Love Island is an exercise in body fascism – why can’t old ugly people like me have sex on the beach?
In its obsession with finding physically perfect modern mates the show mixes post millennial optics –spoiled oversexed kids smoking and snogging their way through life in skimpy swimwear with an ill-disguised infatuation with 1930s style eugenics
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Before you ask, no I haven't seen Love Island but I don't really need to, because you don't need to shake hands with the devil to be familiar with his basic "offer". Same with Love Island: I know what it is, what it represents and why it's a bit evil.
What it isn't, by the way, I fully realise, is climate change or Brexit or North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. In the grand scheme of things it is utterly ephemeral and trivial. Not worth a second thought. Still, though I find it disproportionately offensive because it has an almost fascistic ethos, what with the beautiful and exclusively young and "fit", in every sense, bodies on display. It is ageist and possibly illegal under the Equalities Act 2010, a piece of legislation that has been remarkably ineffective in protecting the rights and dignities of older citizens more generally. I feel like a sort of reject, like a misshapen carrot chucked out by a supermarket, in a society dominated by this sort of cult of youth (though I grant you Jeremy Corbyn, knocking on 70 is something of a conundrum).
In its obsession with finding physically perfect modern mates the show mixes post millennial optics –spoiled oversexed kids smoking and snogging their way through life in skimpy swimwear with an ill-disguised infatuation with 1930s style eugenics. From every frame, every fabricated piece of "Love Island News", every entry on the Mail Online's sidebar of shame, it reeks of contempt for anyone and everyone who is sagging a bit or who can say who Hughie Green was.
For younger people too it is but a tiny but typical fragment in the kaleidoscope of idealised body types that are being still forced on them from every possible medium. If you're a bit chubby, your teeth are a bit buck or you're very short or something then you might as well go and live in some cave, i.e. with no access to broadband.
The not so subliminal message of Love Island and just about every other bit of popular culture is that love and sex and partnerships are strictly for those under 30 with idealised physical attributes. Everyone else can sod off. Love Island is, for all the gleaming white teeth and pert bottoms, and playfulness, an ugly and evil display of vanity and narcissism.
Yes, I want to know why ugly old sods like me aren't let on. OK that might be a bit weird, 60 year olds hanging around with 25 year olds: but why not some physically imperfect young people as candidates, those with their beauty on the inside and all that? Or a show for the middle aged but lively? Flab Island? I've lost a bit of weight recently, still got some hair and my own teeth, and I know who the general secretary of the TUC is (which I doubt all the love islanders do). Where's my hammock, sex on the beach (actual and cocktail versions), and fun in the hut? I mean even with the other old ugly people? Why can't we have an island too? We could sit around discussing Brexit and Kim Jong-un and the Paris Climate Change Accord. We could snog and smoke too. We can misbehave entertainingly because we've had a lot of practice.
I guarantee it would make gripping viewing. Please may we have a series? Before it's too late for some of us, if you get my drift?
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments