Oh, the reality television we’ve seen! In the past couple of decades, we’ve had a show where complete strangers wed, in order to see whether they can grit their teeth and stay together (“Married at First Sight”); a show in which people try to survive in the wild without any possessions, including clothes (“Naked and Afraid”); a show where contestants agreed to eat live bugs, get buried alive, and chug donkey semen for a cash prize (“Fear Factor”); and even a show where, for a staggering fifteen seasons, aspiring businesspeople were pitted against each other by the future President of the United States, all for the dubious honor of working at his real-estate organization (“The Apprentice”). One would think that the American reality-TV audience, of which I count myself a hardened member, should by now be inured to the horrors presented onscreen. And yet, sometimes life surprises you. “MILF Manor,” a dating show whose first episode aired on TLC on Sunday, might be a new low for reality TV, perhaps even a rock bottom.
The premise of “MILF Manor” follows that of other horned-up, vacation-resort-based dating series such as “Love Island” or “Bachelor in Paradise.” In the première, we are introduced to eight women, who are going to be sequestered for several weeks in a Mexican beachside villa. (The word “manor,” with its highborn European connotations, was clearly chosen for its alliterative qualities. Nobody does tequila shots in a “manor.”) Once on-site, the women are tasked with finding love, or the semblance of it (sex), with eight men to choose from. “MILF Manor” ’s hook, or the thing that sets it apart from its dating-show predecessors, is evident in the show’s name. The women are not the usual crew of twentysomething bachelorettes but, instead, hot-to-trot peri- or post-menopausal foxes, who are looking for youngsters to canoodle with.
“I have an extremely high libido,” a fifty-nine-year-old woman named April says. Another woman, also named April, who is forty-three, wants to date a younger man because “a lot of guys that are older they are, like, in papa mode, and I want to get a chance to do me a little.” Kelle, who is fifty, has realized that she “can teach younger men a lot of things,” the specifics of which she might not be able to “say on TV.” (She also has an alter ego named “Disco Mommy” who “loves house music.”)
All of this is only slightly less outlandish than the spoof reality show “MILF Island,” featured on NBC’s “30 Rock,” back in 2008. (The show’s tagline: “Twenty MILFs, fifty eighth-grade boys, no rules.”) But, ten minutes into the first episode of “MILF Manor,” an additional twist is revealed. When the women meet the men for the first time, they’re shocked to discover that these men are not just any old young bucks but actually their very own sons. It’s unclear to me why these mother-son pairs weren’t suspicious when they were asked to go, at the exact same time, on an all-expenses-paid vacation to Mexico, but never mind. More important is the fact that “MILF Manor” is not just a May-December dating show but a May-December dating show haunted by the spectre of incest.
This is certainly a disturbing choice in and of itself, but even worse is how coyly the show plays with its own gross premise. All the contestants know that it’s creepy, but no one says it outright, and the low-simmering primal-scene taboo that the series relies on for its shock value is transmuted into tepid sex-comedy-style high jinks. The coupling-up rites of a dating show are given a cheap boost by the supposed hilarity of the sons’ embarrassment at their moms’ brazen sexuality, and the moms’ discomfort with their baby boys’ horniness. “Honestly, older women are very hot, and I know I’ve got the swag and the game for them,” Joey, a twenty-year-old, says, to which his mom, Kelle, replies, “This is, like, news to me!” They both laugh awkwardly. Meanwhile, Joey stops Kelle when she tries to seduce Ryan, the thirty-year-old son of another MILF, Shannan, six hours into the retreat. “Mom! You’ve gotta be joking,” Joey sputters, as Kelle complains that he’s “cock-blocking” her. Kelle, in fact, emerges as a she-devil whom the other women need to watch out for, both as a romantic rival and as a threat to mother-son closeness. She’s “definitely going for all of the attention,” a MILF named Charlene complains. “She’s going to bring drama to . . . the relationship I have between Jose and myself,” Pola, another MILF, fumes, when the buxom Kelle flirts with her twenty-eight-year-old boy. Sons and lovers!
This heady Freudian stew reaches peak distillation during a game in which the women compete for the privilege of sleeping in one of the suites that has a hot tub. As the guys stand in line, shirtless, each blindfolded mom approaches, teetering on stiletto heels, and paws at the men’s bare, muscled torsos to identify which belongs to her son. The intermingling of the erotic and the maternal in this scene, with its winking sanctioned trespass, seemed downright pornographic. And, though I watched until the bitter end, I could sympathize with a friend who told me, “I felt so ashamed I was watching that I turned it off after thirty minutes.”
Unfortunately, “MILF Manor” is not the first dating show to flirt with incest. This past September, Netflix gave us “Dated and Related,” in which the contestants are pairs of siblings who go on dates side by side and even share a bed together at night. One might say that “Dated and Related” walked so that “MILF Manor” could run. But, unlike that earlier show, which had scant pretensions to any kind of statement, “MILF Manor” purports to have a political bent; there’s some high-minded talk in the first episode about the “double standard” that intergenerational relationships still suffer from, where older men who date younger women are looked upon more approvingly than older women who step out with younger men. At the villa, Jose reads from a message sent by the production, which explains that participants will take part in a “dating experiment that will level the playing field.” And yet the gendered stereotypes to which the show adheres, especially when it comes to what counts as an attractive older woman, are as constrictive as any corset. “I already feel like I’m the woman who is going to get the least attention,” Charlene, who is forty-six and seemingly the least tucked and aerobicized of all the ladies, says. “I’m, like, the biggest girl here.” Charlene must have been “very hot when she was younger, more in shape,” one fellow-MILF opines, but now she “doesn’t know how to glam herself up.”
Sporting extremely worked-out bodies and apparent cosmetic interventions, the MILFs fulfill the cultural edict that demands that women retain a skinny, high-femme youthfulness if it kills them. This is a standard that the women themselves are keenly aware of, and woe betide the MILF who doesn’t fit the bill. Kelle “has invested a lot of time into her body and her sex appeal, and I know that young men want that,” Charlene says, her eyes wide. “What do I have to offer?” Being deemed unfuckable is, in the world of “MILF Manor,” tantamount to death. 
The Mother-Lovers of “MILF Manor”
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