When 'the older woman' is a mom
From Kristin Cavallari's 24-year-old boyfriend to Anne Hathaway's upcoming 'The Idea of You,' motherhood brings a whole lot of baggage to age-gap relationships.
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A few weeks ago, the 37-year-old reality-TV star Kristin Cavallari hard-launched her relationship with a 24-year-old. She went straight to the grid with a smiling photo of herself alongside Mark Estes—a college football player turned social media influencer—with the caption, “He makes me happy.”
In response, she got some high-fives: “Get it Sis,” one woman wrote. More so, Cavallari got criticism and mocking commentary, much of it referencing her age and that fact that she’s a mother:
“Are you adopting him?”
“Your kids need a step dad, not a big brother lol.”
“She’s finally posting pics of her kids.”
“This kid was in high school in 2017 when she was a married woman with three children.”
Cavallari, who divorced the father of her kids in 2022, seems determined to appear unbothered, posting a series of TikToks where she lip syncs to popular audio with lines like “go fuck yourself, seriously.”
She’s also made an appearance in a video for Estes’s TikTok collective—he has a TikTok collective—called Montana Boyz, which consists of a handful of baby-faced young men with a penchant for shirtlessness, cowboy hats, hipster mullets, and lip-syncing the same Luke Combs song over and over again. In a video with 9 million views, the Montana Boyz lip-sync their hearts out right up until the big reveal at the end: there’s Cavallari being swept into the arms of her new boyfriend. In response, a commenter wrote, “I just know she sets them up with little snack plates and iPads when she needs a break.”
What fascinates me, aside from the sheer amount of lip-syncing going on here, is the way the critique of Cavallari’s new relationship has zeroed in on motherhood.
There is plenty that could be argued around power dynamics and emotional maturity in age-gap relationships like this one. Instead, commenters are mostly gesturing toward the fact that Cavallari is a mom to three kids—and the idea that she is (just barely) old enough to be Estes’s mom. This week, she posted a photo of herself wearing a gold necklace with an “M” initial and one commenter wrote: “Mom or Mark ???” Another replied: “Mark’s mom.”
These commenters, most of them women, aren’t invoking the pornographically celebrated MILF, an object of male desire. Instead, they’re placing at odds Cavallari’s motherhood and her desire for a young man. Her motherhood is treated as proof of the inappropriateness of their relationship. Moms are supposed to be selfless caretakers. Moms are supposed to be safe and chaste. Moms are supposed to know better.
Cavallari’s defenders have pointed out the formidable double-standard here. Men might be gently ribbed about dating younger women—if they’re famous, people might even make infographics about their age-based dating preferences—but they’re often met with either a pat on the back or a jocular shrug that makes certain assumptions about “how men are.” What are ya gonna do.
The reverse judgment of women like Cavallari carries an assumption about “how women are.” She is explicitly criticized as a mother, but the implicit critique is that she’s also failing at being a woman.
These expectations around femininity are so strong that they can be used to minimize or distract from actual abuse, as was the case with Julianne Moore’s portrayal of Gracie in Netflix’s May December, which was based on the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, who pled guilty in 1997 to raping a 12-year-old child, who she later married. “Marriage and motherhood are a woman’s strongest claims toward purity and innocence, especially when she is white,” as I wrote last year. “In May December, these roles give Gracie protective cover, but they’re also the means by which she inflicts abuse. Femininity is her enabling alibi.”
Of course, these feminine expectations are also used to control women who are not abusing anyone.
Interestingly, just as Cavallari was being taken to task on social media, a trailer dropped for The Idea of You, a romcom starring Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old single mom who falls into a romance with the 24-year-old lead singer of a boy band after taking her teenage daughter to Coachella. The film, which is set to premiere this week at SXSW and release on Amazon Prime in May, is based on a novel written by Robinne Lee, an author and actress, who got the idea when her husband was away on a business trip and she stumbled on a One Direction music video. She found herself taken with Harry Styles, who she learned was rumored to date older women.
“The seed was planted,” she said in an interview.
Lee set out to “write a novel that challenged certain myths: that female sexuality ceases to exist after we hit middle-age; that having kids makes us no longer sexually attractive or viable; that women at a certain point in their lives—the point where they should be at their strongest and most prolific—become invisible.” She also set her sights on motherhood:
I wanted to look at what it is to be a mother and to have the onus of always putting someone else’s wants and needs before your own. What it means to sacrifice your own happiness and pleasure and freedom for your offspring’s.
It’s intended as a story of staking a claim to desire, desirability, and visibility, as well as happiness, pleasure, and freedom.
This overlaps with how Cavallari portrayed her story on her podcast this week (alongside some pretty inane conversation about “old souls” and age being “just a number”). “Knowing how happy I am, nothing that anyone could say right now is going to rock it for me.” Later, she added, “Have you seen that man? I get to stare at that man. I’m happy!” She emphasized how often he tells her that she’s beautiful. The same-age men she’s dated post-divorce have been more withholding of praise.
Lee’s novel was driven in part from her experiences around aging as an actress in Hollywood. “You're no longer the hot one. You're not the girlfriend. You're not even the hot wife now. You're the mom,” she said. “It really broke my spirit.” It occurs to me—an elder millennial who still thinks far too much about the formative reality-TV shows of my youth—that Cavallari is re-casting herself as “the hot one,” “the girlfriend,” which is to say: the role that launched her into fame.
It all started with her appearance on the 2000s-era reality-TV show Laguna Beach as a 17-year-old high school student. Producers allegedly manipulated her into a teenage love triangle where she became the villain and “the bad girl,” as she put it in her podcast. Indeed, she was portrayed as a seductress opposite good-girl Lauren Conrad.
I’m thinking now of Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man, a book about the author’s affair with a 20-something as a 50-something woman. She writes of observing an older couple: “I knew that if I was with a twenty-five-year-old man, it was so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.’s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself.” It’s not just an avoidance of aging and death, but also a return to the “scandalous girl” she had been. “I felt as if I were reenacting scenes and actions already past—from the play of my youth,” she writes.
I recently revisited Laguna Beach and was stunned not only by just what babies they all are but also one scene in particular. Cavallari’s on-and-off boyfriend Stephen screams at her during Spring Break in Cabo. After Cavallari dances on top of a bar, he slides up next to her: “What the fuck is your deal, bitch? Hey, get up on the bar, you look real good, slut.” Later, she dances close with another guy, whose trucker hat she pulls onto her own head, and Stephen yells across the bar: “Slut!” Then he confronts her outside: “You are such a fucking ho,” he says.
It’s quite the time-capsule moment of 2000s-era hookup culture. What does it mean for Cavallari to re-cast herself in that youthful role now, as a 37-year-old single mother with quite a bit more power and life experience? I wonder about age-gap relationships not only as a way of “reenacting scenes” from one’s youth, but also re-writing them, perhaps especially for women whose first go-round didn’t feel quite so happy, pleasurable, or free.
As a 40-year-old mom myself, I have never fantasized about an affair with a 20-something man, but I have imagined what it would be like to somehow give my current knowledge, perspective, and life experience to my 20-year-old self. It’s part of what I wanted to do with my memoir: write the book I wish I’d had back then.
Of course, this lack of knowledge, the need for operating instructions, is exactly what makes age-gap relationships ripe for critique. And yet—and yet!—the critique leveled at Cavallari centers on her motherhood. It takes issue with her failure to meet feminine expectations, which feels devastatingly reminiscent of the gender-policing in that long-ago Laguna Beach scene. Bitch. Slut. Ho.
All these years later, she can re-cast herself in that youthful role, but there is no escaping the opprobrium directed at women who step into “badness.”
This reminds me a lot of the work Amanda Montei does around motherhood and sexuality (and her book, Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, & Control, and her Substack, Mad Woman, are both great). I know when I got divorced I was terrified that people wouldn’t want to date me because I was a mother. And then when I found a partner and posted about all the hot sex we were having, my ex-husband slut-shamed me in a custody case claiming that I was an unfit mother because I talked about sex. The hypersexualization of the “MILF” while simultaneously shaming mothers who have and enjoy sex (this doesn’t even touch on mothers who are sex workers, either) is a double-edged sword that no mother can win. Anyway, to celebrate a year on testosterone, I got the word “MILF” tattooed across my stomach (which also then appeared in a court filing by my ex-husband 🙃).
Thank you for this. I definitely encountered some ick in situations where younger men found out I was ENM and thought I’d be the i mommy fantasy and I was not into it. I’ve got people to call me “mommy” already 😵💫