their marriages? They want to have sex with woman other than their spouses? STOP THE PRESSES.
    But something that reveals these escapist urges in woman? Well, that is news. To baldly state that grown women have longings that exceed the bounds of conventional marriage and domesticity falls somewhere between bad taste and heresy, and that irreverence is from whence the interest comes. Add in the fact that the primary medium for this message is television — the ultimate means of reinforcing conventional wisdom — and you've got a bit of prime-time subversion on your hands.


In fairness, long before hot mamas became trendy at the TV studio and printing press, porn led the MILF brigade. Proof of the sheer, staggering volume of porn sites exalting maternal hotness is only a Google away, with MILFhunter.com being arguably the most influential (and popular) of the lot. But exaltation of mature women's sexuality predates the digital age. Crack open any old-school book of male sexual fantasies like Men in Love, and you'll find it densely populated by men who have made older women and moms (sometimes their own!) the focus of their fantasy lives.
   The eroticism of motherhood seems like a contradiction in terms in our culture, which keeps women's roles so rigidly stratified. (Sex? Yes! Motherhood? Absolutely! Together? Uh . . . let's tuck that matter under the receiving blanket, shall we?) In an essay about how pregnancy affected her own sexuality, Susie Bright wrote, "It's an awesome feat of American puritanism to insist that sex and pregnancy do not mix. It is the ultimate virgin/whore distinction. For those long nine months, please don't mention how we got this way — we're Mary now." And that attitude continues long past the baby's due date.
    Still, if you're past the flimsy-but-tenacious cultural dictate that women tone down their sex appeal after thirty and/or childbirth, you'll find obvious hints to the contrary. How else could a song like "Stacy's Mom" become a smash, not to mention the video for Maroon 5's "She Will Be Loved," in which forty-two-year-old Kelly Preston plays a mom who eclipses her daughter in the eyes of the band's ultra-emo singer? Consider also the suggestively titled (but ultimately chaste) Wife Swap and Trading Spouses, and the new MTV series Date My Mom, in which a young male suitor chooses from three anonymous bachelorettes based on a date with each girl's mother. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson: your archetype has clearly taken hold.
   Frankly, for some of us, the idea of older women being sexual takes a while to warm up to. At first, they seem so . . . old. Then you date someone who's a parent, or your friends start having kids, and you realize that they're just as juicy as any young, gravitationally defiant singleton, and they have the experience and empathy that can deepen the experience. I'm not saying it's better — the neophyte blush does pack its own special erotic wallop — but when you find your sexual horizons expanded beyond the eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old age range, it's remarkable.
   If the Sex and the City girls shed light on the romantic and sexual travails of freewheeling thirtysomethings, Desperate Housewives puts the yearnings of domesticated fortysomething females on the

map. Amid the constant barrage of messages that "younger is better," is it any wonder that a show depicting lusty, imperfect, fully adult women is a huge hit? Yes, the actresses' lovely faces are a little freakishly "maintained," and their Pilates bodies are whittled down to the low single digits, but that's life in a society that treats female aging and weight gain like twin pathologies. Given the paucity of acknowledgment for the emotional complexity and longing of women "of a certain age," it's best not to look a gift MILF in the mouth.
   Ultimately, what makes the MILF the sexpot du jour is her familiarity. MILF's may seem groundbreaking in youth-obsessed Hollywood, but in real life, we've all known women like this. Sure, the hijinks of the Wisteria Lane ladies border on satire, and the average MILF is likely far less exhibitionistic and acrobatic than a porn site might suggest. Still, their domestic dilemmas are ours writ camp, their sexual exploits are triple-X exaggerations of what lurks in our own dreams. Both women and men can relate.
   The MILF phenom breaks new ground by audaciously illustrating the obvious — that wanting and being wanted doesn't stop after "I Do," and being a wife and/or a mom doesn't mean your fulfillment comes solely from baking pies and scooting off to Brandon and Katie's soccer games in the minivan. And it emphasizes, by default, the performance aspect of being a wife and mother: here's Betty Bourgeois, now co-starring in The Happy Family! It gives lie to the notion that women are neutered, if not denatured, by marriage and motherhood: the one fiction in which both liberals and conservatives seem inordinately invested.
   Today's Desperate Housewives, MILFs and hot mamas represent the footnote to Happily Ever After, and it's small wonder so many people are caught up in their knotty tangle of G-strings and apron strings. They show us what we have known to be true, yet didn't dare speak aloud. They point to what's going on in our own houses, reminding us that perhaps nothing is more seductive than a room with a once-closed door cracked open. Captivated by what might be contained within, we draw closer expecting to find something mysterious and exotic, only to look inside and see, most intriguingly, ourselves.  n°

©2004 Lily Burana & Nerve.com