The Hidden History of the MILF

Yes, really!

If you were between the ages of 13 and 30 in the year 1999, you probably remember the scene from American Pie that I’m about to tell you about.

No, I’m not talking about the pie scene. I’m talking about the MILF scene.

This one takes place in a suburban living room with bad music and red Solo cups full of beer, and a group of horny teenage boys gawking over a photo of their friend’s — Stifler’s — mom, memorably played by Jennifer Coolidge.

“I can’t believe a fine woman like this produced a guy like Stifler,” one of the guys says.

“Duuuuude! That chic’s a MILF,” says another.

They then go on to define the term (“Mom I’d like to F—k,” if you really need me to tell you) and the group begins chanting it together: “MILF! MILF! MILF! MILF!”

Cut scene.

And with that, the MILF was cemented into the cultural zeitgeist.

Now before we continue, a caveat: I am telling you this because American Pie turns 25 this year. (Yes, millennials, we are that old.) And also because I revisit the movie in the latest episode of my podcast, In Retrospect.

But I’m also telling you because I really can’t resist getting to the root of a linguistic term — especially a slang term, especially a funny one, and especially one that tells us something about women and our place in the world. And so as I was revisiting the rise of the MILF, and reading up on all of the ways America became MILF-obsessed in the years after American Pie, I couldn’t stop wondering where the term actually came from. Sure, American Pie popularized it. But where did it originate?

As it turns out, there are a few answers.

The first comes from the internet, a source I would most definitely tell my students is wildly unreliable, but which seems convinced that MILF first appeared in an early 90s issue of “Motor Booty Magazine” — which, contrary to the title, is not in fact a raunchy car magazine but an alternative music and comedy magazine.

But… I couldn’t find a copy to verify this information. What I could find a copy of was a 1995 issue of Playboy, which featured a pictorial of hot moms called “Fabulous After 40,” and which spawned all sorts of discussion on early internet message boards about the “Milfs” who were photographed.

Next, the linguist Ben Zimmer, all around nice-guy and language columnist at the Wall Street Journal, pointed me to some research he had done into the MILF (yes, these are the kinds of things linguists sometimes study) which found that perhaps the first recorded use of the term was in a Buffalo, N.Y., newspaper — it was the name of a local band that was playing a show in town, alongside “The Tails” and “Tugboat Annie.” (MILF-adjacent?)

But was the band-name “Milf” really the same MILF? That question was no match for Zimmer, who tracked down one of the band members on LinkedIn. (Ha!) He told Zimmer — though he did not want to be associated with the research project by name; he had a more corporate job these days — that he and his band mates had heard the term from lifeguards at Fort Niagara State Park to refer to … well, hot older women swimming in the beaches of Lake Ontario.

But, reader, let me tell you — MILF then moved across the country, to California, where perhaps it rightly belonged. In 1992, it made an appearance at a linguistics conference at UC Berkeley, where Laurel Sutton was presenting on slang words to describe women. It was “one of 87 different terms” she had collected in a survey of undergraduates, which she would go on to detail in a paper called, “Bitches and Skanky Hobags: The Place of Women in Contemporary Slang.” What a title!

Berkeley is not that far from LA, so perhaps we can presume that MILF made its way to Hollywood, which seems much more fitting than Upstate New York?

However it happened, America would go wild for the MILF in the years following the release of American Pie.

Britney, pre-kids, in a “MILF in training” tank.

Books bearing names like Confessions of a Naughty Mommy, The MILF Anthology and The Hot Mom's Handbook became part of a MILF-lit genre. There was MILF merch; MILF music; MILF weed. (There’s still MILF weed… but it seems to have originated, or at least become popular, on the hit show Weeds, in which hot suburban mom Mary Louise Parker starts selling pot; she creates a strain called MILF, Snoop Dogg comes to visit, they perform a song about it and everybody lives happily ever after.)

Meanwhile, in my home state of Washington, there was a mini-scandal when a brave resident applied to the DMV for a vanity license plate that read, “Got Milf?” — a play on the famous “Got Milk?” ads from that era. (The applicant claimed that MILF stood for: Manual Inline Lift Fluctuator. Suuuuure.)

You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear the very funny story of where MILF is today, but I will leave you with the words of Laurel Sutton, the Berkeley linguist, who — years later, when she was notified that her MILF paper was receiving the linguistic honor of “first usage” in the Oxford English Dictionary — said she was both “gratified and mortified.”

“The citation will live on long after I’m gone,” she wrote on her blog. “I can only hope that future generations will find this word quaintly offensive, and say, ‘Sure glad we don’t talk like that anymore.’”

Or… do we?!