The MILF has turn out to be a stock figure within the landscape of popular culture. As a relative to the bimbo and the hun, the “mum I’d wish to fuck” is an archetype that hangs on the architecture of excess – a perceived too much-ness of lips, breasts, perfume, and carnality. From Stiffler’s mom to Lisa Rinna, the MILF is a caricature of femininity that guarantees consummate sexual initiation to adolescent virgins all over the place. 

An immersive exhibition by artist, curator, author, and filmmaker Molly Wurwand (at Junior High Los Angeles and co-presented by THNK1994) reconceptualises the Milf as a queer icon. Inspired by “performances of genders, cosmetic surgery, pseudo-celebrity, and the hypnotic discomfort of being alive inside a body”, Wurwand invites visitors to inhabit their “latest definition” of this cultural archetype characterised by them as “the patron saint of Los Angeles”. Featuring original paintings, film, performance art, fastidiously curated artefacts, a sensory perfume experience, and the possibility to come across a vision of your Milf alter ego, Wurwand lovingly (and with what they themself describe as “deranged reverence”) explores, celebrates, and queers the Milf archetype.

Born and raised in Brentwood, Los Angeles – the “headquarters of the Milf spirit” – Wurwand, founding father of the Milf Museum, became obsessive about this icon of ripe, abundant womanhood. “I don’t know should you know Brentwood,” Wurwand tells me over Zoom, leaning closer to the screen and dropping their voice conspiratorially, “but it surely’s where Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered by OJ Simpson.” We discuss this duality of Los Angeles – city of angels and perpetual summer, bathed in golden light and lined in palm trees, yet built on a dangerous faultline. “The best way LA looks is so sparkly and magical, but there may be this mixture of darkness and lightweight,” they explain. “I believe my first fascination from being little was LA itself. And I believe if LA were personified in some sort of form it might be the Milf: stunning beauty, confidence, and a lust for all times, but then there is a darkness under the surface.”

With its emerald lawns, turquoise pools and put-together housewives, Brentwood appears like a glimmering idyll. However the illusion of eerie perfection was shattered in 1994 when, in a story that might be straight from the pages of a Hollywood film noir, Nicole Brown Simpson [along with her friend Ron Goldman] was found brutally murdered by her estranged husband, American football hero OJ Simpson. The world watched, captivated, as his flight from police custody on town’s freeways reached its dramatic denouement within the driveway of his Brentwood home. For Wurwand, it was a formative childhood moment of awakening – a horrifying yet compelling glimpse of their neighbourhood’s shadowy undercurrents; a confirmation of the young artist’s suspicion that, inside the stainless gated residences, all was not because it seemed in sunny Brentwood. 

“I believe if LA were personified in some sort of form it might be the Milf: stunning beauty, confidence, and a lust for all times, but then there is a darkness under the surface” – Molly Wurwand

As we’re talking, it occurs to me that Marilyn Monroe was also living in Brentwood when she died. “It just gave me chills that you simply said that because I feel Marilyn within the air in Brentwood,” Wurwand says. “People may be in search of the glitz and the glamour of Marilyn, but I prefer to consider her in a shawl and sunglasses, shopping on the Brentwood general store. Marilyn is completely present in all of this.” Discussing dark tourism and Monroe’s hacienda bungalow on Fifth Helena Drive, Wurwand says, “I discovered that Anna Nicole Smith had rented the home for a time period. I’m not attempting to say that [Brentwood is] a very haunted place because I believe it is also a very peaceful place…. But there’s something baked into the energy of this geography.”

The vision of the Milf that emerges from Wurwand’s work was born, partly, from their childhood proximity to the extravagances and tragedies that got here to embody, for them, a specific strand of Milfdom. Having dedicated their practice to delineating and explicating their ideas of the Milf, they’ve evolved its original notion right into a rather more inclusive concept. For Wurwand, the Milf – with their intentional and committed performance of gender – is a queer icon who thereby transcends gender. “I never use all caps – like MILF –  because I don’t see it as connected to the acronym. ‘Mum I’d wish to fuck’ is inherently objectifying, but [in my work] the Milf is a persona or a high quality; an adjective.” Here, the Milf goes way beyond being a hot mum, it’s not even a state that Wurwand describes as being conditional on motherhood. “Milfdom is such a heightened performance of gender. And what’s the queer community without considering, battling or embracing performance and gender? But I believe [the Milf] also breaks freed from that, it’s a way larger spirit than simply being contained in a single body or one aesthetic. Being a Milf is a state of being.”

Their Milf ethos was also profoundly affected by the trauma of puberty. “I developed very early and, by fifth grade, I suddenly looked like a cartoon character. It felt so dissonant,” they recall. “On the time, I believed there have been only two genders. I didn’t know that there was infinitely more. I used to be like, ‘Well, I’m not a boy. And I’m not a woman.’ It was really hard and it got really dark and sad for plenty of years. My gender dysphoria was like this horrible, rotten soup within me.” 

“Milf is a state of being” – Molly Wurwand

The conflict between exteriority and inward identity was personified for Wurwand in figures resembling Princess Diana, Lola Ferrari, and Whitney Houston. “I idolised these individuals who were judged so harshly for a way they give the impression of being – or a lot was assumed about them due to how they give the impression of being– but they were different inside.” It’s this dissonance between surface and interiority, performance and privacy that recur throughout the artist’s queering of the Milf archetype. 

It’s challenging to pin down the precise tenets of their “latest definition” but that is probably an integral a part of its inclusivity and expansiveness. It’s always evolving to embrace ever more tropes and details. But there are specific unmistakable Milf artefacts that make the Milf world legible, enshrined by Wurwand of their Milf Museum – Tivo distant, Starbucks cup, and Motorola Razr mobile phone (metallic pink, after all). 

One other throughline is the stress between artifice and verisimilitude. We discuss the allure of Disneyland – one other natural denizen of California – and Wurwand’s fascination with the hyperreal. “At Disney, they leave no stone unturned. In case you pick up an old-timey telephone on Major Street, there are people talking. Nothing is there by accident.” Inspired by this “commitment to creating the not real real”, the exhibition aspires to this same attention to detail. “I believe it’s possibly the closest approximation of a Milf Disneyland,” they tell me. At an arrogance mirror that allows you to see yourself reflected back in Milf form, you possibly can pick up a telephone and listen in to a series of voicemails impregnated with revealing details and clues in regards to the identity of an imagined 90s Milf. “In case you listen, you would possibly determine why the Milf cannot come to the phone,” Wurwand tells me. 

“Milfdom is such a heightened performance of gender. And what’s the queer community without considering, battling or embracing performance and gender?” – Molly Wurwand

Alongside the screening of My Imaginary Life for Someone (M.I.L.F.S.) (a movie made by Wurwand and Ryan McGlade), visitors can experience a sunbathing deck inhabited by ‘real Milf’ performance art, complete with faux grass, set to a soundscape of sprinklers and Los Angeles radio stations. The show also offers the possibility to be intoxicated by heady Milf scents. Wurwand worked with photographer and fragrance expert Elizabeth Renstrom (aka @bassnotebitch) to present a number of Milf perfumes. Together with her “archaeological knowledge of defunct fragrances”, Renstrom curated a series of still-life shots with “peak-Milf era” ephemera anchoring each scent in a time and place. Set amid an arrangement of historical Milf artefacts, the perfume bottles “appear to be candy”. In line with the powerful barely an excessive amount of of everything-ness that characterises an important component of Milfhood, the fragrances are suitably potent. “You’re tasting it. It’s sort of stinging your eyes. You are feeling a bit nauseous but additionally excited,” says, Wurwand, describing the overwhelming sensory experience of the perfumes but additionally, for me, encapsulates something of the formidable and abiding Milf spirit: “They stick with you.”

Milfs by Molly Wurwand (co-presented by Thnk1994 and Junior High LA) is running at 603 S Brand Blvd, Glendale, 90214) until June 11 2023.

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