As a trans lesbian who has long admired — and, let’s be honest, lusted after — older women, one would imagine I’d be thrilled by cinema’s latest trend. Throw a rock and you’ll find a deeply-thoughtful piece exploring how 2024 is the year of MILFs. This new wave of MILF cinema (comprised of titles like Babygirl, A Family Affair, The Idea of You, and Lonely Planet) has gotten everybody talking. Goodness knows how happy I am to see personal heroes like Nicole Kidman getting the work she deserves!
Yet there’s something off about this new trend of cinema, something missing. The MILF revolution will be televised…but apparently it will not make room for queer women?!?!
The absence of queer women from these 2024 romantic movies is much like finding racist material in a country song: disappointing, but not surprising. After all, these films only subvert the American media status quo by featuring younger men swooning for older ladies. Otherwise, these projects still focus on the default protagonists for any modern romantic comedy/drama: rich conventionally attractive white people. The days of working-class-centric American romantic cinema (like Moonstruck or Marty) are long gone.
We live in a post-Ticket to Paradise/Anyone but You world where a fantasy of the bourgeoisie is the central focus. These new MILF canon entries follow that standard to a tee. They refuse to rankle viewers by making their protagonists disruptive beyond a new take on age-gap romances.
Since The Idea of You and A Family Affair can barely find ways to differentiate their leading men, of course they wouldn’t differentiate their genders. These projects (largely coming from algorithm-driven streamers) want to offer viewers a taste of “rebellion” without getting intersectionally subversive.
This year’s newest MILF cinema installments also contained vivid displays of sexuality that Hollywood rarely lets queer women exhibit. Babygirl generated lots of fall film festival buzz with Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson’s kinky exploits. Even The Idea of You had Hathaway writhing with pleasure as Galitzine put his hand in her pants. It’s awesome to see women over 40 viewed as sexual beings on-screen, make no mistake about it. I just think it would be even more awesome if this sexual exploration made more room for queerness.
The potential superiority of queer women MILF cinema is impossible to ignore given how tedious so many of this year’s “provocative” romantic movies turned out. The Idea of You was, for one thing, a snooze. It took a high-concept premise (what if Harry Styles/Shawn Mendes fell in love with a super-fans mom?) and laid on the strained melodrama. Lonely Planet, meanwhile, received criticism for deeply monotonous pacing. How does a romantic drama put more people to sleep than enticing their pulses to quicken? As for A Family Affair, its general reception was more oriented around crummy cinematography and inexplicably bad dialogue. Few tittered in giggle-infused whispers about how “sexy” it was. Only Babygirl has received near-universal praise — maybe because it’s the only one to reportedly acknowledge and incorporate queerness into its narrative.
2024’s mainstream MILF cinema has let queer women down, but, thankfully classics and indies are here to fill in the gaps Lonely Planet could never imagine satisfying. One could argue lesbian film started in 1931 with the original work of MILF cinema: Mädchen in Uniform. Then there’s Desert Hearts one of the greatest movies of all-time. This film hinges on the relationship between Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) and the younger Cay Rivers (Patricia Charbonneau). The emphasis on Bell being older and in the midst of a divorce proves an important undercurrent to the feature’s emotional power. She’s spent much of her life adhering to society’s rigid norms, but it’s never too late to embrace romances that make existence so much sweeter to bear.
If emotional romance isn’t your thing, Showgirls unearthed campy and sensual delights from Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley’s rapport. And if you’re more into GILFs, Lily Tomlin and Judy Greer briefly intertwine romantically in Paul Weitz’s 2015 directorial effort Grandma. The list goes on and on: Chloe, Daughters of Darkness, Parallel Mothers, Loving Annabelle, Concussion, The Favourite.
Then there’s the grand master of these kinds of films, Carol. Possibly the greatest movie ever made (though one could say that about a LOT of Todd Haynes films!), every frame of Carol oozes romantic longing. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s performances are rich with humanity while their dynamic together is nothing short of sublime. Maybe this motion picture is why modern MILF cinema avoids queer women relationships. Perhaps filmmakers have just felt it was pointless trying to make a new film with age-gap lesbians that could possibly top Carol.
The passion for MILF-themed queer romantic material also manifests in countless folks on the internet and in the sex work industry. Sure, such properties typically lack production value. However, you don’t have to look far on the interwebs for a queer woman’s artistic response to something like The Idea of You. Pornographic works, meanwhile, have begun to employ more women directors/screenwriters/producers like Bree Mills. These filmmakers lend extra dashes of nuance to the MILFs of adult cinema. Such projects range heavily in quality, but they at least dare to put queer equivalents to A Family Affair out in the world.
Plus, free from the expectations of algorithm-driven streamers, fan-fiction tomes and adult films can embrace the deeply precise griminess and imperfections of real-world sexual encounters. There’s plenty of romantically engrossing smutty writing out there centered on older queer women. Fan-fiction writers love imbuing their characters with richly specific personalities and sexual proclivities. You get the tantalizing material and some romantic weight. Those are two qualities mainstream MILF cinema often ignores even when it comes to heterosexual relationships.
Scour down that material if you can because it can scratch a very important itch for queer viewers. Specifically, they can satisfy the desire to see/read/watch older queer people existing. Art about older queer women engaging in splashy romances with younger folks can function as just a fun thrill. But it can also work to normalize the lives of queer people existing beyond the age of 30, 40, 50, or — gasp! — even 60. Better yet, it presents these individuals as desirable.
2024 is bound to go down in history as the year of MILF cinema and it’s great to see icons like Nicole Kidman, Anne Hathaway, and Laura Dern getting hefty paychecks and hunky romantic interests. However, these supposedly “subversive” romantic dramas could go even further in upending the status quo. It’s time for a mainstream romcom with a lesbian MILF. But, until then, well, a Bree Mills-directed adult film with Lauren Phillips and Penny Barber beckons…
