Of MILFs, Cougars & Pumas: A Social Phenom That Really Has . . . Uh, Legs

As social phenomenons go, the current obsession on television, in books and pornography with older women doing the wild thing with younger men strikes me as . . . well, probably inevitable.

I will admit to having had the raving hots for a 10th grade English teacher 30 years my senior and many a young man has felt all fuzzy wuzzy between the legs while fancying a roll in the hay with someone old enough to be Mrs. Oedipus. But all of a sudden you can't turn around without being smacked in the puss with the MILF phenomenon. (In the unlikely event that you don't know what the acronym stands for, you probably can figure it out.)

It's great that older moms have been elevated to new heights of bootyliciousness, although I've long found some of them to be attractive as hell and all the more so because they're . . . um, experienced. I know of what I speak having had a summer fling with a tres sexy older woman when I was in my early 20s who taught me things that are illegal in some states.

The MILF phenomenon is in no small part a result of American Pie, the semi-awful 1999 teen sexploitation pic that popularized the term, and later Desperate Housewives, the ABC comedy-drama that debuted in 2004 and has spawned a zillion largely mediocre offshoots. But at the risk of dating myself as being hopelessly over the hill, I think that it was The Graduate, the great 1967 comedy-drama co-starring the wonderfully seductive Ann Bancroft that really got this ball rolling.

The phenomenon does seem to have legs. I have seen several older moms proudly wearing t-shirts with themes like "I Know I'm Hot," as well as a younger one with a "MILF In Training" tank top that barely contained her surgically enhanced bazooms. This means a term that if used by a teenage boy not long ago would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap by his mom has officially entered the cultural mainstream.

One critic tried to get his hands around the phenomenon in reviewing Cougar Town, the new ABC sitcom starring Courtney Cox as Jules, a recently divorced hottie with a 17-year-old son who decides to spice up her dull existence by chasing young studs.

But the critic got it bass ackwards in asserting that older women today are more uncertain of themselves than ever, fearful of losing their sexuality and intimidated by all the young things around them whose social lives are one big orgasm. Puh-lease!

If that's the case, then I'm hanging out around the wrong shopping malls because the older unattached moms that I know seem quite certain of who they are, have fulfilling lives with challenging jobs (if not the best health insurance) and could care less about the Miley Cyrus lookalikes who will give a blowjob at the ring of an iPhone.

Then there is Weeds, the Showtime comedy-drama in which Mary Louise Parker plays Nancy, a widowed suburban mom who deals pot to keep up with the Joneses and her mortgage. And Eastwick, another loogie of a sitcom from ABC that is a takeoff on the Witches of Eastwick movies in which Rebecca Romijn plays Roxie, a witch-in-training with a young boyfriend.

While I can't speak for that Demi Moore, the goals of Jules, Roxie, Nancy and the moms on Wysteria Lane seem to be the same: Assert their sexual power on boy men who are least able to resist it. True romance is, of course, an afterthought.

No one would ever accuse television of providing good role models, but while the MILFs Do Prime Time phenomenon -- as well as the Cougar and Puma sub-genres -- may earn Nielsen points, it is an inapt way to stereotype older women.

Okay, maybe I need to lighten up. After all, society always seems to go to extremes when it comes to anything to do with sex. Then again . . .

Top photograph by Michael Desmond/ABC