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.
Last orders for alcohol?
Research from Canada indicates that, rather than abstaining from booze only in dry January, we should extend it for ever as there is no really safe alcohol limit. I’ve never been a big drinker because I only do things that benefit my career and being drunk doesn’t. Also, I’m a puker. There’s no happy moment. I’m sober, then I go hot and cold, my vision starts shimmering, my stomach turns over and it all ends in clammy remorse. It’s basic to celebrate boozing as a hobby and philistine to build an entire culture or national identity out of it. No one on the planet is better drunk than sober, alcohol is an unnecessary expense and it’s not good for your complexion. There’s nothing cool about being sloppy or making bad decisions or not being able to remember what you did. Life is enjoyable in itself; good company gives exactly the same buzz that you think a cocktail will.
Get into the groove…
Looking at the headlines, it may seem as though there’s little to cheer about. Well, the Queen of Pop, Madonna herself, is here to set things right with her greatest hits tour, Celebration. I admire Madonna both as a creative artist and a tough woman in public life. The last really fun thing I did before the pandemic was seeing the first night of her Madame X tour at the London Palladium three years ago. She was so charismatic that she glowed like a laser, her star quality washing over the audience in throbbing waves of white light. In an age when fame lasts barely as long as a TikTok reel, it’s good to honour a four-decade career that combines style and substance in one unique, steely package. To quote from her hit, Vogue, when “everywhere you turn is heartache… I know a place where you can get away. It’s called a dancefloor” and Madonna knows what it’s for.
• Bidisha Mamata is an Observer columnist
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