Generation S-E-X

Contrary to ancient doctrine -- and the neighborhood pimp -- mommies can be hotties.

By Amy Benfer

May 2, 2001 | About a year ago, at a cocktail party, I met a young man who ran an escort service. He was about 24, dressed in a black leather jacket. He asked me what I did for a living. "Oh," I said, "I edit an alternative Web site for mothers. We write about all the things that other parenting magazines don't touch. You know, news, politics. Sex."

"Sex?" he said. "Oh man, I don't like to think of mothers having sex."

And so, I think, even the New Age pimp can't shake the mother-whore hang-up. It is fine -- read: sexy -- to want to frolick with prostitutes. This guy's business depends on it. But the idea of a woman, with child, with sex appeal does not compute.

I digest this morsel easily. It is not my first encounter with the mother-whore dichotomy. Besides, I have a healthy sense of self-satire. It didn't take me long to find it equally as strange -- and telling -- that I had felt the need to immediately invoke sexiness as part of my definition of motherhood.

It's an equal and opposite reaction kind of thing. I accept that motherhood is conventionally thought of as unsexy, and therefore I define myself, among other things, and in certain company, as, well, a hot mama.

Or a hip mama or an intellectual mother or a "single and proud of it" mother or just about any combination of mother that begins with some modifier that is conceived as being outside the conventional definition of motherhood.

But have you ever noticed how many conventionally unconventional mothers there are out there? We congratulate ourselves for our tattoos, piercings, queer partnerships, queer friendliness, single motherhood, young motherhood or sex-toy-enhanced motherhood -- or simply for the fact that we wear cool boots and don't have a minivan or an SUV. (And of course, we use any unconventional items on this list that we have to negate any conventional leanings we might have: For example, I'm a married mother with an SUV, a tattoo and a nose piercing, or a queer mother with a suburban bourgeois lifestyle, or a transgendered i-banker feminist mother.)

All of this self-conscious "I'm a mother but [insert qualifier here]" nattering only underscores the idea that motherhood, in its generic, unqualified form, is looked upon as boring at best, as well as sexless, intellectually bereft and generally depressing. I'm certain there are some sinister, misogynistic forces at work here, as well as a healthy dose of self-hatred and a certain amount of delusion, given that motherhood has always encompassed more than the mainstream stereotype of the good mother. (I sometimes suspect that certain especially pernicious stereotypes -- the frigid Victorian matriarch, the '50s housewife and today's suburban soccer mom -- have never existed as anything but straw women for the firebrands of each generation to set ablaze with our hip, sexy lighters.)

But the fact is that the definition of motherhood does change -- often drastically -- from generation to generation. Each generation has to reinvent certain aspects of motherhood to make it palatable to women who have had to shrug off the antiquated notions that held sway in previous generations, and to provide a generational continuum between youth and young adulthood. Young womanhood is all about not being one's mother; therefore when one becomes a mother, one often has good reason to believe that one is not one's mother's kind of mother.

The fact that millions of other women are having the same revelation each day at first means that each generation produces an early wave of mothers who insist to anyone who will listen that they are not like the other mothers they know -- until they realize that they are exactly like millions of other mothers they know. Then they all band together and produce the mothering manifestos of their generation. It's nearly Hegelian: thesis (all mothers look like mine), antithesis (I don't look like my mother, therefore I am not a "mother") and synthesis (this is what mothers of my generation look like -- me!).

To see what the unconventional women who came of age in the '80s and '90s have done with the notion of motherhood, one need look no further than two new books: "The Mother's Guide to Sex: Enjoying Your Sexuality Through All Stages of Motherhood" by sex-positive feminists and Good Vibrations co-founders Anne Semans and Cathy Winks, and "Breeder: Real-Life Stories From the New Generation of Mothers," an anthology of essays edited by Ariel Gore (a "29-year-old single mom and the founding editor of Hip Mama") and Bee Lavender (a "married, homeschooling mother of two and the managing editor of hipmama.com"). Semans and Winks also contribute a regular sex column to Hip Mama.

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