My Farmer’s Almanac is the annual Pornhub data. As a corn farmer considers weather patterns, I read porn search terms and consider what the trends mean for our culture. I’ve done it at the end of every year for a decade — reconciling mass adult sites’ numbers against those from the alternative-to-mainstream-porn platform I work for, MakeLoveNotPorn. Most years my almanac tells me what I already suspect. This last year, I was surprised.
Over the last few years, the atmosphere’s been shifting.
There’s a MILF fever.
“Mother’s I’d Like to Fuck” are topping the charts. And I think this harvest says a lot about society right now. But first, the proof…
Searches for fuckable mothers have climbed the search ranks five years running, peaking now as the second most-sought category in the country1. Six years ago, it wasn’t in the top 5. While we watched this unfold through Pornhub’s reports, I saw it personally at MakeLoveNotPorn. More and more creators were sharing sex videos of their fertility journeys, fucking to progress labor, and navigating postpartum intimacy. And more conventional MILF’s — which in porn-speak rarely means new mothers, but mature women — were submitting, nests newly empty, exploring menopausal sexuality, and expanding their long-term relationships.
Outside of the adult landscape, my social feeds told a ‘safer’ version of the same story. Creators wiped tears, knowing their children would be teased for having a hot mom. The influencer Amanda Fowler gained hundreds of thousands of followers dispensing “MILF etiquette.” Jessica Bennett traced the etymology of the acronym here on Substack.
The oldest archetype, the mother, is a trend. Mothers are desirable. Not just tolerated. Wanted, and exhibiting her own want, openly and at scale. The MILF is having a moment, and a feminist reclamation.
In those same five years, I became a mom of two boys. My midriff gained a cesarean scar shaped like a Ren and Stimpy smile. My husband wiped poop off me as my second-born landed onto our Nordic Knots rug, tearing my taint. I nursed them, then weaned them. My boobs turned to empty skin. And I was having the best sex of my life. Using my body to its limits made my pre-maternal over-intellectualized intercourse and stifled-sneeze orgasms feel foolish. As I learned to care for my children, I started caring for myself. Parenting with my partner brought us closer. My body created; it wanted to create more; it wanted and wanted more. Motherhood rocked my world, erotically. I started writing about our sex on Substack. It turned out people liked a sexy mom blog. Because people liked MILFs.
Seriously. Imagine this with me. One of the most-visited websites on Earth, billions of views a month, reporting that the majority want mothers, in rising volume, five years and counting. Isn’t that incredible?
As Bennett found, this MILF forecast dates back to teenage lifeguards in upstate New York rating the hot moms at the lake. Then it migrated into humor magazines and linguistic papers on the ways we insult women, and finally to big screens in American Pie, where the teenage boy fantasy supplanted itself in my subconscious. I never wanted to be the teenage heartthrob. I wanted to be Stacy’s mom. To have it “going on” — the pool, the confidence, autonomy, and comfort within my sexuality in spite of an ageist, misogynist culture. And it seems like I’m not alone. Jennifer Coolidge as Stifler’s mom, and the aforementioned mother of Stacy imprinted the hot-mom lifestyle on all of us ‘80s and ‘90s babies who are now childrearing and refusing to shrink into a desexualized cliché, choosing instead to reclaim the trope. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
For most of the history that’s shaped us, a woman’s sexual life and her maternal life were sequential. Her desirability ended when she reproduced. The mommy milker fetish was niche. The Madonna and the whore weren’t two women, but one woman’s two sequential phases. But that partition is dissolving. The mother’s eroticism is no longer confined to taboo or parody. Mothers, and the society searching for MILFs, are dissolving the trope as old as our Current Era. Moms needn’t be virginal. Mothers are a sex symbol.
If I treated this almanac as augury, I’d make grand claims. A shift this size isn’t just the fermented impact of American Pie. Nor is it cyclical fashion like bellbottom jeans. MILF fever is a dramatic response to absurd times.
Consider what else developed in these same five years. Society was diagnosed as sexless. The birth rate plummeted. The Surgeon General proclaimed both our stress and loneliness levels were an epidemic. We stopped dancing. Our literal Mother Earth is suffering. And global authoritarianism dressed domination up as fatherly protection, despite consorting with (or being) abusers. We, the populous, grew anxious. We craved nurturing. So starved of care, we sexualized it.
Which brings me back to Amanda Fowler, the “MILF etiquette” influencer. She and her husband became parents before their frontal lobes were fully developed. By the porn definition, she isn’t ‘mature’ — thus, she barely qualifies as a MILF. But to me, Amanda is proof this fever isn’t about older women; it’s about a population looking to be mothered. Amanda became a mother across these same years as me, looked at the state of the States and the care it didn’t extend to its people, mothers included, and decided to extend that care to herself first. She describes embodying a MILF as becoming the person she herself is turned on by. She honors her own eroticism so as not to be miserable, and teaches other women to do the same. To refuse the selfless-mother script. To stop doing things the way it’s always been done, because look where that got us.
That, in our sex-lite, porn-heavy, un-horny moment, is subversive. The MILF fever isn’t fundamentally about sex. It’s about a woman turning her maternal care back toward herself, and a culture which is starved for care that recognizes a mother’s self-possession as the most desirable thing available. When mothers come, we tend our own soil first. Whether that healing truly spreads to everyone witnessing it or reading about it online, I can’t say for sure. But based on the comments I get on Happy Endings, I believe it does.
The real Farmer’s Almanac fed a population by telling it when to sow and when to reap. I offer this reading of the adult website tea leaves in the same spirit. The population is hungry for MILFs. This trend, which contradicts longterm beauty standards and expectations for aging, shows us our historic conception of reaping and sowing is over. Desirability is ageless. Care — for yourself, and for each other — is hot right now. And even though mothers have always been the ones to want for others, now their wanting is what is wanted.
Happy Endings is how I spread love, in a care-starved world, by sharing stories from my marriage, and points of view on love in culture.
Every Monday I share a hot take or hot tale for free, except once per month it’s extra-explicit for paid subscribers (like this latest one about ‘milking’ my husband), and every other Thursday I share tips on how to expand your own intimate life (like this one on laughter sex) for paid subscribers.
On Pornhub, ‘MILF’ ranked as the second most-searched term in 2025, 2024, and 2023 (behind Hentai); third in 2022; fourth in 2021.
I love this! And I share with you, what i perceive to be not the norm, that motherhood (x3) was an inflection point in my own sexuality. I think one reason, of many, was an such an empowering relationship with my body, which fueled my overall empowerment. My relationship with my body had always been far more focused on what everyone else would like. And now it was mine, and it was fucking incredible.
Abigail, the essay becomes especially interesting when “MILF” moves beyond an age category and into a question of whether motherhood can coexist publicly with desire, agency, and self-possession. Reading the search trend as a cultural signal opens a larger inquiry into how women reclaim care for themselves after entering a role that can consume extraordinary amounts of it. That gives the data a human question to carry even where the cultural explanation remains open for interpretation. Grateful for the seriousness beneath the provocation and for the way you connected motherhood, desire, and self-possession.