Imagine a 50 year-old woman seducing a 32 year-old man. Fifty years ago, the woman would have been portrayed as a faded movie star, her advances would be spurned and the scene would prove just how pathetic and out of touch she was, as it did in the Oscar-winning 1950 drama Sunset Boulevard.

But today?  It's just another episode in the life of Alex Rodriguez, the 32 year-old slugger who left his gorgeous young wife last year for a fling with a 50 year-old pop star.

Instead of being creeped out by Alex going for a woman old enough to be his mother, we fans wished we could be him.  After all, what man wouldn't want to find out exactly which kind of acrobatic positions the Kabbalah enthusiast Madonna could contort herself into?

So when did Really Legal replace Barely Legal as the sexual fantasy of choice for the discerning male?

The transformation has been a long time coming and closely mirrors the development of indie rock. Much like the Velvet Underground and MC5 began their musical odysseys as reactions against the prefabricated bubblegum pop groups of the '60s like the Archies and the Monkees, the MILF movement began in the late '60s as a protest against such manufactured Hollywood sex symbols as Raquel Welch and Jane Fonda.  The final insult was the 1967 film The Graduate, a movie as insulting to fans of MILF as the Archies hit Sugar, Sugar was to fans of good music. This mean-spirited propaganda piece portrayed Mrs. Robinson not as every schoolboy's fantasy, but instead as our worst nightmare.  

Four years later, Rod Stewart courageously sang of his love for an older woman in his hit Maggie May. The song delicately chronicled the love a teenager felt for his middle-aged lover and gave a voice to our closeted yearnings: "The morning sun when its in your face really shows your age; But that don't worry me none in my eyes you're everything."

Later that same year, the Hal Ashby film Harold and Maude brought the May-December romance to the big screen, as the suicidal teenager Harold finds both the love of his life and a reason for living in the 80 year-old Maude.

The next twenty years proved a fallow time for both indie rock and the MILF. While disco and then hair metal dominated the charts, young starlets like Farrah Fawcett, Brooke Shields and Tawny Kitaen dominated television, movies and music videos respectively.  The MILF movement appeared to have gone the way of the pet rock and the CB radio, a '70s fad that no one felt comfortable owning up to in public.

It would take a mythic figure to reverse the tide of corporate rock and feathered hair. 

Luckily two such figures arose like a pair of phoenixes out of the ashes of '80s excess.

Their names? 

Cher and Kurt Cobain.

While everyone knows the success of Nirvana's Nevermind CD slayed hair metal and ushered in the grunge era, Cher's contribution to the MILF movement is a story that has yet to be told.

Flash back to the late '80s.  Hollywood's hottest young hunks like Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer and Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora mysteriously swore off the teenage poontang to rock under the sheets with the forty-something Cher.  At the time, this blew my teenage mind. Cher was like old enough to be their mother.  What could these young hunks possibly see in her?  To be frank, it grossed me out. And then the If I Could Turn Back Time video came out and I saw two cheeky reasons why these guys chose Cher over her younger contemporaries like Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson.

Both this new sound and this new lust that Nirvana and Cher each respectively brought to the mainstream needed a name.  Initially music critics settled on indie rock, but with acts like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden all signed to major labels, the irony proved too much, and  the original label soon gave way to grunge and then the catch-all of alternative rock.

But take over they both did.  The line between alternative and mainstream rock became increasingly blurred, with the biggest bands of the era such as Creed, Nickelback and Daughtry all paying tribute to the sound of alt-rock gods like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains with their every hit single.