Who me? I’ll be digging past the worn out granny panties I’ve been living in for the last several years and rummaging around for the one last thong at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Then Imma shave my legs and put on some heels. Then I guess I’ll find a clean dress that fits, an actual pair of matching earrings … do my hair … put on some makeup …
Okay, but I could! Because moms are the new sexy. You heard it here first.
It’s not that women who happen to be mothers are more sexy than other women who happen to not have any children; it’s that they’re in the running. Of course, this year they also happen to be winning.
Penelope Cruz was just named Esquire magazine’s sexiest woman alive for 2014. She also happens to be a 40-year-old mother of two, as every damn story about this makes sure to point out in the first paragraph. But somehow Brad Pitt, sexy leading man despite being a father of six, never seems to comes up. Of course mothers can be celebrity sex symbols. Mothers can also be senators, CEOs and fighter pilots and it does drive me crazy when a woman’s professional accomplishments are trumped by the fact of her motherhood. This Telegraph headline from earlier this year comes to mind.
There’s one big difference here, though. Nearly everybody thinks it’s wonderful for mothers to also have high-profile, important careers — as long as they don’t look sexy doing it! My own social media feeds are full of it. Many of my own friends — mothers themselves — have raised their virtual eyebrows about women like Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé shaking their stuff. Is this really appropriate? I mean, they are mothers. Not only is J. Lo a mother of two young children, she’s also 45 years old. That’s right, she’s committed the cardinal sin of flaunting her booty over forty.
I mean, people might ask, what kind of message are we sending to our daughters? Cannot even talented women have successful careers without cashing in on their sexiness? These women aren’t representative of anything real anyway. Those are all excellent, discussion-worthy points, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with whether a pop star’s motherhood in and of itself should somehow make her an unfit sex symbol.
I wholly reject the idea that by simply being mother, a woman is expected to become a virtuous role model for everybody’s children. Mothers are grown women with careers, attitudes, opinions, sex appeal, and complex and varied personalities. Can she sing lullabies to her children one moment and then scandalize the world with a sexually explicit performance the next? Damn skippy, she can.
Which brings me to Queen B.
God, I love her. I’m lukewarm on her actual music, but I love everything about her celebrity. I love how she seamlessly makes motherhood a vibrant component of her public identity without giving up one iota of her “hottest woman in the world” status. She didn’t start a line of organic baby food. She just kept dropping hugely popular albums and putting on smoking hot performances. And when Beyoncé brought Blue Ivy up on stage after her epic performance at the VMAs she tied a bow on that whole package.
So, yeah, moms are the new sexy. I’m calling it.
As if some skinny nineteen-year-old could ever really embody what sexy is anyway. No offence, Miley.
