A new fantasy woman enters the picture ...
It’s your mother-in-law. For many men, it’s a complicated relationship
The mother-in-law is no longer a joke. The images of the meddling yenta, interfering harpy, intransigent frump, party-pooping drudge, sexless and censorious humiliator are no more.
This week, research commissioned by European clothes retailer Peter Hahn suggested most men nurture lustful thoughts about their wives’ mothers. The motherin-law has been relaunched — as a desirable fantasy woman.
But who is really surprised by this? Since your mother-in-law carries the physical and personality traits that made your wife attractive to you in the first place, why would you not also find her female parent a reliable source of concupiscence?
Your mother-in-law is also a genetic map of your future. Best enjoy it. One in six men do — to the extent of actually preferring their mother-in-law to their wife. There are significant erotic currents here: sons-in-law enjoy a naturally defined sexual conspiracy with their wives’ mothers.
But the mother-in-law as intimidating scold is a fixed point in European culture. From the Roman satirist Juvenal to the comedian Les Dawson, the mother-in-law has been despised and mocked. Juvenal said he couldn’t be happy while his mother-in-law was still alive. Les Dawson said his motherin-law’s smile was like a crack in a septic tank.
How dated and crass these both seem. We don’t know what Juvenal’s or Dawson’s mothers-in-law looked like. Perhaps the poet and comedian were each justified in their fear and loathing. Diet, fitness and fashion did not, in the past, always support the mature woman. In Dawson’s Manchester, a 60-year-old woman would be an exhausted, toothless wreck. With a cigarette.
But who could blame David Cameron for enjoying a tremble of pleasure at the prospect of Viscountess Astor, who shares her daughter’s smile, poise, style, trim figure and sensational hair?
We are in Oedipal territory here, a prospect that Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones explored very thoroughly with his 1989 marriage to 18-year-old Mandy Smith. Wyman’s son then promptly married Mandy’s mother, Patsy, who thus became the bass player’s mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw. So here was an amusing confusion of relational hierarchies.
Sex is, in one form or another, the basic currency of human transactions and it trades most often in the areas of transgression and speculation. Wyman could transgress and speculate at will — for so long as his marriage lasted.
For the rest of us, a regular mother-in-law also offers scope for speculation and transgression, at least of the imaginative sort. The mind tantalizingly wonders whether the mature woman might possess special, unknown accomplishments in the art of pleasure.
As for transgression, the desirable mother-in-law brings us close to the powerful incest taboo. But since your mother-in-law does not, by definition, share your DNA, the fantasy enjoyed by more than half the male population is not really incestuous at all. But it is disruptive. Sex usually is, whether below the belt or above the collar.
The real subject here is the psychological reality that older women are now entering the arena of desire.
The classic example of the complicatedly desirable older woman is Mike Nichols’s 1967 film, The Graduate, which turned motherin-law obsession into graphically memorable cinema. Here, Dustin Hoffman’s character is seduced by the voluptuous mother-in-law-tobe just ahead of the wedding.
Having ravished him so success- fully and pleasurably, she then seeks to prevent the daughter’s marriage on account of the act of almost Biblical defilement she has so enjoyed. It’s completely and sensationally delicious — not a nerve-ending is untouched.
The idea of the eroticized mother-in-law, of the knowing older woman, includes notions of tutelage, intimacy, taboo and disruption. Not to mention delight.
It’s why the French don’t use the expression “mother-in-law,” which sounds like a contract. They say “belle-mere,” which means beautiful mother. What with men’s maternal fixations, that seems right, if complicated.