I recently binged Season 8 of Love Island USA, reality TV’s premier summer dating property. My friends, and surely the rest of the world, were watching too. In the chat, we gasped over Sincere’s bad behavior, ogled Carl’s Instagram, traded Reels reenacting Titi’s row with Trinity. When our hapless spouses came into the room during a challenge and left just as quickly, embarrassed by the speed at which functionally nude singles were expected to chomp down literal hot dogs, we exchanged texts. As soon as (spoiler) OG couple Brinity accepted the crowns and claimed the show’s $100k prize, I navigated to Season 4, the earliest available on Peacock, and plowed through that, too. Now, I’m catching up on Love Island UK Season 13, a whopping 65 episodes of which also aired this year.
Why can’t I, a middle-aged, monogamous, straight-passing femme eager to make known my progressive and professional credentials – I’m a feminist! I hold an advanced degree in the humanities! – stop watching Love Island? Consider this a piece of investigative criticism.
I don’t mean to suggest that my interest is a total mystery. After all, I’ve long enjoyed—and written about—other juggernauts in the reality dating category, primary among them Chris Coelen joints like Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum. I love how Coelen deploys toxic structures to foment narrative arcs by turns tragic (in the Greek sense—someone better than you is destined to fall) and comic (in the Shakespearean sense—everybody’s got to get married in the end). I love to hate the heady mix of pop psychology and self-interested drama mongering we’ve come to expect from Nick and Vanessa Lachey.
Nor do I feel bad about watching Love Island. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, and I’m not ashamed to love reality television. When a judgmental family member points out that these shows aren’t “real”, eager to disabuse me of an illusion, I indulge a self-important eye roll. I mean, come on. Didn’t some unhappy adjunct force everyone to read at least a little Baudrillard in whatever cultural studies gen ed fit into the sophomore-year schedule? Simulacra and Simulation is still the standard treatment for what ails you in the age of information, and I delight in prescribing it, like a country doctor mixing up a simple poultice for a common but easily curable infection.
Rather, the tandem ease and fury with which I’ve taken to Love Island USA has come to preoccupy me from a critical vantage. What makes this show so consumable, not only for me as an individual, but also for my demographically aligned compatriots? For this generation, this gender identity, this market segment? In the words of Bojack Horseman’s Mr. Peanutbutter, let’s find out.
Love Island’s Nostalgic and Futuristic Paradise
I’m no stranger to the gamified paradise of love. I came to Love Island after watching many of the other shows inspired by it, including Netflix’s Perfect Match and HBO’s hilarious, self-aware F*boy Island. These properties are all filmed on set in tropical postcolonial locations (including, let the record show, California, settler colonialism’s US arcadia), which viewers see only as backgrounds of infinite sea. The ocean effectively isolates each show’s opulent compound from the mainland’s rules and doldrums.
I’m not the first to notice that Love Island and its kind belong to an older genre, the Robinsonade, which projects emptiness onto the equatorial settings it constructs as the condition of possibility for its tales of Western transformation. We can ask of Love Island USA, as we would of any Robinsonade, what kind of new society, what kind of fantasy world, is at the heart of this narrative? Furthermore, what does this vision offer those of us watching from the continent?
Like any marooned sailor, each cast member on Love Island USA must forgo the everyday comforts of the colonial center to enter the show’s amatory paradise. First to go are full-coverage sartorial expectations (a genre classic) and internet-enabled devices (an innovation). Islanders don revealing swimwear, relinquish their iPhones, and enter the so-called Villa, where they give themselves over to the regime of cultlike erotic practices producers have invented to manufacture story and titillate viewers. Contestants must kiss and grind intermittently, talk endlessly about their relationships, and compete in disgusting branded challenges, all in a bid to couple up and prove they’re truly compatible, or at least, more compatible than everyone else.
We thus join the cast in a fantasyland of sensory pleasure, interpersonal drama, and romantic competition, all dependent on an originary occlusion. Above all, Islanders inhabit a world without devices, a world many of us long to inhabit ourselves. Sure, you can brick your phone or delete your socials if you’re feeling too online, but the virtual world will simply go on without you. You can’t brick everyone else’s phones or wipe out Snapchat overnight. On Love Island, however, production can. Production does. The result is revolutionary. Without phones, Islanders are compelled to talk with one another, build deep friendships, invent games, get silly, make out, work out, or freak out.
Readers of my age cohort have experienced these conditions before, when we were teens or young adults in the 1990s, and that’s one of the attractions of the show’s vision. Love Island USA not only proves how totally our realities off-island are shaped by devices; it also proves we could create a new and potentially better reality, as many of us suspect, simply by eliminating dependence within a group. For millennials, then, Love Island’s paradise is both nostalgic and futuristic. The show takes us back to the glorious malaise of Y2K, when many of us were hanging out and hooking up on the daily, at the same time as it projects the possibilities inherent in that kind of offline boredom into an alternate present, an alternate future.
Romance, the show is clear, blooms quickly under these analog conditions, and so does companionship. The show’s selective casting and relentlessly juvenile branding—women are “girls” and men are “boys”—shore up an essentially youthful dream, returning us to college, sure, when we might have prepped en masse for the bar or club in a communal bathroom, but also to middle school, when slumber parties reigned, hormones raged, and peers without fully developed frontal cortices routinely dared each other to make out in public.
Love, Love Island understands, is always contextual, always has an audience, and the show summons us to join the friend group that cheers, adjudicates, and disrupts every amorous connection. We get to know the cast as its members get to know each other, building with them as we watch a parasocial intimacy that parallels the developing intergroup attachments in the Villa. By the end of any season, we’re rooting for the entire cast as much as we are for any single couple.
This is partly because Love Island’s format prompts viewers to do more than observe. We’re invited to participate in the judgment and division that shape onscreen relationships, wielding authority through Peacock’s app. Each season, we’re encouraged to vote on who is compatible and who isn’t, who gets to stay, and who will be “dumped from the island”. Islanders understand America’s rulings as missives from God, sometimes cruel and confusing, sometimes wise and omnipotent. “Why does America hate me?” Kenzie cries toward the end of Season 8. In Season 4, Sydney wonders if America, with its expanded access to conversations, is detecting a side of crush Isaiah she can’t see.
Participating in the friend group drama again holds a special value for midlife viewers. Even though I didn’t bother to vote, I could delight in gossip and arbitration in the chat. Reddit recognizes this vicarious satisfaction as a function of reality television. Most of us at this age know better than to indulge in petty judgment in our In-Real-Life (IRL) communities. Instead, we can condemn and ridicule mellifluous Sincere, robotic Corbin, MAGA Caleb. This way, we don’t have to stay up late to do so, a famously difficult task for those over 30. (Of course, we should admit that these acts of judgment, at least when they move to a public forum online, are not victimless. Many a reality TV villain has cried to their haters on socials, “Please! I’m a real person!”)
Beauty Is Love Island‘s Great Equalizer
Along with phones, pants, and dignity, Islanders check another mainland obsession at the Villa door: class awareness. On Love Island, nobody goes to work, and we rarely see contestants chatting about jobs or income. Some of the show’s most desired Islanders have been servers, nannies, or nurses, although most are models, DJs, and former college or pro-athletes. Love Island USA thus promotes a familiar fiction: love conquers all. A good match can upend established practices of resource hoarding within a society, cutting through existing inequalities, as we’ve seen with Season 8 winners Trinity and Bryce. All you need is love.
Of course, this fantasy breaks down under scrutiny, and not only because the edit we see discloses only some on-set exchanges. Amaya and Carl, Season 8’s second-place couple, were drawn to each other by a palpable bourgeois affinity. On Season 4, Phoebe turned Isaiah’s head in part because she was a law student. Thanks to the correlation between accent and economic background in the UK, Mallorca Islanders reveal their class status as soon as they open their mouths. Still, Love Island attempts to construct a utopian space where physical attractiveness elides class hierarchies, and the only labor needed to keep this erotic economy growing is the work of preparing heart-shaped pancakes for your crush.
Every islander is equal insofar as every islander is hot, and one of the show’s most perverse pleasures follows from this twisted new form of parity. Hot people forego the advantages they enjoy on the mainland, where they inevitably stand out as high value among the chopped masses. Yet if everyone is hot, terrifyingly, no one is. Here, being hot doesn’t necessarily win you more attention, opportunity, or capital than everyone else.
On an island populated by Chads and baddies, the cast has to make choices based on other metrics; personality, say, or style, attitude, values. All hot people are not interchangeable, it turns out. This means objectively hot people now find themselves in the same desperate position as the rest of us. They must deal with rejection, fear, lies, unrequited longing. On Love Island, some people just don’t like blondes. From our vantage on the mainland, in the trenches, this is funny. This is fun. Schadenfreude, amirite?
Gamifying the Polycule
In any case, work (irrelevant), books (prohibited), and politics (edited out) are all verboten for our Islanders. What, then, is left to pass the time in paradise? Love, of course, which on set is a visual and tactile affair. Love Island USA is first and foremost a sex-positive romp. What can make progressive, straight husbands cry sexploitation are the unremitting close-ups of kissing, humping, licking, spitting, and rubbing. The show’s challenges, more deranged and lavish this season than ever before, are designed to elicit from the cast pornography’s familiar stable of positions and facial expressions. Cast members must sit on enormous cakes, pie each other in the face, straddle each other on desks, cover each other in slime, and spit beans and sardines into each other’s gaping mouths.
I won’t pretend to understand how these softcore scenes play for Gen Z or Gen Alpha, audiences widely known to both watch more porn and have less sex than their forebears. As a geriatric millennial, though, I think Love Island’s sex-positive ethos is yet another nostalgic comfort. When I was a burgeoning feminist in the 1990s, I still associated women’s lib with sexual freedom. Raised by Catholic parents who considered premarital sex a sin against the Lord, claiming and honoring my desire felt both necessary and radical. I would crowd-surf at punk shows to feel the thrill of hands reaching up my shirt. I didn’t track my body count (something the girls on Love Island UK insist is respectful, and they recommend iPhone’s Notes app).
A decade and a half later, I’d finished up grad school at an urban R1, and the times, predictably, they were a-changing. As the culture (and sometimes the state) experimented with holding men accountable for their sex crimes after #MeToo, we began to look askance at women’s desire again, this time from a new angle. Conservatives of my parents’ generation associated girls gone wild with the devil. Progressives of the 2010s worried that horny women might actually be the pawns of powerful men, our appetites instrumentalized by our oppressors. Could a young woman like Monica Lewinsky, for instance, really be said to have desired a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton, the leader of the free world? Of course not. She wanted to impress the President, maybe, or at minimum, perhaps subconsciously, she didn’t want to sabotage her own future. How could she have known what she wanted? She was only 22, an intern.
Women’s thirst, especially youthful thirst, came—and remains—under suspicion. When and under what conditions is a woman free to pursue sexual gratification? When do we grant her desires legitimacy, and when do we read them as hopelessly compromised by forces that threaten the woman herself, who, we worry, might even be misinterpreting her own needs and interests? (In some ways, this is the very question that Melanie and Sincere’s relationship poses on Love Island USA Season 8. More on this below).
#MeToo, it goes without saying, did not solve heterosexuality. Wwhile challenging this well-meaning movement from the left might seem needlessly pedantic at this point, given the monstrous rightwing backlash that followed its meager gains (an accused rapist sits in the Oval Office now, and the manosphere has bred figures that make the register of historical creeps appear quaint by comparison), I do think we lose something when we don’t confront the legacy of its shortcomings head on.
Since #MeToo, heterosexual desire has become for those of us on the left supremely cringey. In contrast to the brilliant and brave progressive queer community of intellectuals, activists, drag queens, lovers, and others who have, by necessity, had to talk about the complex and intractable relationship between sex and power, straights still struggle to understand our own sexual needs and interests in a field of desire always already inflected by inequality. The result has been, let’s say, twofold. On one hand, progressives seem to have ceded hetero desire to the right. On the other, bourgeois coastal elites have been accused of enumerating the rules for ethical nonmonogamy or perfecting the relationship titles within their polycules while the world burns.
Love Island USA wades into precisely these shark-infested waters. Don’t let the cast’s proclivity for silicon enhancements and “Republican face” fool you. The show models and explores ways to behave under polyamorous conditions. A group of romantically interested partners comes together and courts each other in the open, according to a rigorously policed set of strictures. Everyone sleeps together in the same room, the double beds lined up against the wall, like at a sexy orphanage for grown-ups.
Villains aren’t necessarily those who date around, or, in the show’s special language, “explore”, although, as critics have pointed out, Season 8’s cast has embraced a more conservative ethos than previous Islanders. Rather, villains are those who, like Sincere, the most ironically named bad guy in the show’s history, tell multiple partners conflicting stories. We watch Sincere betray Melanie, his first partner, with Sol, then with Amora, promising each of these beautiful, smart women a real chance with him. Melanie, despite her misgivings, despite a stern talking-to from her mother and sister, despite a public outcry she can’t really hear without her phone, still chooses Sincere, again and again.
A hazard of the polycule is that everything is up for conversation, for debate. Melanie lives the hardest version of this. Not only does she have to reconcile the stories Sincere tells with what she observes and hears from others, but she also has to answer for her choice. She’s a woman who wants something that doesn’t seem good for her, and she’s going to hear about it. As we see in the reunion episode, which aired over a month after Season 8’s finale, even corporate America tried to cash in on Melanie’s dilemma. Melanie returned to her device after the show to find that brands like JetBlue and Regal Cinemas were offering her vacations and deals, if only she’d leave Sincere. Yet, Melanie stayed strong. She insisted on her right to make her own decision, to honor her feelings, even if, from the outside, others feared for her sanity, dignity, and future.
I think we can celebrate Melanie, a defensive firecracker with no filter and a big heart, as doing some valuable work for the culture. She persists to the bitter end in standing up for her own desire, intuition, and right to be wrong, should it come to that. Of course, this is not the same as saying we should celebrate as a victory for feminism Melanie’s choice to continue pursuing a relationship with a man who lied to her on screen. Those of us who have survived, or been close to, toxic relationships know what it’s like to be in denial within one.
Yet, viewers can tell that Melanie isn’t a mere dupe because she doesn’t try to defend Sincere, not even at the reunion, where she emphasizes that she still doesn’t trust him. Melanie’s storyline emphasizes the complexity and power of women’s desire, and she models how to honor it tentatively, with care and passion, even when that desire insists, as desire always does, on leading her somewhere confusing, uncertain, and potentially dodgy. Melanie doesn’t trust that Sincere is going to be good for her; she trusts in herself, trusts that she’ll know how to extricate herself if and when it’s time.
Ultimately, centrists need not worry, though—Love Island isn’t secretly woke. Whatever training in ethical nonmonogamy the show offers, it betrays us in the end, squandering its thin progressive cred by gamifying the polycule. As much as the cast follows the mandate to explore, they only do so to win; that is, to come together with a single partner in the end. (Imagine how much more chaotic Love Island would be if contestants were allowed to establish throuples! That would diminish the prize pot, though, wouldn’t it, a lesson we already know from the history of marriage.) In this way, the show instructs us in the emotional labor required for life in the polycule without delivering any of the benefits of sex and love we might enjoy if freed from the shackles of the couple.
Thank Goodness We’re Beyond All That
What does Love Island, finally, have to say about the couple form? Winners from season to season have been diverse in race, ethnicity, class, style, and more, and yet, lore around how to win proliferates online. Of course, these discussions, which surface on socials and digital tabloids, are often flashpoints for the inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexuality that shape the culture Islanders enter the Villa to escape. On Season 4, for instance, biracial Timmy was accused of choosing his partner, Zeta, whom he abandoned shortly after their victory, for dubious reasons. Timmy’s sister, Zeta, alleged after their breakup, had “encouraged him to go for a dark-skinned woman on the show, because they were historically popular with viewers.” Theories beyond choosing a partner focus on how to secure screen time (crucial to get those votes) and build a compelling romantic narrative.
On Reddit, fans and prospective contestants generally recommend a narrative strategy that balances loyalty and risk. Viewers seem to favor couples who can build a relationship quickly but also show they’ve been “tested”. They’ve spent some time exploring a new bombshell, or they’ve weathered temptation at Casa Amour, the sanctioned orgy that drops mid-season. The pair should resolve the test quickly, however, and then demonstrate regret and declare their true feelings for their original partner. This is the idealized relationship viewers are imagined to want. Not exactly love at first sight, but rather love that has survived something, that has earned a kind of cold glitter from its trials and tribulations.
Certainly, this vision has some appeal for the married among us, those for whom the great question of love has long been settled. Marriage, famously, takes some work, and we can celebrate alongside other demographics an idealized couple willing to confront the hard stuff (as long as things don’t get too hard, as Melanie and Sincere and Isaiah and Sydney know). Married viewers can also share in the narrative excitement of the search for love, but this time, from within the comfort of our own established unions.
The search for partnership is perhaps life’s most popular object of narrative interest, and Love Island has found a way to produce this interest structurally, giving us access to a process we can no longer experience firsthand ourselves. (I remember wondering about that as my wedding approached—if I’d found long-term partnership, what would give my days meaning? I’d spent my entire life up until that point searching for love). Married viewers, in particular, can enjoy further gratification as romance unfolds on Love Island. We get to feel superior to these singles; after all, they’re searching for something we already have. More, we get to feel superior to our past selves. Who among us hasn’t sat upon a cake for love?