In an alternate universe somewhere, there’s a show about a single mom who isn’t a complete disaster. She doesn’t have unprotected sex with random men as her two-year-old sleeps beside them; she doesn’t leave her kid in the middle of the night to run out and buy brownies; she doesn’t obsess about whether giving birth has stretched out her vagina; she isn’t lonely, desperate, chronically inappropriate with kids, and underemployed.

But in this universe, the single mom show du jour is SMILF, as in “Single Mom I’d Like To Fuck”, and she does do all of these things. When her child is in the hospital awaiting care, she also takes off the afternoon to don her wealthy employers’ robe, vape with the woman’s college-age son, and then have sex with him (she’s a nanny-tutor). After meeting her baby daddy’s new girlfriend, she masturbates with a vibrator while looking at pictures of the woman on social media, with her son asleep, again, in the same room.

I think we’re supposed to think the single mom in SMILF is edgy and charming and cool. Because she’s cute, plays basketball with the neighborhood guys, dresses like a hipster middle schooler and eats all the time – while never putting on any weight.

The show is created, written and directed by a woman (Frankie Shaw), but this is sounding a lot like a male fantasy. And guess what, it is a male fantasy. “SMILF” is a popular search in porn.

While I was watching the first couple of episodes of SMILF on Showtime, I couldn’t help but think how pleased it would make Ann Coulter. Coulter likes to say that single moms are the reason for everything that’s bad about America (“Victim of a Crime? Thank a Single Mother,” was the title of one of her chapters in Guilty). Coulter’s friends in the alt-right agree with her. “Kids Need a Mum and a Dad,” declared Milo Yiannopoulos, that paragon of family values, on Breitbart in 2015.

More liberal publications are often no less harsh when it comes to knocking single mothers. “How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids,” said a column in the New York Times in 2014. This sort of data-crammed opinion piece strategically ignores studies showing that children in single parent households fare no worse, and in some categories, in fact, do better than children growing up in married households.

Persistent single mom bashing has an insidious effect. A poll by Pew in 2011 found that 74% of Americans think single motherhood is “bad for society”. No matter that what studies actually show is that it is poverty which is bad for kids, not being the child of a single mom.

What is hard on single moms is the lack of societal support for their families – lack of universal pre-school, healthcare, childcare, paid maternity leave, things provided to a greater degree by countries all over the world (Finland, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan and more).

In America, we often find it easier to blame women struggling to raise kids on their own than to help them succeed as parents. And it’s all that much easier to blame and slut-shame when our media portrays single moms as outrageous hot messes, like the single mom on SMILF.

In an alternate universe somewhere, there’s a show about single moms who are good moms. They work hard, make their kids priority number one, and run sane, loving households where their children are safe and happy. These moms exist in this universe already, and all over America. I’m one of them, and so are all of my single mom friends.

We even manage to go on dates sometimes, and have relationships that don’t involve endangering our children. It isn’t always easy, in a society that likes to tell us we’re irresponsible, clueless sluts, but hey, we figure stuff out; we have to.

It’s exciting when a woman like Frankie Shaw gets the opportunity to run a show of her own, in an industry which offers so few such chances to women. But it is disheartening when that opportunity seems to be granted in exchange for the promotion of stereotypes about women’s experience.

Hopefully, as SMILF continues, we’ll see its main character, Bridgette Bird, get her act together. And hopefully she won’t fall into that other single mom stereotype – of needing a man to redeem herself, to learn to be a good mom, to be happy.

In reality, she can do all of that on her own. And maybe that’s the most threatening thing of all about single moms, and why we are so reviled. While we do need support, and would welcome some more government services, we don’t necessarily need men.