Theories of Love Island

I like knowing what people are talking about. I’m the type of person who’s read two or three reviews before I actually see the movie. Insufferable, I know. This is to say I’m not a long-time Love Island watcher; I tuned in once it hit subculture escape velocity, two summers ago, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

(In fact, this has been my way into reality TV in general. I’ve seen 2 seasons of Love Island, both American. I watched my first, summer 2024, because Ariana Madix was hosting; I knew Madix from the nth season of of Vanderpump Rules, which I only watched that season of because of Scandoval. I knew what a Vanderpump was because of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which I started watching near the beginning of the pandemic, because I wanted to understand Woman Yelling at Cat meme. Spoiler alert, Woman Yelling at Cat meme has a very, very dark backstory. Future post on how Houswives turn trauma into drama forthcoming.)

Last-last summer’s season of Love Island was extremely good. This last summer’s was extremely bad–except for Nic and Olandria. I’m #Nicolandria nation, for real. When Love Island is on, it plays an astonishing 6 nights a week. I don’t understand how people keep up with this, except where I live in San Francisco, where summer is offensively cold. Two summers in a row, as the Pavlovian Doo-dododoDedododo triggered our household, and I curled up under an afghan to watch a bunch of male and female thots compete for love and commitment, I found myself wondering, doesn’t America have anything better to do?

Here are the things I can’t stop thinking about after consuming two seasons of Love Island. Call this an indigestion post.

But first, here’s how the show works:

Love Island puts a cast of 10 or 12 cisgendered, assumed-straight “bombshells” into “The Villa,” a cameramaxxed house in Fiji. It has a pool, and beach access, but no one uses them. The purpose of the game is ostensibly to find love; straight couples choose to “couple up”; when there is an odd number of contestants, put through a “recoupling,” in which either the “boys” or “girls” get to choose first who to recouple with, someone or someones will be left “single and vulnerable”--in which case, either the cast or yes, "America," will vote them off of the island. Periodically, a group of new bombshells is brought into the villa to disrupt the happy couples and provide a reason for a recoupling. Also, mid-way through the season, one of the gender-groups is sent to “Casa Amor,” where a group of opposite-sex hotties is waiting to destroy their nascent relationships; an opposite-sex group of bombshells also joins those left behind at the Villa. Oh, and did I mention everyone sleeps in a bed with their couple in the same room with everyone in their house every single night? Oh, oh -- and everything is communicated to the cast through text messages on closed-circuit smartphones.

It’s weird enough without any analysis. I’m generally not a contest reality show watcher. I like the Kardashians and the housewives. I’m not that into competitions. But for whatever reason, this series got me for what felt like two entire summers, so as I gasp for air late into the fall, here are some cultural theories I’m left with.

The surveillance. I wrote about this a little bit on LinkedIn. In fact, maybe that was the post that clued me in that I needed to write this blog. I found myself disturbed by the thought of being trapped in a mansion, cameras everywhere, with random texts coming through to tell you to go here, go there, America hates you, your best friend or new lover is going home.

It was the little things that got to me, like the islanders using prison-esque language of “when we’re back on the outside,” or the way the men universally broke down in sobs when their parents showed up, that clued me into how manipulative and dysregulating this experience must really be. The disturbing isolation and permeating surveillance of the season is the foundation for everything else I noticed about it.

The camera-ready gender performances. Every morning and again every night, the young women spend an hour doing their hair and makeup before going back outside to meet “the boys.” They have a full glam room setup with a lighted mirror and chair space for each of them; the boys have no such private space; their closets and drawers seem to be in the bedroom where everybody sleeps. Besides the gendered expectations the show has for its cast, what’s more amazing to me is that there is an apparently endless supply of young women out there with the actual skill set to put on what we call “full glam” on their own, without any professional help. You could say they are semi-professional at their makeup and hair on their own. They also have these outfits. They have the poses. In following Nic and Olandria’s journey after the show, I realized at some point in my internet wanderings I had actually already seen a picture of Olandria at a college football game in these insane pants, or rather it’s her waist to hips ratio that is insane, with a pair of dramatically cut pants on, when she was merely an influencer, not yet a Love Island cast member. And on a podcast her castmate Chelley talked about how the show’s producers had been trying to recruit her for multiple seasons. How did they find her? Because she’s part of a cohort of internet baddies, of micro-influencers, who are already getting dolled up, getting themselves photographed, making themselves visible exactly for an opportunity like this.

In this way they’re very different than the Housewives because even though they’re not rich (yet), they’re camera-ready. What makes Housewives an amazing show is that the women are very rich, very privileged, very isolated, but being 50+ years old, they totally overestimate their ability to perform and keep their secrets on screen. Meanwhile, while 20-somethings may also overestimate their abilities to perform, they are far more rehearsed as performers–and more importantly, they are ready and willing to sacrifice whatever is asked of them for their fame. I’ve even heard that the Gen Z contestants are even more jaded and performative than the Millennials were, which tracks.

The heterosexism ad absurdum, which is true on all dating shows, which can be summarized this way: this show is so obsessed with monogamy and finding one true love and yet it’s highly accurate to say these people are all in a polycule together. Not only are they all making out with each other, or at least with some of the same people, as on the Bachelor and Bachelorette, for example, but on Love Island they actually all sleep in the same room, like co-ed sleepaway camp.

It shouldn’t be controversial, though it will be, to say that competing on a dating show is s** w***. It’s not hardcore, but the job is to make out on television, so that is clearly erotic labor, aka sw. The absurdity is this in the context of a hyper heterosexist, monogomy obsessed discourse, where they’re obsessed with “coupling up” and being “closed off” (aka monogamous)... when every day is a new game to get them all to make out with each other… and then every single one of them goes to bed in the same room at night.

Finally, something about the fact that this show started in the UK and Australia and then spread to the US, something late Anglophone empire. There’s a famous clip from Love Island UK of a deeply struggling young woman–we could, generously, call her uneducated instead of unintelligent–trying to grok the meaning of Brexit, except she doesn’t even understand that England is a country and Europe is a continent [ video link ]:

It reminds me of the infamous clip of Ms. South Carolina talking about Americans' geography literacy [ video link ]:

There’s something here about once-great empires, maybe never morally great but at least with functioning and comprehensive education systems teaching something, some set of truths which we could contest but at least internally had their own canons and mastery, being in a position where members of the privileged caste, which white people still are in both the UK and the United States, ever, ever, ever speaking like this. Like the phenomenon is the existence of anyone with enough money to do their hair and nails and go shopping all the time having utterly no idea what the fuck is going on–literally not knowing what country they are a citizen of. I’m thinking of how the actual height of Britain’s children is in decline, not to even speak of their reading level–and certainly not to speak on ours. So ultimately I see Love Island as reflecting a phenomenon of economic decline, leaving young people available for highly exploitative labor for intimate surveillance–and not just available but actually spending their young adulthoods preparing for it, in the absence of more promising opportunities for meaning, community, and work.

Oh P.S. As a viewer, to vote for your favorite contestants and couples, you need to download the Love Island App. Here is how the Apple App Store describes its data collection practices. Notably, 3 million unique individuals voted for the summer 2025 season of Love Island USA.