Fear and Loathing in MILF Manor

On age gap relationships, our collective desire for submission, and whether the phrase “That’s my mom right there!” should ever be said on a reality dating show.

“I don’t think any of my sons realise that I have an extremely high libido.”

“I love the Lord.”

“That’s my mom right there!”

These three quotes all appear within the first ten minutes of MILF Manor, a new reality TV show that basically takes the fictional show from the 30 Rock universe – "25 super hot moms, 50 eighth grade boys, no rules” – and realises it for the age of foot fetishism and psychoanalysis. After watching two episodes, I feel pretty confident in saying it’s the dating show that most accurately reflects the modern landscape of sexual politics. The New Yorker called it “haunted by the spectre of incest.”

The premise is simple: there are eight milves in a manor. They’re all looking for love or a good time, having weathered many years of sadness – toxic marriages, divorce, the loss of a fiancé. We learn this when they’re introduced one by one, as per reality TV tradition. “All of my moments have led me to this one,” says a particularly vulnerable woman called Charlene, who is still mourning the recent loss of her 27-year-old daughter. “I am doing this for Ashley in a lot of ways,” she confides. “She wants me to be happy. I know she would want me to be in love.” 

Then what happens is the eight eligible bachelors are revealed, and it’s their sons. We don’t really learn anything about them at this point except that they’re in their 20s.

BRIEF INTERLUDE TO ASK: WHY IS AMERICAN EDITING LIKE THIS??

My brain is used to British reality TV editing, which draws out even the most mundane cliffhangers (“I would like to couple up with…. …… …………..) for five full minutes over a hammy slowcore pop edit of “Mad World” and an ad break. A nation of born thespians if nothing else, we live for the kind of drama that can elevate a brief pit-stop at Walkabout into a renaissance war painting. And so I was really caught off guard by how badly MILF Manor fumbles the bag of this SHOCKING TWIST. There’s no dramatic smash-cuts of jaws dropping or “WHAT THE F**K”s yelled or pantomime expressions of shock and mortification (presumably they all knew this was coming, on account of the logistics involved in actually casting the show, and in a way I respect them for not even bothering to pretend otherwise). The camera simply pans across the row of guys, one of them goes “Oh, they’re our moms?” in the same voice you would use to ask someone in Schuh if they have these in a size 5, and that’s it. Very weak, but –

What transpires from there is some of the best reality television I’ve seen since Big Brother locked Lady Sovereign and Basshunter in a room and forced them to listen to “All I Ever Wanted” on repeat for seven hours. 

Essentially the vibe is Love Island by way of Real Housewives. It’s women in their 40s and 50s with fiery, conflicting personalities, and guys in their 20s with no particularly clear interest in older women but seem to be going into it with that too-horny-to-be-selective mentality of “well, they’re women!” that online discourse is adamant no longer exists. I’m not really sure how modern masculinity came to revolve around a few red-pilled dudes slonking eggs and flying to Scandinavia to get their faces hammered into a Chad. Are we really expected to believe that the majority of teenage boys and young men care more about female physical perfection and the Darwinian pursuit of gender roles than actual sex? That it’s not about how there are no healthy outlets for them to explore or learn about or articulate their desires besides TikTok, which, unsurprisingly, was instantly used by Gen Z boys to joke-but-not-really about wanting to get fucked in the arse by big strong women?

Anyway, if there is sex to be had in MILF Manor we’ve yet to see it, but there is no shortage of horniness-as-performance – a lost art, if you ask me. There’s a peroxide blonde with a Paris Hilton baby voice and the self-appointed nickname “Disco Mommy”, who yells “don’t be a hater, Joey!” after getting cockblocked by her son for trying to bring a guy wearing a full RAW papers tracksuit back to their bedroom on night one (oh yeah, the other twist is that the mothers and sons have to share a room). In the first challenge, the boys take their tops off and the mothers have to feel them all up to figure out which one they gave birth to. As for actual dates, we’ve so far seen a former ballet dancer go paddle boarding with a nail varnish-wearing ex-Army kid called Jimmy. They lie across the boards and do sit-ups, then she airplane lifts him and says, “I used to do this with my son when he was smaller!” 

On the surface, obviously, it’s a ridiculous spectacle. I’m assuming it’s meant to appeal to the majority of viewers through a combination of shock value and gross-out fascination, but so far it’s predictably tame and – as far as how the boys talk about sex goes – surprisingly positive. There’s a discussion early on between four contestants about the difference between a MILF and a cougar (conclusion: “age”), and some brief identification of societal double standards – how normalised it is for men to be attracted to increasingly younger women as they age, and also have a collective culture of coveting older women that generated the terms MILF and cougar in the first place, but gender-reverse both of those scenarios and it becomes desperate and creepy.

The premise is kind of genius because it forces everyone involved to confront their own desires, which is something almost no dating show acknowledges even when the contestants are chomping at the bit for a “blonde with nice teeth” or someone “tall, dark and handsome”. There’s a lot to be said about how MILF Manor is actually a show about familial relationships, not romantic ones. That, if it reveals anything at all, it’s about how the dynamic between (in this case) hetero/bisexual men and their mothers shapes their attitudes to sex and dating in adulthood. We’re only two episodes deep and there’s already a lot of hypocritical behaviour on display: moms insisting that sons would never go for an “easy” woman because they have “standards”, sons warning other boys not to go near their moms because they seem untrustworthy – all while appearing on a reality TV show that facilitates the simultaneous dating of multiple partners pulled from the same sexual pool as the person they’re trying to “protect”. I have no dog in that fight, though, so instead I’m going to talk about the other major theme of the show, which is age gap relationships.

As something of an age gap queen myself, I have a vested interest in this. My partner is five years younger than me and that dynamic is a constant source of entertainment. For instance I get to brag that "I was doing that when you were 12" with regards to a particular drug and it will literally be true; if we ever buy something using my credit card he gets to say "mummy bought me a PS5". He calls me a nonce at least once a week. It's all very fun. But age gap relationships – specifically, heterosexual ones in which the woman is older – are apparently in vogue. Have been for a while in the celebrity realm. Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, Mary off of Selling Sunset and her terminally bamboozled French himbo, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne… RIP Freud, you would have loved observing the teen idol to male jailbait pipeline.

I've danced around this subject before, but we live in submissive times. TikTok is awash with videos of e-boys in nurse costumes prancing around their bedrooms, jacked women slamming their smaller partners against a wall, everyone of every gender dropping to their knees for a domineering goth gf. Fandom is expressed almost entirely through the demand to be stepped on, choked out, tormented (exhibit A: the comments beneath this news story about Aubrey Plaza psychologically torturing Adam DiMarco on set of The White Lotus), and attraction is often expressed in one word: “daddy” or “mommy”. (The latter has overtaken in recent years.) These are all abstracted expressions of desire, which don’t always translate to reality, but it makes sense that our societies becoming increasingly cold and inhospitable would lead to an uptick in the number of people whose greatest sexual fantasy is to be thrown over a house. "No one is having sex" might be one story you could tell about the last half-decade, but the more interesting one is that everyone who is having sex wants to be dominated.

You could say this correlates with the rising prominence of age gap relationships with older women, which come loaded with preconceived ideas about who’s in charge because that’s what’s mapped onto relationships between older men and younger women. (For the curious, I spoke to men in age gap relationships with older women for a piece a while back and the attraction came down to what it always does: shared sensibilities and goals. I mean, who could have foreseen?) MILF Manor, too, trades in long-standing stereotypes of how we view women – as someone’s mother, sister, daughter; a body to be slotted into a familial or sexual category rather than a full person with agency. When it comes to older women especially, most people still struggle to reconcile the idea of them having desires that seemingly conflict with their station as a mother, or whatever, which constantly creates split complexes like “Madonna / whore” or, its modern iteration, “tradwife / OF girl”. MILF Manor is good precisely because it forces those binaries to coexist.

For me, the most interesting thing about the show is that it reflects recent developments in how men talk about sex. Ever since I got TikTok in the depths of the pandemic my FYP has been full of young men bantering about shagging in a way that combines genuinely progressive attitudes with a sort of 80s action film / porn star pastiche (often they have mullets and what have you). Again, this doesn’t necessarily correlate to anything happening real life, but it tracks that the same forces that have produced the most sexually attune, sexually fluid generation in history would pull straight men in the same direction.

The Overton window on straight guys joking about sex is shifting, and the casting process for MILF Manor has definitely taken this into account because Gabriel – the one who dresses like he’s in the chorus line for American Idiot on Broadway – is big on TikTok. At least half of the male cast has been lifted from this demographic, or is at least designed to appeal. Two of them are wearing chipped nail varnish, one has black linework tattoos, another used to be a stripper, and the way they talk to and about the women is – genuinely, I think! – no different to what you’d see on a more conventional dating show. Certainly, when Jimmy spoke the words “Pola has these feet that I just wanna oil up and shove in my mouth”, it landed better than when any of the enormous estate agents from Essex have deep throated a toe on Love Island. So far, the only examples of retrograde attitudes and condemnable behaviour have come from the women – something that probably comes down to age more than gender.

Like, sure, one of the guys had a small mental breakdown upon learning that his mom fucked his best friend and then went for a naked swim in the middle of the night and started slurring about “reality”.

Yeah, it was stressful when Disco Mommy’s son identified how much attention her giant fake tits receive and she said “well it didn’t bother you when you were a baby sucking on them” and he hit back screaming “I NEEDED THE MILK, MOM! I NEEDED THE ENERGY!”

But beyond these flashes into the depths of psychoanalytic hell, MILF Manor is no different to any other dating show, really. The ladies are playing up to an archetype ascribed to them by the format. The boys are in over their heads and don’t know how to flirt. Will anyone find love? Almost certainly not, but in true 2020s fashion they might get some good content and a brand deal out of it. On that note, I will love you and leave you with a failed pick-up line from episode one: 

“That’s a beautiful ring, by the way. Kinda reminds me of your face.”

Horrible, awful stuff. It should be banned. I hope there are at least nine seasons.