Love and brand deals in the panopticon
Love Island szn (aka the most wonderful/hellish time of the year)
In 1999, Wendy Langford published Revolutions of the Heart, a book about romantic love and its tendency to recreate harmful structures of power between men and women. It reads like an ice bath. “Love itself is not entirely innocent”, she writes in the conclusion, “[l]ove itself is not essentially anything”, and although we may seek to escape the pain of toxic masculinity or misogyny through a relationship, we still exist within and can perpetuate the harm they cause; even as we believe that love will save us from them. If love is blind,1 it makes us blind to the potential of emotional alienation, destructive dynamics, and generally having a fucking awful time.
Anyway, Love Island is back.
I’m so excited to have these beautiful test subjects on my screen again. I cannot wait for them to consume my every waking thought and ultimately render me so parasocially invested that I send minutes-long voice notes to my friends demanding that they send all the boys - quoting directly here - “to Catholic hell”. On Love Island, everyone is beautiful and no one is over 30. It’s a world where queer people don’t exist in any meaningful sense because of (ahem) “logistical difficult[ies]” and you can watch the shiniest people you’ve ever seen suffer the effects of weeks-long mind games as perpetrated by those they’ve handed their heart to, like if the gladiatorial arena had veneers and radiant angel Maya Jama.2
While participating in the show, the islanders aren’t allowed to know what time it is. They’re not allowed to have any writing implements or things to read, they can only have two alcoholic drinks per day, and they’re told when they can shower or be inside. All the have is each other, all they talk about is each other. Love Island is a crucible of insecurity, emotionality, and voyeurism. It’s watching people watching people watching people; and those people are aware of the fact that they’re being watched and want to be seen in a very specific way that might endear them to the public (or to the Account Directors who manage PR lists).
So, in a year that’s brought us the wonderful I Kissed a Girl, what does the world’s longest and most heavily surveilled night at Revolución de Cuba have for us? Let’s take a look.
One thing I’ll say about the islanders is that they’re far braver than I am, and I could never do what they do. Of course, I would never be let in the door because the BMI thinks I’m dead and if someone asked me what my “type” was I’d say Kermit the Frog with big arms. But the idea of doing a full beat to lay around in 30C heat and wear heels with a bikini every damn day for a man with the emotional intelligence of a marshmallow makes me want to hurl myself into a paper shredder. If already being in a long-term relationship is like being on the last helicopter out of Vietnam, subjecting yourself to Love Island in 2024 is like signing up for the Milgram experiment, sponsored by Juvederm.
Fundamentally, Love Island is a marketplace. Sure, there’s the literal meat market going on as glistening, muscled bodies are gawked at by the camera and the contestants alike. But there’s rarely a spec of the show that either isn’t advertising space or is conspicuously void of branding (because, I can only assume, a lucrative sponsorship hasn’t been secured). My first exposure to this year’s show was that Google Pixel is now the ‘phone sponsor’, the ads that take us to and from the break extols the virtues of buying clothes on eBay - you can even buy the water bottles, suitcases, and towels that the islanders use! On Love Island, everything is for sale: people, products, and of course successful couples are hugely marketable.
Can we talk about the prize really quickly? £50k is not a lot of money in 2024. Amelia Tait wrote a great piece earlier this year about how prizes get smaller and smaller as the cost of living looms larger and larger, and never is it more obvious that the real prize of Love Island is brand deals and successfully selling yourself than when the £50k is waved under the islander’s noses.
I’m predisposed to like Samantha, the makeup artist. I worked in luxury beauty retail for years, and it was MUAs like her who were on the front lines with me fighting back customers who wanted to try 25 identical peachy nude lipsticks and teenagers who swore down that they needed to use retinol NOW. I really like Mimii, the mental health nurse who’s oozing with charm. The men mostly blend into an amorphous mass for the first week or so for me, so you’ll have to forgive my lack of specifics beyond Sean, the guy who sells sweets on Tiktok live, and gives girls a bag of sweets on the first date,3 and Ayo, who says “Stinky!” in response to Mimii saying she’s been cheated on before, which is how I’m going to respond to all unpleasant news from now on. Also, Joey Essex is here?? What the fuck???
In case you were ever worried that Love Island would become progressive in any possible way, be not afraid. “Welsh girls are wifey as fuck", says one of the men in the midst of a huddle as they prepare to rate the girls from most to least like girlfriend material. “Wifey as fuck” ends up close to the top of the scale, while a girl who’s told she seems like (seems like!) she “parties too much” is put near the bottom - didn’t expect to see the Madonna/whore complex show up within the first 45 minutes but here we are. People watching people watching people.
Langford reminds us that passionate love is typically positioned as “in resistance to power and control”, but how is such a thing even possible in an environment as radically controlled as Love Island? The answer is that it isn’t, not really, as evidenced by the small number of couples who stay together after the show ends and the even rarer few who have started families. What is possible, however, is a version of that love that’s profitable and disposable - no wonder they held on to those fast fashion sponsors for so long.
Thank you so much for reading this week’s edition of Scheming Third Wife. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram, and if you’re sharing this on social, please add a link.
I’m not even going to touch THAT show, oh my god
Although if what I know about gladiators is accurate, they absolutely would love a boohooMAN collab
ICK.