PROBABLY NONE of Freud's ideas have aroused more disgust and incredulity than the Oedipus complex. Named after the mythical king in a Sophocles play who unwittingly sleeps with his mother and murders his father, the Oedipal theory hypothesizes that there's a bit of Oedipus in all of us. From early childhood, the theory goes, taboo feelings of lust and anger sometimes arise toward parents. These feelings in turn cause us conflicting feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety. The emotional conflicts recede and then resurge in adolescence in forms that hide some of the painful, antisocial feelings from consciousness underneath symbols and displacements. A childhood sexual feeling toward one's mother might be redirected towards someone who is in one way or another like one's mother. “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad),” as the old barbershop standard goes. Patterns of fantasy and dread evolve during childhood, but in one way or another may unconsciously influence our psyches for ever after.
It's hard to tolerate the idea that people could have such icky, taboo fantasies, whether disguised or not. In the play, poor Oedipus lives in fear of the dreadful fantasies coming true. His wife Jocasta (who is also, unbeknownst to either of them, his mother) consoles him: “[F]ear not that you will wed your mother. Many men before now have slept with their mothers in dreams.” Good thing dreams don't come true! Except that they do in Greek tragedies.
People hear the story of Oedipus and the theory bearing his name and sometimes conclude that Freud was a coked-up madman, a monster projecting his own twisted fantasies onto everybody else. As Freud put it in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,
That is what our opponents believe; and in especial they think that we have “talked” the patients into everything relating to the importance of sexual experiences—or even into those experiences themselves—after such notions have grown up in our own depraved imagination. These accusations are contradicted more easily by an appeal to experience than by the help of theory.
For a host of reasons, the Oedipus complex has presented complications and challenges to experimental verification, but I'd like to make a bold claim that to my knowledge has never been made publicly or formally. The claim is this:
Since Freud's death, a “natural experiment” has occurred that has confirmed the validity of a central element of the Oedipal theory.
What was the experiment? A sequence of events over the last thirty years that unfolded like this:
The internet was created. The internet radically changed how people lived, including their sexual behavior. Pornography migrated from newsstands' dirty magazine racks, adult theaters, and the seedy back rooms of videotape rental stores to computers connected to the internet. Individuals began consuming porn directly in their homes with a new degree of anonymity and privacy, free of public embarrassment. At the same time, computers' facility for compiling statistics on their users' behavior made en masse porn habits and preferences visible and trackable. In their book about internet pornography A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas accordingly call the internet “the world's largest behavioral experiment.”
MILF porn became more popular than sliced bread. The acronym “MILF” stands for “mom I'd like to fuck.” The 1999 film American Pie popularized the term, using it to describe a voluptuous mom played by Jennifer Coolidge. The four letters of this acronym spell out what's merely implied in the Sophocles play: that mothers and mother figures elicit not only chaste feelings, but also in some contexts elicit taboo, uncomfortable feelings of sexual desire. An article in Playboy in 2014 reported that “shockingly, the most popular search term on PornHub isn't even an explicit one, like ‘blowjob’ or ‘threesome’; it's
the familial ‘mom.’” A Google search of the term “MILF” at 8:14 p.m. on January 7, 2024, yielded over 4 billion results — a billion-and-a-half more results than turned up when searching the household staple “bread.”
Of course, we can't expect this natural experiment to prove Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex in all its details (e.g., his view that defenses against intolerable Oedipal feelings might account for many of his patients' most troublesome symptoms). What it does reveal, at a minimum, is that males have pervasive, taboo, sexual feelings about moms. We can take this as a brute fact or, in a scientific spirit, we can attempt to explain it. And there is simply no theory in psychology that would have predicted it other than Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.
Freud might have said a lot of other things that would not have been borne out by data collected over a century later. He might have made the outrageous suggestion, for example, that people harbor secret sexual feelings towards bread. And this natural experiment would have returned the verdict: nope, they're much more interested in MILFs. He could have named any other form of perversity—bestiality, say, or pedophilia—as the secret longing most prevalent in the hearts of straight males. Instead, he said it was Oedipal desire, and the data ended up backing his claim. Freud's hypothesis predicts and explains the MILF phenomenon with specificity and economy.
Other explanations are possible and worth considering, but the MILF phenomenon represents compelling evidence that Freud was onto something. Unless, of course, your abhorrence of the hypothesis prevents you from even considering it.
While psychoanalysis has a ready explanation, the rest of psychology and psychiatry sputters and handwaves. Anything but admit that they were wrong, and that it looks like Freud was right. Dr. Justin Lehmiller, author of the 2014 Playboy article on MILFs, for example, lurches to an irrational halt before this evidence, jams the gearshift into reverse, and stomps the accelerator. He denies that MILF porn has anything to do with mothers at all, despite the acronym spelling it out for him, and insists that the term “MILF” is actually a misnomer:
It is somewhat surprising, then, that “MILF” is the term that stuck for describing this genre of porn. Whether the women in these videos are actually moms seems irrelevant, as are the viewers' feelings about their own mothers. Indeed, MILF porn isn't really about moms per se—it's about real women who are comfortable and confident with their bodies and sexuality and aren't afraid to show it.
He argues that it's the power of these women that's attractive, not their status as moms, and speculates that the MILF phenomenon may have originated in office cubicles, not in the psychic tensions of child development:
[A]ttraction to MILFs may be a reflection of the changing gender structure in the workplace, in which women today hold more positions of power than ever before.
Right. “Mom-I'd-Like-to-Fuck” porn is not about moms! Definitely not about liking to fuck them! Because that would be disgusting! It's actually about the seductiveness of empowered
women in the workplace! MILF porn is so not about moms. Not at all. We can all agree that consumers of this porn would respond at least as strongly to another name. How about BCFA porn for “Business-Casual Feminist Appreciation,” because … because otherwise … because—Wait, what?
The moms in MILF porn do wield power, but only of a very dated and domestic variety: the power of family caretaker, rule-setter, and provisioner of food, clean clothes, and comfort. Her power is the power to gratify or to withhold pleasure. The fantasy moms in many of these videos are domestic servants who not infrequently do laundry, cook, clean, nag, and call themselves “Mom” and “Mommy” on camera to establish their maternal character before going on to serve the sexual needs of their young male wards. The dialogue in such videos often emphasizes familial, taboo, incestuous themes with about the subtlety level of a neon sign. I have yet to see a pornographic video in which a MILF turns anyone's head with a memo summoning her sales team to the next action review.
What does Dr. Lehmiller have to say about the Oedipus complex? He admits that it's the first explanation for the MILF phenomenon that comes to mind, then swiftly brushes it aside with an argument as circular as Jocasta's chastity belt. In all the years since Freud conceived of the Oedipus complex, Dr. Lehmiller explains, “very little scientific support has been found for this idea.” In other words: this new evidence can't validate the Oedipus theory because the theory hasn't been borne out by past evidence. According to that logic, of course, nothing that hasn't been proved already can ever be proved! The MILF phenomenon clearly is supportive evidence. Poor Dr. Lehmiller! He is up to his Oedipal eyeballs in denial, and we can certainly understand why. The facts he denies are icky and hard to tolerate. To dismiss them, he uses the same kind of emotionally driven rationalization we encounter in climate-deniers.
For a long time, climate scientists predicted carbon emissions would heat the atmosphere and wreak havoc on the environment. They could not conclusively prove their case in a laboratory, but over the years, a natural experiment unfolded that tested their theories and yielded confirmatory results. Global temperatures and sea levels rose in concert with rising carbon dioxide levels. Glaciers and snowpack receded, causing rivers to run dry and forest fires to increase. Atmospheric heat evaporated more water and began to shower the Earth with more storms and floods. But climate deniers dismiss manmade climate change as the explanation for these phenomena precisely because, in their minds, it wasn't proven up to now. The rising seas, receding glaciers, droughts, and storms are evidence in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. The rise of MILF-themed pornography in the anonymous wilds of the internet is a natural experiment providing a new source of data to test one significant piece of Freud's theory. It suggests many people really do secretly harbor these taboo feelings even though they're at the same time ashamed and disgusted by them. It suggests that Freud was right.
Let's be braver than Lehmiller and look at the data with our eyes open. Even a cursory glance at the titles of channels on popular video-sharing site PornHub obliterates Lehmiller's pious characterization of this porn. In fact, on the day I investigated, four of the top ten and twelve of the top thirty channels on Pornhub had explicit incest themes in the titles. This held whether I ranked the websites according to Pornhub's
private algorithm, according to their reported subscription numbers, or by views. Clicking on the channels, sampling their videos, and visiting their home websites indicates that the titles accurately and consistently reflect the content. The My Family Pies channel, for example, refers satirically to the ‘80s sitcom Family Ties. Maybe it's selling ‘80s TV porn, not incest porn? Let's see. It advertises its content as follows:
Don't be greedy, there's enough family pie to go around! These horny step fathers, mothers, brothers, and step sisters love to share and keep it in the family. Peak behind closed doors to see how they strengthen their family bonds. Stay for dessert and sample a piece of mom's hot pie!
Hmm, no mention of Tina Yothers. Unsurprisingly, videos from My Family Pies have zero to do with '80s TV or the modern feminist workplace and lots to do with faux-family members banging each other. The existence of more generally incestthemed porn like that featured on My Family Pies makes it even more likely that MILF porn is interpreted by viewers as incestuous. It would be a stretch to say that MILF porn is not understood as a part of this broader genre without a plausible explanation for why this is the case. The context suggests that
contrary to Lehmiller's assertion, MILF porn is about moms in the familial sense of the word.
While this graphic offers a snapshot, it doesn't capture the full extent of explicitly MILF- and incest-themed porn on the internet. Top channels like Let's Doe It may not focus exclusively on MILF-porn, but they advertise it first on their list: “Stepmoms, threesome sessions, hard rough sex—letsdoeit. com has it all!” Porn star Alex Adams does not appear in the table, but he makes a porn series called “Mom Comes First” and another called “Family Therapy XXX.” His video “Mom and Step Son's Late Night,” which has 98.5 million views on PornHub—roughly equivalent to the viewing audience of the Superbowl—is filled with dialogue explicitly role-playing the mother-son relationship of the two actors and the secret and taboo nature of their encounter.
Adult entertainers and models on social media platforms like OnlyFans have caught on to the demand for MILF-themed fantasies as well. Fifty-six-year-old Elaina St. James has been called “OnlyFans' Favorite MILF.” In real life, she is a single mom from a conservative midwestern background. She knew nothing about MILFs until she read an article saying older women were making good money modeling on OnlyFans. That proved correct. She describes herself as in the top 1 percent of OnlyFans earners and her earnings claims have been fact-checked and corroborated by Business Insider. She has written about her experience as an OnlyFans model for HuffPost and for Newsweek.com. In the latter article, she said,
There is such a market for mature “MILFs” and I hadn't known that previously. I have older fans, but my core fan base are aged 25–40. … What I have found is that my fans generally have a fantasy about an older woman in their life, like a teacher from when they were younger or a neighbor. So sometimes I'm me, or sometimes I'm role playing as, for example, a “naughty stepmom.” I suspect these younger men are not going to date someone my age, but they like the fantasy.
St. James and I chatted for an hour via Zoom on November 2, 2023. (I reached out to four other online adult entertainers. One declined to be interviewed, two did not reply, and one agreed to an interview but failed to follow through.) She told me that performing a MILF role on OnlyFans is entirely demand-driven. It was never of interest to her personally and can even be off-putting. She told me, “I think men really want to get one over on their dads. … You've got a hot wife, I find her hot, I'm better than him. I'm better than my dad. I have a bigger dick. She wants me because I'm young and vital, look at how much I turn her on.” Her fans' taboo fantasies sometimes make her uncomfortable—if the age-gap they want to roleplay is too big or if they want to roleplay in a way that feels too directly incestuous. “They want to call me ‘Mommy’ and I'm like No. Nope. You can call me ‘stepmom,’ but you cannot call me ‘Mommy,’” she says. “It's too infantile. It's too young. That really skeeves me out.” The market conditions she describes undermine critics' assertion that Freud suggested these sexual fantasies to his patients. In St. James's experience, her fans bring these fantasies to her, and she tries to redirect them.
According to Dr. Justin Lehmiller, the interest in MILFs has nothing whatsoever to do with moms. So much for Occam's razor.
“The Oedipus conflict remains one of Freud's concepts least investigated outside of the consulting room,” according to Adelphi University investigators Lawrence Josephs, Nina Katzander, and Aleksandra Goncharova, writing in 2018. They are among the very few psychologists to test the Oedipal theory with experiments, not just case reports from clinical practice. Likewise, investigators Ogas and Smith observed in 2012, “Almost no academic research has been done investigating the appeal of MILFs.” Those sex researchers who have noticed the MILF phenomenon have not evaluated it as evidence for or against psychoanalytic models of the mind. An article appeared in the Journal of Sex Research in 2014, for example, titled “Schoolgirls and Soccer Moms: A Content Analysis of Free ‘Teen’ and ‘MILF’ Online Pornography.” The article did not consider the Oedipus hypothesis to explain its data. Academic psychology and psychiatry have in recent decades favored meticulous description over hypothesis-testing, and if they're going to test any hypothesis, it's usually not a psychoanalytic one.
This is partly because Freud's critics have succeeded in stigmatizing psychoanalytic ideas as categorically “unscientific.” Lack of adequate support for research by past psychoanalytic leaders, meanwhile, hindered the field's response to this anti-Freudian propaganda. Contemporary psychoanalytic researchers now face real difficulty obtaining funding and publishing in mainstream journals because of this stigma. A 2015 article in Psychotherapy Research cited “decreased research funding, increased medicalization of mental health problems, and declining psychodynamic representation among research faculty” as impediments to psychoanalytic research.
But even if there were more psychoanalytic researchers, it's not clear they'd seek to investigate the Oedipus complex. Many commentators have observed that psychoanalysis itself has eschewed its former emphasis on sexuality in favor of attachment. Psychoanalyst Kaveh Zamanian has noted the general “decline of psychoanalytic interest in the concept of psychosexuality” and sounded Freud's old warning that people should be careful not to ignore childhood sexuality just because it's uncomfortable to think about. It's also unrealistic and puritanical not to think about. Perhaps it was psychoanalytic puritanism that drove Zamanian out of clinical practice to go open a bourbon distillery in Kentucky.
What about the 2018 studies by Adelphi researchers Josephs et al.? They used a technique known to social psychologists as “mindset priming” to test some of Freud's hypotheses about the Oedipus complex. The researchers had hundreds of study subjects read vignettes designed to unconsciously prime a certain idea or feeling, then had the subjects react to various prompts and looked at whether the priming had predictable effects on the subjects' responses to the prompts. So, for example, they had one group of subjects read a vignette about a child walking in on their parents kissing in their bedroom—colorfully labeled the “Oedipal loser” vignette. A “spousal betrayal” vignette described a man or woman discovering their spouse committing an infidelity. A control group vignette described someone entering the kitchen to discover their roommates making breakfast.
Based on Freud's Oedipal hypothesis that children of a certain age experience relations with their parents as a sort of “love triangle,” the researchers predicted that people would react to the first vignette much as they would to the vignette about adult infidelity, with feelings of jealousy and disapproval of adult infidelity. Their predictions proved correct, and their results were published in Psychoanalytic Psychology in 2018.
Freud-bashers and denial-deniers within and without psychoanalysis are not so easily convinced, however. They'll go to astonishing lengths to protect their fantasy that the Oedipus complex is, as climate deniers say, a “hoax,” a relic, a myth that needn't be taken seriously. A 2019 article in Psychodynamic Psychiatry titled “Freud's Clinical Theories Then and Now,” for example, comes dangerously close to academic fraud in its misrepresentation of the scientific status of the Oedipus complex. Purportedly written from a psychoanalytic point of view, the article makes the false claim that “75 years of research” have led psychoanalysts to abandon the Oedipus theory:
With the aid of over 75 years of research since Freud's death, today's psychodynamic-orientated clinicians have discarded many of Freud's tenets related to the Oedipus complex. Modern psychoanalysts have focused their attention instead on a patient's personal relationships in their early life, their current life, and in their interactions with their therapist (transference).
Seventy-five years of research on the Oedipus complex! That's a lot of data! Let's take a look at it! The author provides only a handful of citations to back up his bold claims: review articles by Jonathan Shedler, Rebecca Curtis, and Drew Westen, respectively, and the 1996 book-length review of psychoanalytic studies by Fisher and Greenberg, Freud Scientifically Reappraised. He can't point to a single study that has disproved the Oedipus complex. A closer look at the reviews he cites is even more damning; none support the author's claims and several directly contradict them. Shedler and Curtis do not mention the Oedipus complex at all in their reviews. The general thrust of their articles is that Freud's core ideas are testable and have been confirmed. Westen exclusively discusses studies that support the Oedipal theory. Here's what Westen has to say about one of them:
Watson and Getz asked parents of children ages 3–6 to record over a 7-day period the number of affectionate and aggressive acts they displayed toward their same- and opposite-sex parents. Supportive of Freud's [Oedipal] theory, affection toward the opposite-sex parent and aggression toward the same-sex parent were significantly more common than the reverse.
Far from declaring the Oedipus complex a psychoanalytic relic, Westen describes it as one of five “central tenets” of psychoanalysis and provides statistics suggesting that the majority of psychoanalytic practitioners concur. A survey he conducted showed “a surprising amount of agreement” about the five tenets.
Fisher and Greenberg's review raises questions about aspects of the Oedipus theory and suggests modifications to the way the theory is applied in clinical practice, but it explicitly affirms the core elements of Freud's Oedipal theory:
Let us make one last pass at Freud's Oedipal schemata. His formulations in this area are of anfractuous intricacy, and the findings pertaining to their validity are equally complex. Although the data support the basic notion of the Oedipal triangle and the existence of certain mechanisms to cope with the tensions created by Oedipal confrontations, they failed to corroborate other major features. The evidence … disputes the widespread inclination of psychoanalytic clinicians routinely to trace their patients' symptoms and difficulties to defects in Oedipal relationships.
Since Freud's time, psychoanalysts have indeed broadened
their understanding of attachment, conscience development, symptom formation, and treatment well beyond the confines of Freud's initial formulations. Psychoanalysts have not, however, come to any kind of consensus discarding the Oedipus complex. According to Westen, it remains a central tenet of psychoanalysis that alongside loving feelings, children sometimes have forbidden sexual and aggressive feelings toward their parents, that these conflicting feelings may be influential and symptomatic, and that they may persist as mental traces in adulthood, expressed at varying levels of consciousness.
Psychoanalysts have retained these ideas for a very simple reason, and it's not because they're all brainwashed by Freud. It's because the ideas correlate to the observed reality of clinical and introspective experience. The ideas are furthermore beginning to be proved by experiment, including the grand natural experiment of the internet. To put it more concisely, the ideas are correct.
Repeat a lie often enough and people start to believe it—especially if the lie is something they desperately want to believe: “the climate crisis is a hoax”; “Freud has been discredited”; and “MILFs are sexy because of feminist advancements in the workplace.” The world is so much simpler, healthier, safer, and cleaner when looked at without functioning eyes! Like Freud, Oedipus was really onto something.
Austin Ratner is editor in chief of TAP and author of the book The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof.