There was no pop-eyed lust, no furtive boner, no drooling over dusky bazooms and stiletto gams. I could not be moved by Teutonic nubility, taut bellies or thong-flossed buttocks. In fact, the entire 3-D section conjured up only the grim image of nearsighted shut-ins with red and blue cardboard glasses perched on their trembling noses, soiled BVDs clumped around their varicosed ankles.

I tossed my copy on a groaning pile of erotically benign rags: Harper's, the New Yorker, Golf Digest. I was saving myself for the superior stroke book, my own true erotic bible, the glossy guide to honeys most likely to succeed with me, myself and a box of Kleenex: The Lands' End "America's Ultimate Swimwear" catalog, demurely billed as "26 pages of the kindest cut anywhere."

To hell with coltish babefests and contrived 3-D hooey. It withers in the face of this robust confidence, these sturdy thighs, those downy arms. What is a collagen-plumped pout and a belly ring in the face of a tender grin and the endless promise of maturity? I am over the supermodel; we're not even friends. These days, most nights, I belong to the soccer mom.

That's right, she of the coveted vote and the Plymouth Voyager. Am I the only one to have discovered her sultry poignancy, the sexy affirmation that everything -- and I do mean everything -- is possible after childbirth at the age of 35? Nope. We are legion (though still somewhat stealthy and apologetic).

I know, I know. The Lands' End models are fairly young women, but that's only because catalog models usually are. What they project is unabashedly adult. These are still proto-soccer moms, here to dispel the ridicule and denigration heaped on their sisters by smarmy comedians and jealous Type A urbanettes. This subtle swan might require a kinder cut, but that's about all the supermodel has on this Venus in a tankini.

I am not the first guy to complain (others in a suspiciously defensive tone, I with great sincerity) that the overwhelming majority of women promoted by SI, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Allure -- the whole panoply of publications dedicated to starvation chic -- tend to be about as sexy as plaster mannequins. Beautiful, yes -- if you subscribe to the criteria of Hugh Hefner and Hamish Bowles -- but also unapproachable, unreal and kind of cadaverous.

The typical supermodel is, to my eye, oddly lifeless, sterile. Does she have genitals? Or is her authentic sexuality subsumed by the awesome austerity of her calculated media presence? Could I really contrive a convincing fantasy in which I would throw down Heidi Klum and blitz her fleshy battlements? Nah. For that I need a real woman. For that I need a soccer mom.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.