Long Live MILFs
On Stanning Middle-Aged Actresses
This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe!
I don’t know when it began (perhaps it is timeless), but at some point in the last several years, a new figure has emerged for sapphics to idolize: middle-aged women. In particular, many lesbians, bisexuals, and queer women online have taken it upon themselves to carry the torch for various middle-aged actresses they find stan1-worthy, with Twitter bios that read things like “Stanning middle-aged women is my full-time job” and “Long live milfs.”2 The different women this standom can encompass is actually quite vast, but there are some names that come up most frequently: Sarah Paulson, Cate Blanchett, Rachel Weisz, Gillian Anderson, and Sandra Oh, for example.
This fascination reaches across all platforms on the internet, from Twitter, to Instagram, to Tumblr, to Reddit. On Instagram, you can find the devotional meme account sapphic_middleaged_actresses, whose bio reads “niche memes about the sapphic yearning for middle aged actresses & other gay shit. they are dykonically acclaimed treasures and lesbian icons.” On Twitter, you may find this fancam3, which features all the middle-aged women that have been on the Hollywood Reporter Roundtable accompanied by the voiceover “do you know what a MILF is?” (Several of the women featured in this video are in fact not mothers, such as Sarah Paulson and Sandra Oh. As we will learn, these labels tend to not have a clear definition).
There are several different iterations of this phenomenon, some of which overlap. There is the stanning of middle-aged actresses, which though it does produce intense feelings, is necessarily detached because these stans have never actually come into contact with these actresses in most cases. Then there is the more immediate desire for “actual” (read: non-celebrity) middle-aged women, such as is revealed in sapphics’ recollection of crushes on teachers or a friend’s mom. (See: this meme, this meme). Certainly, the second example is more material, as these are women that actually exist in sapphics’ lives, but there is also generally a far-fetched, aspirational aspect of these crushes, as I imagine very few of them are actually consummated. In this way, these two examples of desire are thus closely related; there is a hopeful, larger-than-life quality to these (presumably) one-sided relationships that nonetheless provide a very real sense of satisfaction and devotion. Indeed, there is clearly something compelling about these experiences, which seem to be shared by numerous sapphics across the globe.
But where do these impulses come from? And why have these desires coalesced in such a way online? Certainly, you could take a clinical, Freudian look at this phenomenon and say that these queer women and sapphics simply have a psychological need to be taken care of, or, to put it in layman’s terms – they just have mommy issues. But I am not Freud, and we are not in a therapy session (though maybe we should be). And, because nothing in this world is simple, I think there are multiple answers to the questions I’ve posed.
In some capacity, there is a desire for care present here. (See: “women with massive mom vibes who look like they could take care of me,” above). This desire is clearly present in some of these recollections about having an adolescent crush on your friend’s mom or your teacher. Wanted to be cared for is (I think) a universal desire, but one with particular resonances for queer people. Many queer people also have a particularly troubled relationship with adolescence, often feeling like they weren’t able to fully be themselves or start figuring out who they were at a time when all of their peers were. It might feel difficult to truly grow up for this reason, and encountering someone who can impart wisdom to you can be especially rewarding. (Indeed, this relationship is a common throughline of experience for both queer men and queer women, and especially for trans and non-binary people).
Moreover, some queer people have complicated or difficult relationships with parental figures because of their sexuality, which might make a maternal figure all the more appealing. (When I posed a question about why sapphics love middle-aged women on Reddit, one user simply commented: “mommy issues.”)
But this is not the whole story, either. On the other side of the coin, there is a clearly stated desire for domination present in this discourse. This seemingly masochistic obsession with physical destruction – “I want so-and-so to run me over with a truck,” for example – has been present among fan communities of all sorts for some time now and has become a central rhetoric of stan culture. As Jia Tolentino writes in The New Yorker, “devotion, by its nature, tends to invite agony.” Tolentino suggests that this particular impulse is an affliction of the times, that “the half-ironic millennial death wish has become an underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age.”
This longing for domination has always had queer under(over)tones, and is particularly prevalent among sapphic fan communities. You might recall the great Rachel Weisz renaissance of 2018, which included the famous Reductruss article Woman Cozily Cupping Mug Secretly Thinking About Getting Absolutely Railed by Rachel Weisz, or Jill Gutowitz writing in Vice that “Every day, it seems we find new and innovative ways that we want Weisz to harm us.” This desire for self-destruction is often asked not of younger women, but of middle-aged women like Weisz who evidently wield an unassailable power over sapphics everywhere.
Both of these impulses – to be cared for and to be dominated – are predicated on a desire to let someone else take control, particularly when it’s someone more experienced than oneself. The meme pictured above (“Women with massive mom vibes who look like they could take care of me”), also contains the phrase “Women who look like they could destroy me without a second thought,” indicating that these two ideas often exist simultaneously.
Part of this desire, I think, is based on the assumption that middle-aged (or older) women are both more confident and competent than younger women. Confidence, of course, is universally appealing. When I spoke to some users on Reddit, I got numerous comments about the maturity, confidence, and ability to be and know oneself that middle-aged women seem to exude. Confidence thus plays into both of the ideas I’ve mentioned so far – being able to care for someone necessitates a certain amount of experience and/or confidence, and, concurrently, observing confidence in someone else may generate a desire to be dominated by them.
Inevitably, such a fascination is also related to a larger cultural impulse that has become increasingly common, which is this obsession with commenting on how beautifully celebrity women are aging. There is an oft-repeated mantra online that tends to go something like “look how good J-Lo looks at 52!” or “Gillian Anderson is the hottest 53-year-old,” or simply “Jennifer Beals is 57???” (Reader: she is). These exclamations certainly seem laudatory on the surface, but also tend to reflect a strange assumption that “normal” women apparently wither up and die once they reach the age of 40.
What I want to note here is that there seems to indeed be a particular fascination with middle-aged women in digital culture more broadly, from straight women obsessing over J-Lo’s skin to gay men singlehandedly running the Glenn Close Oscar campaign. (Glenn Close, by the way, is 74 years old, which just goes to show you that the term “middle-aged” really has no fixed definition anymore – I’ve seen women as young as 35 be included in this category). But while some of this discourse about middle-aged women can be fairly condescending (some sapphic stans included), I do think there are some elements at play in the lesbian discourse that aren’t captured within this larger discussion.
Indeed, while there are plenty of straight people who find middle-aged women desirable or attractive, there are often groups of women who are particularly beloved by sapphics and less so by everyone else. The most obvious example of this is probably Sarah Paulson who, while she is a critically acclaimed actress frequently lauded for her on-screen work, has a uniquely devoted fanbase of young sapphics who idolize her for her beauty, talent, humor, and importantly, her sex appeal. Another actress who sometimes comes up in this discussion is Helena Bonham Carter, who, again, is a beloved actress, but is not frequently cited as a sex symbol except for among certain lesbians and bisexuals.
There also seems to be a certain amount of joy – especially among queer people – in ardently loving something that is not commonly seen as desirous in the world writ large. This is a common element of queer culture (and in particular lesbian culture), as queer people have always found new ways to define and redefine what is or isn’t attractive within our own communities. (These norms frequently fall outside of normative standards of beauty – see: body hair, mullets, Hawaiian shirts). As one user put it on Reddit, loving middle-aged women almost runs “counter current to cis het culture which devalues these women.” This is a common element of sapphic fan culture online, wherein fans create their own value systems and get to decide what falls into this “canon” of queerness.
As with everything, some people are bothered by this particular trend. Every year or so the same discussion about so-called “age gap” relationships in lesbian films is rehashed, with detractors saying that this dynamic is unhealthy and plays out too frequently. Some viewers take issue with the power dynamics at play in these films and claim that there are too many movies that fall into this category. (In reality, there are not that many of these films – Carol, Ammonite, and Desert Hearts are a few of the most popular examples). For those that are troubled by this trend, this love for middle-aged actresses is not necessarily something to celebrate.
For the actresses who have become the objects of our collective affection, however, this movement is surely a welcome development, and it never hurts to have sapphics on your side. And, regardless of whether you think this inclination is a “positive” trend or not, it has become a compelling force within digital lesbian culture and is not likely to die out soon. As one stan put it on Twitter, “long live milfs.”
Stan is a portmanteau of the words “fan” and “stalker,” but in common use just means a very dedicated fan. It originates from the Eminem song of the same name.
In case you didn’t know, MILF stands for “Mother I’d Like to Fuck.” (I’d like to formally apologize for having to include this footnote).
A fancam is a fan-made video mostly found on Twitter. They are usually only a minute long or shorter and often feature an upbeat song paired with a fast-paced video reel of an actor or character’s best moments.