You know that moment when a man who wants something thinks he sees an opportunity to charm an easy mark? A common version is specific to mothers, and it goes like this: A mom and her kid are out somewhere together, and they meet a guy. It doesn’t really matter who. He may be a service worker looking for tips, an acquaintance of the child looking to get in good with the mom, or a garden-variety slimeball. What matters is that he’s meeting this woman for the first time. And when she is introduced as the child’s mother, that’s his cue.
He licks his lips. This is what he’s been rehearsing for. He delivers his line with relish: “This is your mother? I thought she was your sister!”
The mom is supposed to titter and blush, thoroughly disarmed by being thought young and worthy of anyone’s flirtation. Maybe this has happened to you, or to your mom. Certainly you’ve seen it on TV. It’s wildly patronizing, which is not to say it never works.
Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live offered up a sketch that doubled down on that interaction, then tripled down, then quadrupled down. Sarah Sherman and Heidi Gardner played two moms being taken out for a Mother’s Day brunch by their sons (Mikey Day and Andrew Dismukes). The scene began wholesomely, with talk of a post-brunch trip to the botanical gardens, then got fully derailed when their server, Alby—played by the host, Walton Goggins—arrived at their table and started hard-core flirting with the moms. He began with a variation on the classic line, of course: “I’d say ‘Happy Mother’s Day,’ but all I see are two young men out with their much-younger sisters.” Sherman and Gardner reacted with an aw-shucks vibe, embarrassed but pleased. “You’re getting a big tip, mister,” Sherman said. To which Alby replied: “No need, I already have one.”
They had entered uncharted waters. But still, Sherman’s character tried to play it off. “You do not want to flirt with a couple of old moms,” she said. This is when the sketch turned. “Oh yes, I do,” Alby said. He’d “always been attracted to mothers,” he announced, perhaps because he so admired his own, or perhaps because “once I came of age, I slept with every single one of her friends.” This was the sketch’s big joke: Although other servers might facetiously flirt with mothers for tips, Alby meant it. He genuinely wanted to have sex with these moms.
As the sketch went on, Alby delivered menus and mimosas alongside increasingly lewd double entendres and come-ons, all Southern charm and jutting hips. Goggins played him with an infectious, naughty glee.
But Alby supplied all the sexual energy in this sketch. The moms were at turns delighted and shocked by his antics but mostly did not return flirty fire. Only briefly did one of them display any libido at all: After Alby announced he’d soon have a “hat rack” under his apron, Sherman’s character took off her reading glasses and said, in a sultry tone, “Prove it.” But don’t worry: Before the audience could be subjected to too much lustful-mom energy, her son immediately scolded her, and she snapped back into sexless-mom mode.
The show had an opportunity to push back against the stereotype that middle-aged women, and mothers in particular, are both undesirable and empty of desire themselves. That seems perhaps to have been the writers’ intention. A couple of minutes into the sketch, Alby scolded one of the sons for being skeeved out by the proceedings: “Just ’cause your mama baked you doesn’t mean other men don’t want to see the oven.” Crass this might have been, but it was also a good point. Women’s sex lives don’t end after giving birth, however much our culture might like to pretend otherwise. Unfortunately, most of the sketch undermined this idea—because the joke was not only that Alby would take things so far. The sketch went for laughs by implying how ridiculous it was that a guy like him could truly be hot for these silly, frumpy old moms, these “mature goddesses dripping in Talbot’s,” as he called them. One couldn’t escape the sense that the women were the real butt of the joke.
Goggins, it’s worth noting, is 53, and—as he mentioned in his monologue—a newly anointed sex symbol. But older men have often been allowed a sexuality denied to older women. What could have been a refreshingly expansive view of motherhood instead ended up feeling retrograde.
In a segment of “Weekend Update,” SNL reinforced the view that motherhood is antithetical to sexuality. Gardner appeared again as a different but still-frumpy mother: “Dianne, the mom who’s only read about New York on Facebook.” She spewed a bunch of urban legends that she’d seen on social media. One was about a mom who visited New York City and bought a pair of sunglasses from a street vendor. “She puts ’em on, what does she see?” Dianne asked. “Porn! Everywhere!” The sunglasses somehow “erased all of her memories, and now all she remembers is porn!” Her children? Forgotten. “Sorry, kids—mommy just knows porn now. She can’t come to your recital ’cause she’s on the bang bus.”
These sketches might have seemed to take aim at overly flirty waiters and Facebook conspiracy theories. But the undeniable undercurrent was: Watch out for moms who think about sex—and be sure to shut them down.
The post SNL Isn’t Really Hot for Your Mom appeared first on The Atlantic.
