Last year I had the unusual and unblogged pleasure of attending a birthday party where the majority of the guests were professional opera singers. It took place in the basement room of a London restaurant. If you try hard you can imagine what the rendition of “Happy Birthday” sounded like. The birthday girl has a teenage daughter and a fiancé my age. His male friends have given him an obvious nickname. Today I found out that the mother of a ‘Blogger who links here thinks I’m a “cute guy”.

Anyway, further to this discussion, sex mag Nerve declares 2004 to have been “the year of the MILF“. Parts of the linked article will leave ordinary men scratching their heads in the way they do when, despite evidence to the contrary you could hang a towel on, their girlfriends suddenly decide that their boyfriends don’t fancy them any more:

“…a cute young thing will always peg on the babe-o-meter…”

“…the public imagination has grown tired of what seems so manufactured and manipulative[: the high-gloss teen queen]…”

“To baldly state that grown women have longings that exceed the bounds of conventional marriage and domesticity falls somewhere between bad taste and heresy”

“The eroticism of motherhood seems like a contradiction in terms in our culture, which keeps women’s roles so rigidly stratified.”

Yeah, the line of our straight male trousers can only be broken by brainless, skinny, blonde teenage virgins with saline-filled breasts. We never even so much as glance at brunettes with children. Mind you, this piece was written by a former stripper and, given the job they did, former strippers can be forgiven for having developed a skewed outlook on what it is men want, especially if they seem to be more interested in the contents of a man’s pockets than whether he’s pleased to see them or not.

I’d also like to point out that the term “MILF” was in use long before American Pie made it popular.