MILFs and Happy Endings

Published July 19, 2011 BY Lili on Good Men Project
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/milfs-and-happy-endings/

Is raunch culture invading our everyday language?

For those fortunate enough to plead ignorance to the meaning of the disrespectful MILF term, let me just say I am just plain envious. I’ve not been spared that good fortune since I have a relative who’s a raging sexual compulsive, and his idea of bonding with me is to share his latest sexual exploits with me. Since that’s a non-stop endeavor of his, I hear way too much, stop him though I try. He blames me for creating “distance” when I remind him there’s lots of other topics to talk about besides swinger vacation clubs, best strip clubs ever, and his by-now-ubiquitous “fave porn star of the day” category.
(Note to the disbelievers that sex addiction is real: when an otherwise-intelligent man’s entire conversational and experiential repertoire can only revolve around sexual pursuit, there’s definitely a problem. Ahem.)

Said relative was recently visiting me for the afternoon and we went out to lunch. Perusing the menu items in the French restaurant, I was chagrined by the amount of calories I’d be consuming, since I was trying to lose a stubborn 10 pounds that had mysteriously accumulated on me recently. I tried to make light of it by mentioning my quandary, but my relative interrupted me with:

“Oh don’t be ridiculous! You’re hot! In fact, you are one of my all-time favorite MILFs”

“Huh?” I responded.

“Oh, don’t be coy! You are one hot MILF!” he continued, tearing into a buttery croissant.

Puzzled, I shrugged, thinking how either he’d developed a serious lisp since last I saw him, or perhaps he was lightheaded with hunger also. I picked up a croissant.
“Nah, come on, Lili, you’re kidding me, right? Tell me you don’t know what MILF stands for? Seriously.”

“No, I do not,” I assured him. “Should I?” His charade was starting to irk me. I had low blood sugar and wasn’t at all interested in learning a new word just now.

“Oh my God, Lili, what rock have you been living under? It stands for: Mothers I’d Like To Fuck, and that’s one of the most popular categories of porn, everyone knows that!,” he scoffed, finishing his croissant and eyeing mine.

I sat there dumbstruck.

Stunned gave way to a state of shock. I wondered whether I should enlighten him that even though we’re not living in some backwater homestead, that incest is still generally frowned upon. Or, should I tell him his brain was turning to mush from all the porn he watches non-stop? I started to tear apart my croissant.

Was it just me, or was I being bullied, along with everyone else, into having to accept porn’s invasion into everyday life with its coarseness as the new norm? The new conventional? Contemporary. Vulgar. But always cool.

Unperturbed by my disassociated staring down at the fleur-de-lis tablecloth, he felt obliged to help refine his definition for me: “Well, it’s like…you are hot! It’s just that the MILF term doesn’t refer to the hot young chicks. Which, given your age, isn’t really your category anymore. You know? Like, now you have your own category. That’s kind of sex-positive, don’t you think?“

Unfixing my stare, I started to look around for sharp instruments on the table. I knew I should’ve saved my visit with him for after my glucose levels had risen sufficiently to afford me better levity. He never fails to push the envelope of my patience.

“See,” he began again, very carefully selecting his words, “You aren’t a hot chick. That’s just the really young girls. You are now more like one of the soup chickens. You know? Like, they’re not as tender as the chicks are, but in my opinion, they’re actually a whole lot tastier.”

Pleased with himself, he wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin and threw it down triumphantly on the table.

As the room began to spin, I prayed silently: Dear God, please, immediately remove any serrated eating implements from off this table or prepare to accompany me in prison for the next 20 years.

I left him at the corner three short blocks from home and stumbled, narcotized, through the rest of my afternoon. I couldn’t yet identify the traumatizing effects of the newly-installed, heartless meme going around and around in my head, hectoring me relentlessly:

“Lili….you are a soup chicken…you are a soup chicken… you are a soup chicken…you are a soup chicken…”

You know how you’ve never heard of a word before in your life and then when you do, you just know it’ll crop up again within a few days? Sure enough, two days later, while sitting on a bus, I was leafing through a glossy magazine someone had left behind on the seat. It was one of those high-end “Life in the Big City” types of magazines, complete with endless pages of the Manhattan glitterati posing with cosmos at their important charity balls, all laser-whitened, perfect teeth offsetting Hampton-tanned, Juvederm-plumped skin, ballyhooing the good life.

I thumbed through pages of photos showcasing spectacular penthouse apartments for sale with wraparound gardens and Hudson River sunset views in the 20 million dollar category plus baronial-looking ads from agencies seeking to place butlers, governesses and groundskeepers for employment on your estate. Wow. So, this is how the other half lives. Fascinating! Sure beats the heck out of looking out the rain-streaked dirty window of the bus I was in.

Just as I turned the page, I spot a noticeably large ad for a gym showing a photo of a young woman with a tiny bit of a belly, gleefully jumping up in the air in her workout clothes. Next to her are huge, colorful graphics that scream:

“New Moms! It’s Almost Summer! It’s Beach-time! Is Your Body MILF-Ready?”

What?!

No, it can’t be. Must be a misspelling. I pull the magazine up closer to my face in the event that my reading glasses have failed me.

There it was, again: Is Your Body MILF-Ready?

A maybe six year-old child was sitting on the bus next to me, leaning in, half in my lap, eagerly looking at all the pretty pictures in my glossy magazine. As I peered down at the ad, I imagined a horrifying scenario: this precocious-looking child next to me, no doubt having already mastered reading the entire Harry Potter series, scrunching up his face at me and asking me,

“Um, what is M-I-L-F?” It wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities; the giant, brightly colored block letters on the page could easily lasso his attention.

Rut-row. Time to switch to a different seat. Quick, before my reverie about this child could become a reality.

I look down at the ad again. Does this gym here actually mean to conflate that nasty porn-derived term with motherhood? Does this mean that within two days time, I have to go from not knowing what this word means, to knowing what it means, to now having to allow opprobrium to chalk up another win? Oh, just damn, Skippy!
Are women ever allowed a break from not looking their dang hottest, not even a few weeks after just having a baby? Good God, MILF with a tiny infant? What have we become?

And I am not alone with these porn-into-mainstream experiences. Recently, my friend Terre went to her Netflix account and checked out the tab labeled, Our Recommendations for You.

First on the list of films they thought Terre would like, was a film called MILF. She never clicked on their second choice.

Instead, she called to tell me and with both of us taken aback, we just sat in silence on the phone together. After all, what is there to say when you’re trying to digest something you find distasteful and dare I say it and brand myself as the uncoolest of uncool ever: crude?

I’m well aware that that descriptor word generally greases the track for big success in any pop culture product nowadays, but I’ll say it anyway: crude fails as an art form for me.

A popular genre film titled, MILF? What?!

It’s not like Terre wandered into a XXX video store, after all. Yeah, she and I get it about humor in films. And we wonder about that kind of humor, the kind that has to keep upping the ante on grossness because last year’s gross doesn’t even earn a chuckle this year.

But, mostly, what we resist is the insistence that everyone just accept that it’s cool to lift and use terms from the increasingly popular lexicon of pornography.

Advertising that seems to say: “It’s so catchy! It’s cute, even! Make these terms part of your daily vocabulary and you, too, can be cool and not notice any class, decorum, or regard for yourself or others slipping away from you whatsoever.”

Painless, this reach for being cool.

In just one week, three references to MILF had invaded my world, and I was filled with increasing heaviness. I’ve only felt this bleak despair while handing tissues to tearful wives of sex/porn addicts as they share their heartbreaks with me during counseling sessions.

Optimism was fast evaporating, and the gloss of the high life I had momentarily escaped into had sunk to the bottom of a big, black dross pit. Uh-oh.

Unable to escape the claws of that particularly heavy brand of depression, I did what I knew would help: I switched gears from the mental to the physical. Getting on the treadmill and running has helped chase many a demon away in my life, and now I was desperately in need of a shift. With two miles down, and three still to go, I turned the TV on that was mounted in front of me. Mindlessly watching the shows and the commercials, I was grateful for the distraction until, what’s this?

I watched hot fudge being poured in slow-motion over mounds of ice cream as a female voice-over chirps,

“Come into Friendly’s this weekend for our free Happy Endings Sundae!”

What? Wait a minute…what did she just say?

Friendly’s? The family-friendly ice cream parlor chain, evocative of Norman-Rockwell-esque family get-togethers, everyone leaning into a table mirthfully sharing a gigantic banana split? That Friendly’s?

Is Friendly’s daft?

Or are they messin’ with us?

Can double entendres be slathered into a hot fudge sundae commercial?

Should I give them the benefit of the doubt?

Nah, if my sicko relative is right, you’d have to be living under a rock to not know these things nowadays. And I can’t imagine the big ad-exec that has the Friendly’s account, not knowing.

Well, that just pisses me off. Big-time! Who do they think they are, anyway, shoving their barely-camouflaged “jokes” down unsuspecting families’ throats? What kind of twisted despots are they anyway? They think they’re going to get away with trying to conceal sexual euphemisms under melted chocolate sauce? Who do they take us for?

Who do they think they are, anyway, shoving their barely-camouflaged “jokes” down unsuspecting families’ throats?

Whipping on my imaginary Crusader cape, I hop off the treadmill and run out of the gym, and I keep on running till I get back to my apartment where I’ll turn on my computer and Google Friendly’s Ice Cream.

I need to find some really good reason they’re co-opting this term from the sex-for-sale trade, for an ice cream. “Happy endings” is a term mainstreamed from the dubious world of massage parlors that cannot quite advertise their real business: providing sex. A happy ending is a couple of oiled strokes to the body followed by the customers’ choice of attaining an orgasm, with the price varying with the amount of effort required by the, um, masseuse.

Call me humorless; call me shrill. Call me a hopeless pedant. I don’t care. But all this raunch culture seepage into our everyday language is surely a step towards madness.

On the way home, endorphins pumping from my run, I compose a missive in my head to Friendly’s telling them just what I think: that since they couldn’t possibly be that daft, that they must be messing with us, and that I will therefore never eat at Friendly’s again. That should get their attention. That I’d never eat there anyway due to their Muzak and bad lighting seems rather beside the point right now.

Finally I arrive home and I’m online now….Googling….Googling...There!

Third listing down, tucked in between something about desserts and saving money, in bold print and there it is: The Happy Endings Sundae!

I open up the link and see it’s not the main Friendly’s flagship homesite, it’s a website featuring the awesomely wonderful free sundae with the offensive name. The link is to a woman’s, named Julia Scott, website and pictured on her homepage is her latest bargain find:

A brand new Friendly’s all lit up and welcoming, with a perfectly PhotoShopped azure sky behind it. Facing this bucolic image from the side bar, is a chipper looking, widely smiling woman with large, suburbanized hair. Julia?

In cursive, girly-girl lettering like in Barbie ads, right across her photo, it says: Bargain Babe!

It does. I swear it. Google it yourself if you don’t believe me.

Oh my God, suddenly I cannot stop laughing.

The homemaker remade, as Bargain Babe! The hotness factor has officially rolled through suburbia, leaving no housewife unadorned and un-hot! Wow. Everyone’s jumpin’ on that bandwagon.

Julia, aka Bargain Babe, is heralding the latest bargain she’s dug up and shares it with us by writing:

“Get a free sundae when you buy any chicken strips entree. Choose from Friendly’s Signature, Honey BBQ, or Kickin’ Buffalo Chicken Strips. Each entree comes with coleslaw and a dipping sauce. The free sundae is called Happy Endings, which comes with two scoops of ice cream and one topping. I’ll take mint and chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup, please!”

Wow! You go right ahead and do that, Bargain Babe. I’m imagining Julia or Bargain Babe or whoever she really is, dragging hubby and the kids to Friendly’s to show off her expertise in sniffing out the free ice cream deals. When the waitress arrives to take her order, Bargain Babe, ever buoyant, will chirp, “I’ll take the Kickin’ Buffalo Chicken Strips with a Happy Ending, please!”

Will there be a straight face on any male in the establishment when that invariably happens? Will hubby be snickering subversively behind his menu?

Erase, erase, erase, I tell myself. I try to expunge this weirdness from my mind, to remember that there are still people who do not know about such things. People who have never been exposed to porn and have happy, sane lives.

What does my creepy relative know, anyway? He thinks about having sex with his relative, for God’s sake. With me! Ewwww.

Clearly, he needs help.

Wait! I’ve got it! Maybe the solution is to move to the country. People like the Amish have done that, and they seem pretty happy and none too disadvantaged. Even when deranged gunmen open fire in their schoolrooms, they live by their principles and do not resort to baser impulses.

Yeah, I could get a nice little wood cabin in the woods like they do, cut off the Internet and the TV and purge the incessant media images and concepts that perpetuate the message of: Bigger, Better, Faster, Hotter and More Sex, Sex, SEX all the friggin’ time!! And don’t forget to look HOT while doing it. Recent pregnancy is no excuse!

Yes. That is what I will do, move to the country and then allow my brain to rewire itself so that I’ll begin to take my sustenance from the birdsong and the wind in the trees. I will quit my gym membership and I will wear only comfortable clothes. My life will simplify. That can only be good.

Right.

The feasibility of that solution providing gratifying results is about equal to my chances of winning the lottery and buying one of those 20 million dollar penthouses. And then to keep up with all my friends from the Fabulosity Club, I’d still have to read those glossy magazines… with the ads for MILF gyms in them.

My fantasy fades into the stark reality that mere escapism will not be enough to buffer me from coarse, porn-derived terms being bandied about in my everyday life.

No, I am a Manhattanite, this is where my work is, my roots are here, this is where I belong. I will not be driven away by crudeness.

So, although I am a witness to both advertising’s and popular culture’s glib use of terms and concepts from porn and raunch culture, I need to remember that porn is an imitation of life (at its very best). And I commit to living a real, fully-dimensional life in defiance of the inanity of what I see around me. There is no acronym or euphemism for that, but maybe it will catch on. I can only hope.

In the meantime, maybe right outside the door of the incredible penthouse apartment I’ll move into, there’ll be a nice, big rock in Central Park I can occasionally hide under.