‘MILF Manor’ Is a Bizarre Blend of Reality TV and Incest Porn
Sex has always ruled the genre long ago mislabeled “reality TV.” It’s present whenever you start the cameras rolling on a group of people, whether at their place of work or in a well-appointed villa with unlimited booze. Even a survivalist show like Naked and Afraid, which drops contestants in some of the planet’s most punishing environments, relies on the gimmick of teammates making first impressions without clothes on.
In that context, the Sunday premiere of MILF Manor — an awkward new dating show from TLC — is not exactly a watershed moment. True, it seems to fulfill the prophecy of a 30 Rock joke about a fictional series called MILF Island (“25 super-hot moms, 50 eighth-grade boys, no rules,” according to Jack Donaghy’s pitch). But as far as its spin on the hookup house formula, it had no chance of surprising us. The moment the trailer dropped last month, everyone guessed the taboo twist: the dating pool for these attractive middle-aged women would be made up of their adult sons.
Watching episode one of MILF Manor, nonsensically titled “MILF Said Knock You Out,” it’s hard to believe that the boys and women didn’t agree to this Freudian nightmare in advance. They are revealed to each other in a moment at which the embarrassment feels genuine while the shock sounds performative. Deception, too, is nothing novel where reality programming is concerned. What’s freshly alarming about TLC’s latest lowbrow product is how it attempts to engage with dominant trends in porn. Casual sex is no longer enough; kink must become mainstream.
A choice as small as using the term “MILF” instead of, say, “cougar,” signals an exploration of the carnal and fetishistic instead of humdrum hetero attraction. These aren’t just women of a certain age — they’re moms, and that’s part of why you’d like to fuck them. Those on MILF Manor also appear to be reasonably wealthy, able at least to afford personal trainers, cosmetic surgeries and the support of multiple children, positioning each as a potential sugar mama to any of the male suitors she did not personally birth. Who has erotic power over whom in this arrangement is a subject for debate.
“MILF” is also what you’d type into a porn site to filter out the keyword “teen” and find a “mature” woman — the kind that several of the MILF Island sons claim to be looking for — acting out your preferred sexual fantasies. It consistently ranks among the top searches on those platforms, yet here it serves as a speakeasy backdoor to something equally popular and far more deviant: incest. The proliferation of smut that features phony stepsiblings, or a fake stepparent with a stepson or stepdaughter, is evidence of our appetite for the outrageous. And what is reality TV if not a calculated outrage?
Therefore, each mother of MILF Manor is blindfolded, then instructed to caress (or grope) the shirtless men, and identify, by touch alone, her child. The game invites the women to arousal at the abs and pecs on offer, despite the knowledge that one set of muscles belongs to a person they dare not consider a sex object. Except, if some of the moms can be fooled into picking the wrong man, as several do, then perhaps the converse scenario is possible: under the wrong conditions, they might accidentally lust after their own boys.
This tension is deliberately magnified by the living arrangements. The young men, aside from having to sit for confessionals with their moms, also room with them, which leads to complaints of both distasteful proximity and cockblocking. There’s a sense that the show treats the son-and-mother pairs as married couples, sleeping in the same room and jealously guarding one another from outside advances. Joey, the son of Kelle, an extremely outgoing blonde, prevents a contestant named Ryan from entering their space on the first night, as panicked as a husband who fears his eventual cuckolding. Earlier, when Kelle is seen flirting with a certain Jose, his mother, Pola announces her intention to keep them apart.
And it doesn’t stop there. Jimmy, a man with his sights set on Pola, is given ample time to discuss his appreciation of women’s feet, describing the way he’d like to rub hers with oil, then paint her nails, then suck on her toes. A preview reveals that the moms will later share risqué secrets including “I had sex with my son’s best friend,” while the men are at some point blindfolded in order to give back rubs, unaware if they’re massaging mom or someone they hope to woo. Throughout, of course, all parties are treated to the realization that a person in their immediate family has sexual agency — the inciting development in so many fauxcest porn scenes.
MILF Manor asks the viewer to derive titillation from this psychological torture, and you may not have the stomach for it. At the same time, you’d have to be pretty naïve to suppose that any reality-dating concept has been engineered for the participants to find true love. TLC is following a compulsive progression toward the illicit and unforgivable — had they not gotten there, another cable brand would’ve beaten them to it. Only a zealous prude could fully discount the entertainment in Oedipal friction, a source of narrative irony since, well, the myth of Oedipus.
The actual question here is why we have to settle for the queasy middle ground — this half-baked TV spectacle that trades on the archetypes and conventions of porn while providing its audience enough leeway to revile the cast as horny old sluts and conniving man-whores. Like countless predecessors, MILF Manor wants people punished for agreeing to build or test intimate bonds under abnormal conditions. Where it goes further is in courting your public, moral disgust at a dynamic you may well have used to meet private, masturbatory needs.
One likes to think producers can’t keep exploiting our sexual hangups forever. But until we get a series that promises to deliver America’s Next Top XXX Star, expect the cycle of hypocrisy to continue. For now, desire remains a dangerous commodity: the second you put it on a screen, you’re fucked.