Last year, I regrettably formed a new guilty pleasure. You guessed it – I bit the bullet and fell down the hole of the hottest dating show of our generation – Love Island. As addicting as it is to watch the downpour of drama that helps you escape the genuine problems in life (many of which these contestants will never have to worry about again – like money, and job-seeking, and qualifications, and, oh, sexuality – we’ll come back to that one later), the toxicity that seeps from the shows every pore is something that should never be celebrated or popularised.
If, for some reason, you’re currently in the position that I was just this time last year, and have never watched an episode of the entertaining tripe, I’ll give you a quick rundown. Stereotypically beautiful men and women are shacked up in a Spanish/African villa for months with the goal of ‘coupling up’ with their one true love and winning the big cash prize. For every man, there is a woman – equal numbers for equal, but painfully straight, couples.
Now, going into the show, I wasn’t expecting to see anything remotely relatable in the first place. All the girls are literally perfect, and the likes of last series’ Italian Stallion Davide was handcrafted by Michelangelo himself. There is not one belly roll when they sit, and the Islanders snack on fruit instead of devouring a whole pack of Oreos within a minute. But one thing was more certain than anything – It was going to be nuclear (excuse the pun). Boy and girl, girl and boy. Every Islander is expected to be dead straight.
You’d at least expect, however, for some form of acceptance for a
ers’. Last year, contestant Luca Bish expressed some pretty harsh disgust at the suggestion of Sapphic intimacy that was potentially unfolding in front of his very eyes. “You can’t do that!” he exclaimed as two girls locked lips inches away from him. A vile comment, when you consider past contestant Sophie Gradon, who took her own life after the bullying she endured following her experience being part of the shows first and only queer coupling.
In 2021, Love Island’s producers deemed the introduction of same-sex couples on the show as being “logistically difficult” to execute. Now, those of us in the LGBTQIA+ community have been called a lot of things – many of which I cannot reiterate in this column. But, ‘logistically difficult’ is, for me, a new one. Now, you can read this as me ‘taking the comment too far’ all you like – but there is literally nothing difficult as accepting that there are other sexualities and identities that exist outside of straight and cisgender, and I’m sick of such people complaining about how incredibly effortful and excruciating it is to remember someone’s pronouns and preferences. It is quite literally the most basic level of respect you can offer to another person.
Love Island, you may indeed think that it is ‘logistically’ too much effort to try to include a wider range of our society on your more-modern-than-ever ‘reality’ programme, but I’d argue that you are ‘logistically’ inept, devoid of any actual empathy and lacking of innovation. To remain as relevant as you are, you must begin to bin the outdated versions of love that so many of us are sick of seeing.
Oh, and also, the girls and the gays would argue that we do it better. If you want drama, we’ll give you it tenfold – much more than Becky lipsing George could ever muster.