I Can't Stop Thinking About MILF Manor
On the contradictory nature of my favorite MILFs (mothers I love forever)
An unfortunate truth about being alive at this particular moment is the fact that, at any given moment, it is incredibly easy for people to access and consume near-limitless amounts of the most depraved shit imaginable.
I’m not exaggerating or speaking in hyperbole, as much as I wish that I was. With a reliable WiFi connection and a few deliberate clicks and keystrokes, Joe1 Anybody can indulge in videos showcasing women eating feces and horses sodomizing men to death2. Every minute of every day, moronic rhetoric packaged in dripping sacks of putrid word vomit is uploaded for all the world to see. Albeit slightly censored, media that is by all means disgusting and abhorrent has increasingly inched its way into televised content, too. It takes almost no effort, when flipping through channels or browsing streaming selections, to find footage of graphic war carnage and surgeries that proudly show the parts of us meant to be hidden behind flesh. There are shows of people drowning in slow motion beneath the weight of rat skeletons and miscellaneous refuse, of pimples exploding in milky supernovas of blood and pus.
Whatever makes your skin crawl is, more often than not, just an arm’s reach away.
Short of ripping out modems and routers and bashing screens to bits, we are powerless to fight against that which haunts the digital ether. Even if one were to start ripping out modems and routers and bashing screens to bits, it wouldn’t stop such things from existing and proliferating. To cope, we grow mental callouses in the face of the unsavory.
Consequently, many of us can go through life largely unfazed by transitory media that should probably evoke some level of disgust. Most can simply click to go back, or change the channel without a second thought.
And yet...the mere mention of one piece of media, in particular, seems to send shivers down spines and uniformly elicit winces and cringes. It is a beacon of pure perversion, capable of thoroughly disgusting the seemingly desensitized.
The culprit? TLC’s MILF Manor.
As the name suggests, MILF Manor centers around a gaggle of hot single moms sequestered in a house filled with hot single dudes young enough to be their children.
This is far from the first time this basic concept has been played out on television. In 2008, the NBC sitcom 30 Rock centered an entire episode around a (fictional) reality hit titled MILF Island, a Survivor-hybrid featuring “20 MILFs, 50 eighth-grade boys, no rules”. When in-universe network executive Jack Donaghy (portrayed by Alec Baldwin) marveled at “Deborah and Shawna squaring off at Erection Cove”, it was no doubt meant to satirize the deviance and idiocy that viewers crave and producers continue to churn out.
Jokes aside, nearly a year after the airing of the MILF Island episode, TV Land premiered an eight-episode series hosted by Vivica A. Fox titled The Cougar, in which a mother of four sought love connections among a group of 20 men in their 20s. In the fifteen years(!) since, several shows with similar premises have run their course. Most recently, we’ve been graced with the likes of Hulu’s Back in the Groove and Peacock’s Love for the Ages.
But while other shows flirt with innuendo and taboo, MILF Manor takes the nuclear route. When the show debuted in January 2023, participants and viewers alike were horrified to discover that the pool of eligible young bachelors sharing the manor with the MILFs were, in fact, their sons.
Mothers and offspring gasped in tandem, and 10 episodes worth of debauchery ensued.
At this point, many of those free of the Manor’s confines choose to turn away in horror.
Many have written their takes on MILF Manor. Most of these takes express revulsion. That said, I feel that the truly wild nature of this wonderful abomination has been understated.
MILF Manor is not just raunchy reality. It is a lawless realm, balancing blatant farce with our deepest darkest truths, completely self-aware of how utterly revolting it is. It is cheap and disgusting and it knows that you are disgusted, too. It does everything in its power to shock both the audience and the individuals unwittingly bound by the Manor. And it knows that, no matter how twisted it gets, the twisted bits of you and I will continue to secretly delight in all that makes it repulsive.
This, too, is often left out of written takes. It’s obvious to all that MILF Manor churns stomachs, but few have speculated as to what it is that makes this extremely stupid show so horribly delicious. Why do we keep watching? Why do I keep watching?
In her thesis titled “Hedonics of Disgust”, psychologist Nina Strohminger suggests that humans seek constrained risks as a form of benign masochism. Disgust likely came about as a safeguard from all that is dangerous, but when that danger is reasonably stripped away, all that’s left is arousal. Perhaps our tendency to closely scrutinize that which disgusts is a quality that has allowed our species to thrive for countless generations. Perhaps it is hardwired in our DNA not to look away.
Even so, I sometimes worry, as I laugh like a fucking hyena at MILF Manor, that there’s some malfunction going on in the execution of the emotions meant to gatekeep my body and soul.
So, reader, today I challenge you to stick around and delve with me into the abyss as I try to make sense of what makes this 42-minute nightmare so good.
But first, a little background.
At a glance, it is surprisingly unclear who, exactly, first birthed this twisted concept into the world. In the age of streaming, credits no longer delineate the end of one episode from the beginning of another. Go-to online resources are consistently inconsistent in their crew listings. Perhaps this is purposeful, some paltry evidence that the minds behind MILF Manor feel some degree of shame or embarrassment regarding their creation. With ties to London-based Spun Gold TV, Ontario-based eOne (Lionsgate Canada), and Warner Bros. Discovery, the most realistic explanation for MILF Manor’s origin is that it was some sort of transcontinental collaborative effort, forged together by a team of particularly diabolical producers. No one and everyone is the mastermind behind it.
This wouldn't be particularly surprising, since the human race has been stuck on the intrusive thought of mother-son unions since the age of Sophocles. It is the stuff of tragedies, an unwanted leftover remnant of our animal brains that simply refuses to atrophy.
In his 1899 publication The Interpretation of Dreams, famed neurologist Sigmund Freud had the following to say on the matter:
[Oedipus’] destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.
For the past hundred years or so, people have argued the validity of Freud’s proposed Oedipal complex for many reasons, not least of which is that very little empirical evidence exists to back the theory up. I am just a person writing about MILF Manor on Substack.com, not a psychologist, so I can’t provide a particularly informed opinion on whether there is or isn’t something to Freud’s ideas.
What I can provide, however, are statistics gathered from PornHub.
According to one of the world’s top distributors of online pornography3, “MILF” was the 2nd most-searched query worldwide in 2023. In addition, it was the 5th most-viewed pornographic category viewed worldwide. Searches for the 7th most-viewed category, “mature”, increased by 77%. Meanwhile, stepmom fauxcest has remained a tried-and-true popular subgenre.
Pop-ups and banner ads promise liaisons with horny housewives and single moms that need to be satiated sexually. Countless films feature experienced older women showing naïve young bucks how to please a lover. Sexual education at the hands of confident MILFs is treated as an act of love – not necessarily a romantic, passionate love, but the sort of love that is warm, nurturing, and forgiving of missteps.
And clearly, enough of us are drawn to it. Like moths to a flame.
Popular media, from The Graduate to “Stacy’s Mom”, has toyed around with this fantasy for ages. MILF Manor is merely the natural culmination of a fantasy thousands of years in the making, unafraid to utter the thoughts we all try so desperately to hide. In certain circumstances, showrunners play coy. For instance, Daniela Neumann, a managing director at Spun Gold TV, told the Washington Post that the “MILF” in MILF Manor stands for “Mother I Love Forever” in the UK4. But everyone knows what this program is, at its depraved core. As a result, it has garnered the harshest of criticisms. IMDB reviews have branded the series as ”Like a Horrific Car Crash”, “Worse Than You Were Expecting”, and my personal favorite, “Boring Trash For Sad Weirdo Perverts”.
True as these statements may be, they fail to identify what makes the show so truly horrifying.
The answer probably does not lie in the basic fact that older women sometimes have the hots for younger men (and vice versa). It is not something so easily identifiable as latent run-of-the-mill sexism. Instead, I believe that the true horror emerges from the chaotic circumstances themselves, in which mothers and sons are forced to voice their desires and witness one another as inherently sexual beings. It’s difficult to capture in words just how uncomfortable and jarring the experience of watching any given episode of MILF Manor truly is.
But for you, reader, I’ll try.
For starters, all the faces on MILF Manor, without exception, feel familiar. However, you likely won’t be able to place exactly where you’ve seen them. Theirs are the faces that have populated the sort of transitory background media that goes largely unnoticed when you live in a world that bombards you with media.
Jose Mizrahi, the epitome of the evergreen “tall, dark, and handsome” trope, was extensively featured in El Domo del Dinero, a competition show that aired on Telemundo and likely went unnoticed by all but a few Spanish-speaking Americans. He also appeared in a Spanish language advertisement for Goya Pinto Beans, credited as “Guy in Red Shirt”. Lisa Wilcox – a mid-season addition to the cast – starred in the fourth and fifth installments of the A Nightmare on Elm Street horror franchise5. April Jayne6 played a bit part in an episode of Married…with Children as a sexy lingerie saleswoman, and for a time she was frequently featured in the sort of skin-tight photoshoots designed specifically to be posterized and hung up in the tool sheds and workshops of slightly perverted, unhappily wed uncles. Her son, Gabriel, is a Wilhelmina-backed model. I’ve seen him posing in a Patagonia pullover in the paid advertisements of my social media feed, paired with the promise of a 30% off outerwear sale.
Not all cast members are bit actors or aspiring models looking for fifteen minutes of fame. In fact, interviews have revealed that a sizable percentage of cast members were “found” on Facebook and Instagram via cast recruiters7. But even these recruits feel familiar. I have seen the bleach-blonde, suntanned, Orange County caricature that is Kelle Mortensen (aka Disco Mammi) ten trillion times throughout the years, even though she supposedly led a relatively normal life as a real estate broker prior to 2023.
What many fail to realize is that no one on MILF Manor knowingly signed up to be on MILF Manor, specifically. It is abundantly clear that some level of deception was necessary on the part of the showrunners to ambush men and women alike into their roles. This is evident from the very first episode. As much as I’ve grown to love these individuals, none of them were talented enough actors to mask or feign the horror in that first moment of recognition, when sons were paraded out half-naked to their eagerly awaiting mothers. Frequently, the pawns that make up the MILF Manor cast seem just as horrified as their audiences.
I can only imagine that most stay to make the best of an unfortunate situation. Whether “best” equates to love, fame, or money is anyone’s guess.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any meaningful direction for the MILF Manor inhabitants to direct the horrors that they face, save a God that has clearly forsaken them and a camera that doesn’t talk back. There is no familiar host to hear out complaints – all correspondence directing participants on what to do next is dictated through anonymous text messages, some invisible voice of authority that thrives on human suffering. There is no one to guide MILF, man, and voyeur alike through this journey at all. As a result, each episode is a structureless haze, fueled by bottomless pina coladas and strawberry margaritas.
Now and then, humiliating challenges are prepared, each one more craven than the last. Without warning, people lacking the potential for further drama are unceremoniously booted from the premises. This happens more frequently than you might expect because the general lack of chemistry between cast members is truly staggering. For a show so hyper-fixated on sex and sexuality, the producers go to great lengths to get the MILFs and the men to sleep together. Structured dates are forced upon those not entirely disgusted by the sight of one another. Only the most talented of the bunch manage to feign love connections, though unconvincingly.
And through it all, abject art emerges.
Some of these moments are fleeting comments, so brief and beautiful that you will miss them if you aren’t paying close attention8. Others play out in multiple acts throughout an episode, bizarre tragic comedies that crescendo with moments of inescapable existential dread over the absurd.
For example:
In the second episode of the series, participants are instructed to play a game called “Wall of Secrets”. Moms and sons are challenged to stump their family members with a secret9, which is written on slips of paper attached to a wall. If mother can stump son AND son can stump mother, both the mother and son win a date with whoever they’d like to take out. Simple enough, right?
Most of the secrets are slightly salacious, but nothing earth-shattering. One boy admits to once having had sex on the beach, and a mother confesses to going on a few dates with their son’s old middle school teacher. You get the idea. But one secret, in particular, stands out from the pack.
As each individual goes up to gaze upon the displayed secrets, everyone seems to agree that the slip reading “I slept with my son’s best friend” crosses a boundary into the realm of being completely unacceptable. Even on MILF Manor, there are some lines you just don’t cross. Evidently, this is one of them.
Once everyone has placed their bets, the group is summoned together, with oversized glasses of red wine in hand, to reveal their secrets to their housemates. One by one, mothers and sons are mocked and humiliated by their embarrassing confessions. But the culprit behind the worst note remains a mystery.
Finally, we arrive at Jimmy and his mother Soyoung. Soyoung, one of the quieter personalities from a comparably conservative Korean background, correctly guesses her son’s secret (“I got pink eye from eating ass”) and quite literally jumps for joy as the rest of the house chortles, “We all knew it!”
Jimmy, on the other hand, guesses incorrectly. Still laughing, the house razzes Soyoung and insists she cough up the truth. The smile dissipates, she hesitates. Finally, she admits that she has done the unspeakable with Jimmy’s bestie. As jeers of “OHHHHHHHHH!!!” ring through the room, the young man freezes in a moment of disbelief. At first, he tries to brush off the devastating information with jokes, but the facade quickly falls to pieces. Jimmy, wearing one of those wide anxious contradictory smiles that only come when a person is faced with something truly horrendous, clings closely to a decorative pillow. When asked why she would reveal such a savage secret, Soyoung simply states that she knew it was a secret her son would never guess. The laughter dies down as the gravity of the revelation sets in.
Charlene10, a very sweet and desperately horned-up Italian Jersey girl simultaneously looking for love and grieving the death of her daughter, has not picked up on the tension. “Soyoung likes ‘em So Young!” she jokes with a pointed finger.
The joke does not land. End scene.
We pick back up with a low-res iPhone confessional from Jimmy, clearly upset and musing that his mother “should’ve took that to her grave, or something.” The scene cuts outside, where a small orange pair of swim trunks lie poolside. We can see Jimmy swimming inside of a soothing blue beacon in the darkness. He is wading around the waters, entirely in the nude, visibly drunk, and possibly on the verge of a psychological break. He insists that he is okay to a sympathetic Charlene, caught in the crossfire. Clad in pajama pants and hearing the commotion, Soyoung walks outside and orders her son to come to bed, as if he is a young boy once more. I believe11 she calls him 미아, which is a Korean word that translates to “wandering child”.
Jimmy, sinking deeper until he is nothing more than a disembodied head in the chlorinated azure amniotic fluid of this substitute womb, is obstinant, claiming to be at peace. The two talk past each other for a few minutes, until the mother, defeated and on the verge of tears, heads back inside to cry herself to sleep. Triumphant, blurred penis proudly on display, he looks into the camera and comments to no one in particular that “some people can’t handle the realness”. It’s ambiguous as to whether the one who is unable to handle the realness is meant to be Jimmy himself, his mother, or both of them. The lights in the manor dim for the night, signaling an end to the unresolved matter.
How this miasma of despair unfurls is delectable. Shakespearean, even. It hardly matters how much what’s shown reflects what actually happened, so long as it yields results simultaneously sick and compelling.
When I first watched the “Wall of Secret”s segment, I turned to my husband and told him to enjoy the show while it lasted, because there was no way that the horrible experiment unfolding before our eyes could be replicated. Ultimately, I was wrong – those crazy bastards managed to get the show renewed for a second season.
The gimmick changed slightly for the show’s shameless return. Perhaps to encourage more hookups, the MILFs weren’t forced to date from a pool of men that they themselves birthed. However, the large pool of available men did consist entirely of father/son duos, revisiting that Freudian gem of a concept regarding boys murdering a father for the love and possession of a mother.
If you’re worried that perhaps the production went soft for its second go around, fear not. I can assure you that it was just as depraved and ridiculous as the inaugural season. One of the earlier episodes featured a father and son taking one MILF out for a three-way tantric yoga date. Miles was blindsided completely by the arrival of his father Stacy, who he had been estranged from for several years prior. Barby, the fiery Latina that constantly seemed to turn heads for better or worse, incessantly used the phrase “coochie tingles”. She also started selling merch brandishing the phrase “coochie tingles”, no doubt with full knowledge that a cringeworthy phrase on a large enough platform could very well birth a money-making meme.
Much like the trailblazing first season, all of these characters feel familiar. Many are people used as career props, who have finally worked their way to the limelight to prove that they too have been graced with thoughts and feelings and aspirations. Kelly Mac, a Vietnamese immigrant who fled the Fall of Saigon12, did fairly well on season 18 of Worst Cooks in America, a show that I’ve only seen playing as background noise at my mother-in-law’s house. Father-son duo Jacob and Ashley Ward perform alongside one another in fitness-themed Instagram reels like this. Instead of springing to life out of Dicks Sporting Goods promos, the boys of season two hopped straight out of sponsored ads for department stores in the throes of death.
But of particular note regarding the newest season is the fact that a significant percentage of the cast members have seemingly treated their mandatory NDAs as a list of suggestions rather than a legally binding mandate. As a result, the very people that fueled MILF Manor’s many antics have begun stripping the paneled siding from the machine, bearing for all to see the ugly nuts and bolts and tangled wires.
Most of these revelations are making their way to the most devoted, morbidly curious fans by way of Reddit AMA13 and fleeting Instagram stories. So far, they’ve told us this much:
Though never mentioned on the show itself, the women of MILF Manor season 2 were initially told that they would be participating in a fictitious show called “Northern Love”. This made perfect sense since the manor was not so much a manor as it was a nice Air BNB somewhere in Ontario. Meanwhile, the men thought they’d be appearing on a show called “Cuffing Season”. Fathers got roped into the mix by producers who claimed to be recruiting for some unnamed third dating program in need of men over the age of 45.
Upon arrival, participants were shocked to discover the truth of what they’d signed up for. By most accounts, several of the women had no interest in dating younger men, and several of the men had no interest in courting women twice their age. The first challenge, presented shortly after the hapless residents dropped off their bags, featured boys and MILFs teaming up to move as much maple syrup as possible through a relay race using only their bodies as transport vessels. It is vile. Like eating too much of something sticky and sweet, any potential pleasure to be gained from the endeavor quickly gives way to intense nausea.
Woebegone contestants mostly accepted their fates because, from what I understand, leaving the manor was not a particularly easy feat. Lannette West, a MILF who grew fed up with the ups and downs of the experience mid-filming, relayed to fans that at one point producers physically blocked her way out the door. Even so, the cast underwent changes in nearly every episode14. Ineligible bachelors with their hearts not in the game were unceremoniously tossed aside in favor of fresh blood, keeping viewers and residents alike on their toes. For about four weeks, they lived like this, trapped in a prison constantly in flux.
Even so, sweet moments somehow managed to manifest on occasion. Belying the hot-and-cold relationship portrayed on television, Crystal and Stacy enjoyed a romantic candlelit dinner amidst the chaos. MMA fighter Chris – the dude from the Macy’s ad pictured above – donned an apron and baked a birthday cake for his girlfriend, Barby. Shauna, an artist by trade, had her beau, Joey, sit for a painted portrait. Of course, these sentimental vignettes were all trashed in favor of hellfire and venom, of which there was plenty. A steady stream of alcohol begot bitter rivalries laced with screams and profanities. Rumor has it that, on a least one occasion, fighting between cast members almost devolved into physical blows.
Ultimately, four couples left the villa united. But at what cost? When asked if he believed that the producers were conducting psychological warfare, 24-year-old Sam Blackett responded with a definitive “absolutely”.
As one might expect, the turmoil of MILF Manor cannot be contained between four walls and a handful of cameras. Though the second season concluded several weeks ago, small-scale wars have broken out among slighted ex-lovers and bitter enemies. Cease and desist orders have been issued over online insults. At least one MILF has filed a restraining order against a former castmate.
And here I am, still watching, still reading, still wondering why the MILF microcosm haunts me so and why I feel compelled to write about it. Maybe it’s for your sake, reader, so that you might understand the allure without having to go through the effort of watching 20+ hours of brain rot. Maybe it’s a welcome distraction from a world that sometimes seems to be falling apart in some irreparable way.
Over the last week, I’ve found myself plagued by apparitions of Divine, the long-dead drag queen muse of famed transgressive filmmaker John Waters. Divine, who famously claimed to be the “filthiest person in the world”, would have loved MILF Manor. Her words at the end of the 1972 film Pink Flamingoes keep ringing through my head:
Maybe Divine and MILF Manor are onto a truth we’re mostly too proud to admit – that filth is something inextricable from the human experience, that nothing is pure.
If you enjoyed this essay and want to say thanks, please consider buying me a coffee 😎
Or Josephine! Women are also depraved.
Its exact ranking fluctuates around a bit, but PornHub is consistently ranked among the top 20 most-viewed websites worldwide. It is second only to XVideos among the most-viewed adult websites.
My friends from the UK assure me that this is absolutely not true.
Interestingly, Lisa Wilcox also played hot stepmom Missy Preston in a short-lived Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure live-action knock-off series. It’s almost as if fate dictated she join the cast of MILF Manor
Credited as April Wayne*
Some of the aspiring models and bit actors may have been recruited as well, to be clear. Personally, I think that individual backgrounds before MILF Manor can be a somewhat misleading signifier of how fame-hungry any one cast member may or may not be.
One example that immediately comes to mind: an exchange in which Joey, the son of Kelle Mortensen, comments that his mother gets a lot of attention “mainly because she never wears bras”. The mother responds to her son that “it didn’t bother you when you were a baby sucking on ‘em”. Joey protests, “I needed the milk, Mom!”, to which Kelle flips her hair and states “You were really thirsty…” It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s horrible.
A somewhat sadistic detail worth mentioning – the residents of MILF Manor were instructed to record a deep, dark secret without knowledge that said secrets would be used for the “Wall of Secrets” challenge and shared with the entire house.
Charlene is my favorite MILF, in case you were wondering. She pops up in the strangest of places, like this episode of Couples Court with the Cutlers.
I don’t know Korean, so please forgive me if I am mistaken here.
They really gloss over this, as one might expect.
For those unfamiliar, AMA stands for “Ask me Anything” – they essentially function as Q&A threads. The moderators generally confirm by some private means that a person is who they claim to be. As of July 25th, 2024, cast members Miles Strozier, Sam Blackett, Lannette West, Rebecca Candelaria, and Shauna Young have hosted AMAs. In addition, Crystal Jennings and Christopher London have spoken extensively on Instagram about their time in the Manor.
9 or 10 out of 12 episodes, if I’m not mistaken.
I was traumatised thinking why would someone make a show like this.... Feminist Freud meets Sex in the City meets Trump era America
There is one right now.