Love Island & Double Standards
It’s finally here, the nation’s favourite reality TV show is back, Love Island! If you’re not familiar with the concept, either because you live under a rock or you’re too good for these kind of shows (eye roll), Love Island is a show where 12 single girls and guys get to have a free holiday somewhere in Spain and have the chance to potentially meet their soulmate. This show has it all, attractive contestants and a lot of drama but it also comes with a negative side, the overwhelming misogyny. I love the show and the buzz that comes with it on social media but it gets ugly for the women in the villa real quick. Not only can the male contestants be well dicks, the people watching aren’t that much better. Why are the male islanders treated so much better than the female ones and why are we so quick to demonise them for decisions they make?
One element of the show that never fails to get people talking is sex. Obviously when you throw a bunch of people together who are attracted to each other, something is going to happen, but for some reason, we’re all shocked every time! All the men are expected to sleep with someone, it’s practically all they talk about before they even get into the villa but they’re not expected to sleep with one person the whole time they’re in the villa like the women are. They’re also not judged for how quickly they sleep with someone, let’s take the Zara and Alex situation for example. Season 2 of Love Island, Zara had the opportunity to take whoever she wanted to the hideaway and she chose Alex who had just entered the villa and they had sex. The next day she told Kady who called her an ‘absolute idiot’, all of the villa were talking about her and lost her title as Miss GB. Meanwhile, no one had anything to say to Alex who had claimed he liked Olivia. The whole point of the show is to ‘look for love’ and obviously for a lot of the contestants having sex is part of that, if a woman doesn’t sleep with them, they’re frigid but if she does then she’s not ‘wifey material’.
The virgin/whore separation is used a lot, even though a lot of the guys fit under the whore category a lot more comfortably, looking at you Terry. The need to separate the girls into two camps, bad girls vs good girls, is not only extremely sexist but suggests that there are certain traits like being confident, too loud or too forward mean they’re not deserving of love. It’s all banter when guys like Marcel reveal that they’ve slept with 300 women (that confession really didn’t age well) but if any of the girls even suggest they’ve slept with more than 1 person, they’re not the kind to ‘take home to mum’. The Liana and Adam situation comes to mind, Liana had entered the villa with Tina and revealed to everyone that she was a stripper. Immediately, the guys take Adam (the only single guy at the time) and ask which one of the two he liked best. Terry, who had probably slept with all of England anyway, tells Adam that he couldn’t take her home to his gran even though Adam was a stripper as well.
Reality TV shows are some of the most entertaining ones to watch but seeing some of the contestants rely on archaic ideas completely lets it down. Unpacking misogynistic behaviour is difficult and takes time but it's season 4 now and we need to do better. Imagine how much better this show would be if the female islanders were uplifted and praised as much as the male ones? Life or in this case summer is too short to spend it shaming a woman for a choice that is completely up to her!