A new fantasy woman emerges ...
It’s your mother-in-law. For many men, this relationship is complicated
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 that 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, of course, 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 could not 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.
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.
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, the Dustin Hoffman character is seduced by the voluptuous mother-in-law-to-be just ahead of the
wedding. Having ravished him so successfully 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 is completely and sensationally delicious.