“All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.”
- Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal
1. Springy
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Sexy,” the 22-year-old Miranda drifts into an affair with Dev, an older married man who picks her up at a department-store makeup counter. Miranda is white; Dev, brown. The story examines the blurry lines between eroticism and exoticism, closeness and distance, the lovers’ desire for intimacy and the multiple barriers to it.
As their relationship unfolds, Miranda overhears the messy fallout of another extra-marital affair. Her Indian co-worker is on the phone for hours with a distraught cousin whose husband left her and their son for a British girl he met on a flight.
These two threads come together in one of the most awkward adventures in babysitting ever depicted. One afternoon, Miranda finds herself watching 7-year-old Rohin, the child of her co-worker’s cousin. Bored, Rohin orders Miranda to try on a slinky dress he discovers her closet. When she does, he tells her, “You’re sexy.” She interrogates him, asks him to explain what that word means to him. Finally, he answers: “[Sexy] means loving someone you don’t know.”
Miranda is unsettled by the encounter. It’s a warped echo of the time when Dev had whispered “You’re sexy” to her on a date, words that had felt “so near and full of warmth that she had felt herself go hot.” The affair ends. She allows the spark to extinguish itself.
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When I first read this story as a twenty-something, I identified not with the complicated particulars of Miranda’s relationship but with the way that ‘sexy’ is not a quality that Miranda defines for herself. It is, instead, a set of ill-fitting expectations she tries on, like when she returns to the department store where she and Dev met to “buy herself things she thought a mistress should have.” Black high heels. A satin slip. A slinky cocktail dress that hangs unused in her closet. She is stepping into a role—the enticing young mistress—rather than exploring the contours of her own desire.
Rereading “Sexy” as a 41-year-old mother, I still ached at the memory of my insecure earlier self, in matters romantic and otherwise. When I think back on myself at 18—heck, even at 25—I didn’t have a clue what ‘sexy’ was all about. Starved for any attention from the opposite sex, so focused on the stamp of approval that others might bestow, I never even thought to ask what sexy meant to me.
But this time around, I was more attuned to the absences in the story, the sexual sagas that are unwritten, sidelined. The mysterious figure of Dev’s wife, whose resemblance to a beautiful Bollywood actress obsesses Miranda for a time. Or the co-worker’s cousin, the spurned mother, who “cries, sometimes for hours. Sometimes straight through dinner.”
As the director Bette Gordon wrote over twenty years ago in BOMB magazine, we are more accustomed to media representations of young, unmarried women’s sexual encounters. Stories of mothers’ sexuality are largely absent.
As if even that juxtaposition of words—sexuality, mothers—were unseemly, almost taboo. We need mothers to be selfless. Chaste. Fonts of platonic love. Gordon wonders,
This post is my modest—or rather, immodest—attempt to draw back the figurative curtains, brush the literal Cheerio crumbs, out of the parental bed.
On this site, I’ve explored the ways that parenthood both constrains and motivates our creative pursuits outside of the caregiving role. What about sexuality, another aspect of our selfhood that can be challenged, but also shaped, by having kids? How might the transformation of parenthood extend to our sexual selves in particular, in ways that go beyond the common complaint of not having as much time or energy for sex?
On the one hand, I’m not sure why this felt like the right moment to do a deep dive into the topic of maternal desire. Nearly a year into the pandemic, many of us trapped in our homes with an excess of children and an absence of privacy, we parents are not exactly getting it on with reckless abandon (unless everyone else is?!).
At the same time, I know exactly what drew me to it. The topic felt frivolous, escapist, fun.
As it turned out, though, my romp through the literature on motherhood and sexuality was not nearly as sexy as it seemed.
Proto-MILF? The actor Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967).
2. Tender
Way back in 1980, in the O.G. women’s studies journal Signs, Susan Weisskopf coined the term “asexual motherhood.” She was referring to a split between sex and motherhood in the culture. The sense, which many mothers had internalized, that being both sexy and ‘a good mother’ was a contradiction in terms.
In the decades since, not much has changed. As recently as 2014, social-work professor May Friedman wrote of
Or, as the bestselling psychologist Esther Perel puts it: “the sexual invisibility of the American mother is ingrained in our national psyche.”
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In August 1991, Vanity Fair featured a cover photo of the actor Demi Moore—pregnant, nude. Both my husband and I, barely preteens at the time, still remember that controversial cover, a testament to how talked about it was at the time. Moore’s pioneering nudity supposedly ushered in a new era of frankness around, and even celebration of, the sexiness of pregnant bodies, and today we regularly see celebs rocking form-fitting pregnancy clothes.
Superficially, it appears that we are making some gestures toward acknowledging mothers as sexual beings. But it is just that: all surface.
Researchers Leah Shipps and Sandra Caron did a content analysis of several women’s magazines from 1991, the year of the Demi Moore cover, through 2010. Despite an uptick in pregnant ladies on magazine covers, the study found no corresponding increase in the coverage of sexuality and motherhood within their pages. Which, by the way, averaged a paltry 2.3%!
For over twenty years, publishers and editors had routinely missed opportunities to discuss the sexual identity of mothers, to offer advice or simply to enable women to recognize themselves in each other’s shared stories.
Annie Leibovitz’s iconic 1991 cover photo of Demi Moore. Check out this how this Serena Williams cover from 2017 recreates and riffs on the image—it has a new kind of power, in part due to the compelling presence of Williams herself and in part due to the absence of black femininity from these popular representations of pregnant motherhood.
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In pursuit of your pleasure—and mine, I ventured into decidedly unsexy terrain: social-science research on mothers and sex. I was most curious about mothers’ own perceptions of their sexuality and desire after kids. Beyond those more quantifiable measures (e.g., frequency of intercourse) that so preoccupy clinicians, what were the emotions around mothers’ experience of sex and sexuality? How did mothers see themselves? I was less focused on that first-year postpartum or after adoption, which has oddly received the most scholarly attention but is often when, as one mother of a colicky infant put it, sexuality is “one of those…fringe benefits of being a human that I pushed off to the side.”*
A caveat: the scholarship was quite spotty on this subject, not to mention narrow in the range of experiences and identities it encompassed—aside from one study of mothers in the southern African country of Lesotho, subjects were often white, middle-class, and heterosexual mothers in Western nations.
What I found, above all, was a kind of tenderness. Not tender as in sweet or soulful. I mean more of a vulnerability, a sensitivity, a rawness—like a wound not fully healed.
There were some familiar beats, starting with a lack of freedom to even have the kind of sex the mothers wanted, in the spaces or during the times of day that were most enjoyable for them.
Also, many new mothers felt an imperative to be ‘put together’ or to not ‘let yourself go’—a performance of attractiveness, if not sexiness. A friend pointed out these contradictory messages: “One is that mothers are sexy, and another is that mothers can't have room for their sexuality.” To me, the former is less about expressing one’s sexuality and more about unrealistic expectations for women, and a sense of worth tied to our physical appearance. In the research, the inability to meet those expectations became yet another source of ‘mom guilt.’
Many interviewees commented about how their relationship to their body changed, from dissatisfaction with their postpartum bodies to a sense of being alienated from specific body parts as they took on new functions. One of my friends echoed a common refrain in the social-science literature: in those early years, “Breasts were for nourishment, not sexual play. I was only thinking about how to keep the baby alive, how to keep myself alive.” The question then is how do you eventually claim those parts back for your own, and for your partner’s, enjoyment? Jane, a 38-year-old study participant, noted the need to “re-sexualize” parts of her body that had become desexualized in early motherhood—for her, this was an emotional, not just a physical, process. It took some time.
Enlisting your body in the service of another’s care ties into a deeper tenderness: the feeling of losing yourself as an individual as your wants are subsumed by others’ needs and physical demands. As the authors of a 2012 study claimed, “the idea of the ‘good mother’ involves an orientation from self to other that can manifest as ‘disinterest in sexual relations or a dissociation with one’s own sexuality.’” It can be difficult to reconcile these two images, imperatives.
Or, as Perel asserts (intriguingly but perhaps a bit too sweepingly):
…
Since motherhood and sexuality are often treated as mutually exclusive in American culture, there is often a shame or silence at any hint of their interconnectedness.
In 1980, Weisskopf wrote about the reluctance (both in casual conversations and in the scholarship) to look at the potentially sensual elements of maternal experience, like breastfeeding. Thirty years later, Beth Montemurro and Jenna Marie Siefken described the same taboo. Perel, too, speaks of the physical pleasure of caregiving—a physiological response evolved from an evolutionary drive to care for young. She is quick to clarify its sharp distinction from adult sexuality but notes that,
Friedman also claims that when we actually dare to witness mothers’ experiences in practice, we find that caregiving is deeply “corporeal, physical, and sensuous work.”
3. Salty
The seeming exception to the rather prudish, matronly figure who dominates American portrayals of motherhood is, of course, the MILF.
In both porn and pop culture, MILF “refers to a slightly older, very polished woman who is expected to have significant sexual prowess; MILFs are almost always white and usually middle to upper class and are universally presented in heterosexual contexts.”
Despite her apparent subversiveness, however, the figure of the MILF reinforces the status quo. The image is, like the 1999 movie American Pie that popularized the term, sophomoric and crude. Even the phrase “Mother I’d like to fuck” implies that the MILF is the exception to the rule of the sexless mom.
What’s more, the MILF embodies others’ fantasies, is a sex object rather than an active participant. Her sexiness centers around her desirability to others instead of on her own desire.
If I was looking for a more positive representation of maternal sexuality, this surely wasn’t it.
The actor Jennifer Coolidge playing “Stifler’s Mom,” the original MILF. Also, I had forgotten that the actor John Cho introduced this term to the lexicon!
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Probably my sexiest encounter with maternal desire—certainly, the only one that actually got my pulse raising—came in Molly Wizenberg’s memoir The Fixed Stars:
Admittedly, Wizenberg has the advantage of being newly single and newly queer: her memoir charts a shift in her sexuality that begins, with disorienting suddenness, in her mid-thirties, after she’s been married to husband Brandon for a decade.
In one passage, Wizenberg compares sex with her husband after childbirth to an investment in their relationship: it felt “prudent, advisable, like maxing out my Roth IRA contributions for the calendar year.” In contrast, her sexual experiences with women and non-binary partners involve elements of surprise, risk—they are at times awkward but exhilarating forays into uncharted terrain.
Aside from some bona fide raciness, I most appreciated how Wizenberg’s memoir offered an alternative to the strict lines of demarcation between sexuality and motherhood, a willingness to explore the meaningful, if indirect, relationship between these two facets of our identities. Wizenberg speculates that, in some sense, the change in her sexual orientation began with pregnancy and the postpartum period. She explains that
Wizenberg’s experiences of self-discovery and transformation through motherhood resonated with some the more positive accounts of maternal sexuality in the research. A handful of interviewees noted a deeper understanding, and acceptance, of their sexuality, as well as a pride in what their bodies were capable of. One pointed to a greater comfort, trust and openness to communicate what she wanted with her partner—a feeling of contentment with herself, a freedom.
4. Seasoned
Sexy means loving someone you don’t know.**
Is this true? In the context of Lahiri’s story, it might capture the truth of the affair between Miranda and Dev, but I’m not sure the definition rings true in general. Perel circles around this tension between familiarity and mystery. She writes that the “comfort and consistency” of family life seem incompatible with “unpredictability, spontaneity, and risk [which] are precisely where eroticism resides.”
Putting aside the question of sexiness within a relationship, though, what about the familiarity with yourself that comes with age, and specifically with being ‘grown up by’ your responsibility to another life? It seems to me that it’s self-knowledge—a deeper understanding of and appreciation for oneself—that underlies the more positive stories of sexuality that mothers experienced.
I related most to these stories. For me, this time of life, exhausting and stressful though it is, has also been a liberation, a coming into power.
Sexy, I finally realize, has nothing to do with another’s appraisal. It’s a perspective. A confidence. An attitude, baby.
Among the many transformations of motherhood has been a shedding of the inessential. A fading of earlier insecurities, a sudden clarity about what matters and what doesn’t. Many of the ‘sexy’ traits that I recognize in myself are often coded as masculine, what we hetero ladies are supposed to find attractive in ‘older’ men: leadership, confidence, experience, knowing your value. Others, less so: nurturance, imagination, connection. Regardless, this particular combination of qualities, many of which have surfaced only since I became a mom, have left me feeling, well, hot.
I don’t mean to say that there’s a single story of how motherhood and sexuality intersect. Far from it! Even within my own limited experience, there are complexities, contradictions. At times, neglecting my needs within a family environment has meant losing touch with my own desires. I sometimes lose that struggle for selfishness.
The flip side, though, is that in the process of giving myself over to another life, I’ve settled more fully into myself.
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It’s 8 pm on a Tuesday night. I’m typing this post on the couch while my husband puts our 5-year-old to bed. I’m wearing my faded grey “Madre” T-shirt, the same Outdoor Voices joggers I have been living and sleeping in for days, and a pair of thick neon-green socks I’ve stolen from Sol’s dresser. I haven’t confirmed, but it’s quite possible that there’s a strand or two of Swiss chard remaining in my sports bra from a stage of dinner prep gone awry.
Today I have discussed the terror and victory of confronting the blank page with my college writing students. I have prepared a plate of apple slices and peanut butter when my son announced his 10 am Zoom kindergarten munchies. I have furtively embraced my husband as we passed each other in the hall, because whenever we are caught cuddling, our child invariably asks, “Can I join in?” I have sat on a planning call with caregivers from Nigeria to New Zealand who are fighting climate change. I have gamely pretended, at my kid’s request, to be a mother white blood cell to his baby white blood cell.
Nothing sexual or even remotely sexy occurred. But in those cumulative acts of listening, engaging, nourishing, leading, I felt alive, present, fully myself. Well-seasoned.
To riff on those immortal words of Right Said Fred: I’m too sexy for the Myth of Asexual Motherhood.
I didn’t stage this photo! Alas, it was my 5 yo, and not my husband, who spelled out this phrase with Bananagrams tiles.
NOTES
*This experience is not limited to mothers. The sex-advice columnist and podcaster Dan Savage noted a similar experience when he and his partner first adopted. Perel also insists that the primary caregiver, regardless of gender, tends to experience a deeper disconnect with their sexuality: “My work with gay and lesbian couples has led me to recognize that this dynamic is replicated whenever one parent takes charge of the kids, gender notwithstanding.” Yet another reason to hear a broader spectrum of stories around parenthood and sexuality.
**I reached out to some friends to solicit their definitions of sexy, and the responses were marvelous. One noted that, for her, sexy “has come to mean that you’re attractive, interesting, magnetic, desirable, powerful, confident and that this power/energy shows on your body, your face and in how you carry yourself.” Another defined sexy as “feeling free and empowered to express my sensual and lustful feelings.” Being in an intimate relationship in which one feels “equal, valued, desired, respected, and appreciated” was also key. And someone pointed me to the work of the self-described “radical lesbian feminist” philosopher Mary Daly, who “described women’s sexuality as about our connection to the life force…the divine.”