If there is a single moment that distills Love Island’s essence, it is this one: The roommates are settling into their seven beds in the shared bedroom of their modernist Mallorcan villa. The lights are out and the cameras installed in the ceiling have gone into night-vision mode. Everyone is cast in a green light, their beady eyes glowing like animals captured by a motion-triggered wilderness cam. As is typical, several couples begin to go at it in their neighboring twin beds, their bodies rhythmically thrusting under the comforters.
Then Adam, who is in bed alone, crouches on all fours, flings off his comforter, and rips a soul-rattling fart. It’s a wet one that lasts a good three seconds.
I’m guessing that at this point the roommates laughed and kept boning, but I can’t be sure because I squealed in shock, doubled over with laughter, and gasped for air. Then I proceeded to binge on the rest of the 44-episode second season of Love Island. This was after I’d already worked my way through the 34-episode first season in the matter of a few weeks. I don’t want to be a person who laughs hysterically at farts, but this is what this year has done to me. It has done Love Island to me.
I don’t want to be a person who laughs hysterically at farts, but this is what this year has done to me. It has done Love Island to me
For the uninitiated, Love Island is a British reality TV show that was rebooted in 2015, but it only started to take off this year in the U.S. after the first three seasons showed up on Hulu. It features 12 contestants, or Islanders, as they call themselves, who show up on day one wearing bikinis or swim trunks, the near-constant uniform of the series. The men are invariably musclebound, the women pouty-lipped, and nearly everyone is bronzed to a crisp. Upon stepping foot in the villa, they are promptly made to choose a partner based on looks alone. Each couple then shares a twin bed in the privacy-free, mass-bedroom of the villa.
Mostly, the Islanders’ days are spent gossiping, chain-smoking cigarettes, applying extensive makeup, slathering on sunscreen, and sunbathing next to the villa’s massive pool as ice clinks in their presumably alcoholic drinks. At night, few let the proximity of their roommates deter them from under-the-covers humpage, which the show catalogs unblinkingly. On several occasions, multiple couples have been shown going at it at the same time, as their roommates crane their necks to see and sometimes even offer commentary as though narrating a horse race.
There are periodic “re-coupling” ceremonies, during which anyone left standing without a partner is kicked off the island. New contestants are introduced to spark new romances and tear apart existing ones. (Often, the additions seem to reflect a precise understand on the producers’ part of key contestant’s “types”—a word frequently tossed about in the villa, and which is reduced, in the contestants’ own words, to things such as “big boobs,” “big booty,” and “tattoos.”) Occasionally, contestants are voted off by viewers. Then, in each season’s final week, viewers vote for their favorite couple, and the winners receive a joint prize of $50,000.
It is a dystopia of brutal and unapologetic superficiality
It is a dystopia of brutal and unapologetic superficiality. As Eva Wiseman wrote of the show in The New York Times, “It’s Tinder made flesh.” The actual tagline of Season 2 was “survival of the fittest,” which conveys the series’ cutthroat nature but also has a double-meaning, as “fit” means attractive in British slang. Couplings and re-couplings happen with all of the emotional subtlety of middle school. The most frequently used slang reveals the heart of the show: grafting (trying to attract or seduce someone), mugging off (being made a fool), pied off (dumped), and banter (“to make fun of,” per The Oxford English Dictionary).
Women often get the brunt of this punishing setup. There is a lot of talk of “lads,” a term reflecting a British subculture of, as Wikipedia puts it, “young men assuming an anti-intellectual position, shunning sensitivity in favour of drinking, violence, and sexism.” On the show, women and men are often held to familiar double standards: men’s sexual adventuring is celebrated while women’s bed-hopping is cast by contestants as sad or shameful. The wife/whore dichotomy is also alive and well in the villa, where men routinely endorse the idea that there are “birds” that you bring home to mom, and “birds” that you “fock.” Just when you think the show’s introduced a Good Guy, he goes and slyly has sex with one of his roommates as the woman he’s been courting sleeps obliviously in the neighboring bed.
These dynamics are so bad that during a recent Love Island binge, my husband turned to me and said without any hint of irony: “We’re just watching symptoms of the disease of patriarchy.” And then we clicked to the next episode.
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