Will we be able to look away from the mummy issues raised on Milf Manor? | Bidisha Mamata

The reality show in which mothers and sons live together and start flirting is weirdly kinky but also oddly natural

If you're a woman of a certain age, struggling in the housing crisis, you could always check into Milf Manor. It's a new US reality show in which women and their sons live in a house together and then all the ladies and all the guys flirt with each other (Milf stands for Mum I'd Love to Fuck, in case you didn't know). In the search for a new hit, Milf Manor's producers have gone back to the oldest human drive on the planet, the mother of them all: the original dyad between a baby and their primary caregiver. Maternal love, filial love, carnal love and erotic love blend together in a mutually jealous, weirdly kinky, televised Freudian melange. It's natural, it's normal, it's common, it's fine! After all, Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex 400 years before the birth of Christ. Once you pass 40, you become invisible to men in their 30s while every 20-year-old on the planet notices you, including waiters, security guards, interns and other women's sons. I can explain it in one word: perimenopause. When wise Mother Nature realises your ship is sailing, she starts wafting out your erotic pheromones at double strength like novelty cocktails during happy hour at the last-chance saloon and you attract those virile young males who are biologically best able to pollinate the flower". Milf Manor is airing on the cable network TLC, which also happens to stand for Tender Loving Care. As the guys queueing to visit Milf Manor know, that's exactly what you get when you come to Mummy.