• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 6, 2023

A new TLC sex-competition series is drawing fire in advance of its premiere for using the acronym “MILF” in its title, a term considered to be sexist and derogatory.

The show, “MILF Manor,” is also drawing derision because it mirrors a concept that was once dreamed up in a “30 Rock” episode that was clearly intended as a joke.

Premiering January 15, “MILF Manor” has eight women ages 40 to 60 (pictured above) assembling at an unspecified “paradise destination” in Mexico with “eight young hunks,” says a TLC press release.

“Tensions run high when eight women and eight young hunks come together to find love,” says the press release. But as the old song asks: What’s love got to do with it? Probably very little.

In case anyone reading this does not know what it means, MILF stands for Mothers I'd Like to F---.

The term is widely seen as sexist, derogatory and misogynistic for the way it objectifies women. To its detractors, the acronym perpetuates stereotypes of strong mature women as little more than lonely sex fiends.

“We can't deny the sexism and misogyny that is derived from an older female character whose only function is to be, how else can we say it, f***ed,” columnist Charley Ross wrote about the show last month on Glamour.co.uk.

“Are we really all about marketing mature women as a [masturbatory] fantasy for young men?” she asked.

“MILF” exploded into the national, slang lexicon in 1999 after one of the sex-obsessed teen boys in the movie “American Pie” used it to describe another teen's mother played by Jennifer Coolidge.

In the years that followed, the term turned up occasionally in marketing campaigns and elsewhere.

A 2007 campaign from Spirit Airlines used “MILF,” but in this instance it stood for “Many Islands, Low Fares.” The campaign promoted the airline's Caribbean flights.

In 2013, the apparel company True & Co. applied the acronym to “Moms I'd Like to Fit” to promote its bras.

In 2016, Fergie titled a song “M.I.L.F.$.” In 2017, Showtime premiered a scripted show called “SMILF.” The “S” was for single.

But long before that, in 2008, the acronym was used satirically in “30 Rock” for a show whose concept was so ludicrous that no one back then would ever have predicted it would become a real TV show, or something like it, 15 years later.

The show, “MILF Island,” was created by the fictional Jack Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin, whose title was Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for General Electric, then the parent company of NBC.

The linkage between “MILF Island” and “MILF Manor” was identified last month by William Hughes, writing for avclub.com.

“ ‘MILF Manor’ [is] an actual TV show so close to the premise of the 14-year-old ‘30 Rock’ joke ‘MILF Island’ that only one of two incredibly bizarre explanations present themselves,” he wrote.

“Either the creators of the series were intentionally [italics his] patterning themselves after a ‘30 Rock’ gag, or they independently and accidentally stumbled onto the same idea and thought, ‘Yes, excellent TV’.”