Published July 19, 2011 BY Lili on Good Men Project
http:\/\/goodmenproject.com\/featured-content\/milfs-and-happy-endings\/<\/p>\n
Is raunch culture invading our everyday language?<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve not been spared that good fortune since I have a relative who\u2019s a raging sexual compulsive, and his idea of bonding with me is to share his latest sexual exploits with me. Since that\u2019s a non-stop endeavor of his, I hear way too much, stop him though I try. He blames me for creating \u201cdistance\u201d when I remind him there\u2019s lots of other topics to talk about besides swinger vacation clubs, best strip clubs ever, and his by-now-ubiquitous \u201cfave porn star of the day\u201d category.
(Note to the disbelievers that sex addiction is real: when an otherwise-intelligent man\u2019s entire conversational and experiential repertoire can only revolve around sexual pursuit, there\u2019s definitely a problem. Ahem.)<\/p>\n
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\u2019d 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:<\/p>\n
\u201cOh don\u2019t be ridiculous! You\u2019re hot! In fact, you are one of my all-time favorite MILFs\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHuh?\u201d I responded.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, don\u2019t be coy! You are one hot MILF!\u201d he continued, tearing into a buttery croissant.<\/p>\n
Puzzled, I shrugged, thinking how either he\u2019d developed a serious lisp since last I saw him, or perhaps he was lightheaded with hunger also. I picked up a croissant.
\u201cNah, come on, Lili, you\u2019re kidding me, right? Tell me you don\u2019t know what MILF stands for? Seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I do not,\u201d I assured him. \u201cShould I?\u201d His charade was starting to irk me. I had low blood sugar and wasn\u2019t at all interested in learning a new word just now.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh my God, Lili, what rock have you been living under? It stands for: Mothers I\u2019d Like To Fuck, and that\u2019s one of the most popular categories of porn, everyone knows that!,\u201d he scoffed, finishing his croissant and eyeing mine.<\/p>\n
I sat there dumbstruck.<\/p>\n
Stunned gave way to a state of shock. I wondered whether I should enlighten him that even though we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Was it just me, or was I being bullied, along with everyone else, into having to accept porn\u2019s invasion into everyday life with its coarseness as the new norm? The new conventional? Contemporary. Vulgar. But always cool.<\/p>\n
Unperturbed by my disassociated staring down at the fleur-de-lis tablecloth, he felt obliged to help refine his definition for me: \u201cWell, it\u2019s like\u2026you are hot! It\u2019s just that the MILF term doesn\u2019t refer to the hot young chicks. Which, given your age, isn\u2019t really your category anymore. You know? Like, now you have your own category. That\u2019s kind of sex-positive, don\u2019t you think?\u201c<\/p>\n
Unfixing my stare, I started to look around for sharp instruments on the table. I knew I should\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee,\u201d he began again, very carefully selecting his words, \u201cYou aren\u2019t a hot chick. That\u2019s just the really young girls. You are now more like one of the soup chickens. You know? Like, they\u2019re not as tender as the chicks are, but in my opinion, they\u2019re actually a whole lot tastier.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pleased with himself, he wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin and threw it down triumphantly on the table.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I left him at the corner three short blocks from home and stumbled, narcotized, through the rest of my afternoon. I couldn\u2019t yet identify the traumatizing effects of the newly-installed, heartless meme going around and around in my head, hectoring me relentlessly:<\/p>\n
\u201cLili\u2026.you are a soup chicken\u2026you are a soup chicken\u2026 you are a soup chicken\u2026you are a soup chicken\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
You know how you\u2019ve never heard of a word before in your life and then when you do, you just know it\u2019ll 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 \u201cLife in the Big City\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
\u201cNew Moms! It\u2019s Almost Summer! It\u2019s Beach-time! Is Your Body MILF-Ready?\u201d<\/p>\n
What?!<\/p>\n
No, it can\u2019t be. Must be a misspelling. I pull the magazine up closer to my face in the event that my reading glasses have failed me.<\/p>\n
There it was, again: Is Your Body MILF-Ready?<\/p>\n
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,<\/p>\n
\u201cUm, what is M-I-L-F?\u201d It wasn\u2019t outside the realm of possibilities; the giant, brightly colored block letters on the page could easily lasso his attention.<\/p>\n
Rut-row. Time to switch to a different seat. Quick, before my reverie about this child could become a reality.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
First on the list of films they thought Terre would like, was a film called MILF. She never clicked on their second choice.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re trying to digest something you find distasteful and dare I say it and brand myself as the uncoolest of uncool ever: crude?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m well aware that that descriptor word generally greases the track for big success in any pop culture product nowadays, but I\u2019ll say it anyway: crude fails as an art form for me.<\/p>\n
A popular genre film titled, MILF? What?!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019s gross doesn\u2019t even earn a chuckle this year.<\/p>\n
But, mostly, what we resist is the insistence that everyone just accept that it\u2019s cool to lift and use terms from the increasingly popular lexicon of pornography.<\/p>\n
Advertising that seems to say: \u201cIt\u2019s so catchy! It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Painless, this reach for being cool.<\/p>\n
In just one week, three references to MILF had invaded my world, and I was filled with increasing heaviness. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s this?<\/p>\n
I watched hot fudge being poured in slow-motion over mounds of ice cream as a female voice-over chirps,<\/p>\n
\u201cCome into Friendly\u2019s this weekend for our free Happy Endings Sundae!\u201d<\/p>\n
What? Wait a minute\u2026what did she just say?<\/p>\n
Friendly\u2019s? 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\u2019s?<\/p>\n
Is Friendly\u2019s daft?<\/p>\n
Or are they messin\u2019 with us?<\/p>\n
Can double entendres be slathered into a hot fudge sundae commercial?<\/p>\n
Should I give them the benefit of the doubt?<\/p>\n
Nah, if my sicko relative is right, you\u2019d have to be living under a rock to not know these things nowadays. And I can\u2019t imagine the big ad-exec that has the Friendly\u2019s account, not knowing.<\/p>\n
Well, that just pisses me off. Big-time! Who do they think they are, anyway, shoving their barely-camouflaged \u201cjokes\u201d down unsuspecting families\u2019 throats? What kind of twisted despots are they anyway? They think they\u2019re going to get away with trying to conceal sexual euphemisms under melted chocolate sauce? Who do they take us for?<\/p>\n
Who do they think they are, anyway, shoving their barely-camouflaged \u201cjokes\u201d down unsuspecting families\u2019 throats?<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll turn on my computer and Google Friendly\u2019s Ice Cream.<\/p>\n
I need to find some really good reason they\u2019re co-opting this term from the sex-for-sale trade, for an ice cream. \u201cHappy endings\u201d 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\u2019 choice of attaining an orgasm, with the price varying with the amount of effort required by the, um, masseuse.<\/p>\n
Call me humorless; call me shrill. Call me a hopeless pedant. I don\u2019t care. But all this raunch culture seepage into our everyday language is surely a step towards madness.<\/p>\n
On the way home, endorphins pumping from my run, I compose a missive in my head to Friendly\u2019s telling them just what I think: that since they couldn\u2019t possibly be that daft, that they must be messing with us, and that I will therefore never eat at Friendly\u2019s again. That should get their attention. That I\u2019d never eat there anyway due to their Muzak and bad lighting seems rather beside the point right now.<\/p>\n
Finally I arrive home and I\u2019m online now\u2026.Googling\u2026.Googling…There!<\/p>\n
Third listing down, tucked in between something about desserts and saving money, in bold print and there it is: The Happy Endings Sundae!<\/p>\n
I open up the link and see it\u2019s not the main Friendly\u2019s flagship homesite, it\u2019s a website featuring the awesomely wonderful free sundae with the offensive name. The link is to a woman\u2019s, named Julia Scott, website and pictured on her homepage is her latest bargain find:<\/p>\n
A brand new Friendly\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
In cursive, girly-girl lettering like in Barbie ads, right across her photo, it says: Bargain Babe!<\/p>\n
It does. I swear it. Google it yourself if you don\u2019t believe me.<\/p>\n
Oh my God, suddenly I cannot stop laughing.<\/p>\n
The homemaker remade, as Bargain Babe! The hotness factor has officially rolled through suburbia, leaving no housewife unadorned and un-hot! Wow. Everyone\u2019s jumpin\u2019 on that bandwagon.<\/p>\n
Julia, aka Bargain Babe, is heralding the latest bargain she\u2019s dug up and shares it with us by writing:<\/p>\n
\u201cGet a free sundae when you buy any chicken strips entree. Choose from Friendly\u2019s Signature, Honey BBQ, or Kickin\u2019 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\u2019ll take mint and chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup, please!\u201d<\/p>\n
Wow! You go right ahead and do that, Bargain Babe. I\u2019m imagining Julia or Bargain Babe or whoever she really is, dragging hubby and the kids to Friendly\u2019s 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, \u201cI\u2019ll take the Kickin\u2019 Buffalo Chicken Strips with a Happy Ending, please!\u201d<\/p>\n
Will there be a straight face on any male in the establishment when that invariably happens? Will hubby be snickering subversively behind his menu?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What does my creepy relative know, anyway? He thinks about having sex with his relative, for God\u2019s sake. With me! Ewwww.<\/p>\n
Clearly, he needs help.<\/p>\n
Wait! I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 time!! And don\u2019t forget to look HOT while doing it. Recent pregnancy is no excuse!<\/p>\n
Yes. That is what I will do, move to the country and then allow my brain to rewire itself so that I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
Right.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d still have to read those glossy magazines\u2026 with the ads for MILF gyms in them.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So, although I am a witness to both advertising\u2019s and popular culture\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, maybe right outside the door of the incredible penthouse apartment I\u2019ll move into, there\u2019ll be a nice, big rock in Central Park I can occasionally hide under.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019ve not been spared that good fortune since I have a relative who\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":11,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-237","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n