Top 3: Love Island and the Material Effects of Desire
Media Round-Up:
The Living End [1992] - Trying to watch more response pieces to the AIDS crisis as research for A Thing, and I wish I could get more into this? I just couldn’t feel invested in the leads (even with their powerful chemistry) and the style didn’t quite hit for me.
A World Without Police [2021] - Geo Maher - Some incredibly work on what it means to make the police truly obsolete, and how we already have so many of the tools to make a better world! Also, it’s fun to read when he gets poetic and/or bitchy.
Elvis [2022] - My King (Luhrmann not Elvis) has done it again! Truly the master of capturing the feeling of a moment of great excess and leaning HARD into it. I also continue to be fascinated by his somewhat problematic relationship to Black culture!!
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Top 3
I’m always meaning to do more writing on reality TV, cos I have a lot of thoughts about, what we are willing to accept within this hyperbolised reality has a lot to say about us. Also, given the increasingly surveilled nature of our world and our continued alienation from the actual fruits of our labour - perhaps we’re not as far from these reality TV stars as we think! So here’s a little something about one element of the current season of Love Island.
For anyone who doesn’t watch it, Love Island is a reality TV show which puts a number of single people looking for love on an island. The objective is then to stay on the island (as new ppl are brought in and they become vulnerable to being kicked off), find love and be voted as the audience’s favourite couple at the end of the show- which gets you the £50k prize.
This year’s season started slightly different than most, the starting 5 couples were chosen by the audience rather than the islanders themselves. In a move that was largely unsurprising for the British public, the starting couples were neatly segregated, with both Black men being paired with both Black women and the white women being paired with the white men. Neither of those Black couples worked out and from the start, it was fairly obvious that they were not compatible. Now, after some evictions and recoupling the pair of Black contestants that had actual chemistry (Indiyah and Dami) are now together, but also every other Black contestant (excluding Danica and with a big TBC over Casa Amor people) has been booted off.
(source: @nelzistired on Twitter)
Given the circumstances, the original pairings were uniquely fragile and subject to change, yet almost immediately a hierarchy emerged. Everyone asked each other who their ‘top 3’ were and for the white contestants, the three names that came up would almost always be the three white people of the ‘opposite sex’ in the house.
At one point early on, one white man (Andrew) falsely told a white woman (Tasha) that she wasn’t in the top 3 of another white man (Luca) and it caused some drama. Ostensibly this was a confrontation over the lying and the breaking of the homosocial solidarity, but the subtext is also that it was deeply offensive to suggest that he would choose one of the Black women over her. On this island, anyone Black is not only less desirable than their white co-stars but seen as completely unDesirable. This is true for the Black men as well, something that can be seen with how Dami will flirt with every person (of any gender) in there and has never really been a source of drama.
When I capitalise Desirable here I am specifically using Da’Shaun Harrison’s definition: ”Desirability is the methodology through which the sovereignty of those deemed (conventionally) Attractive/Beautiful is determined” More reductively, you can think of it as taking the societal ideas of beauty/a beauty standard/pretty privilege and giving them a systemic analysis.
(Danica)
With the introduction of Danica as a bombshell later in the season these segregated sexual politics were heightened. Danica is a small but thicc mixed-race woman who could pass as white with relative ease - especially in this context where everyone is heavily tanned. And yet, she has been passed around like a hot potato, not only treated as less desirable but like someone who isn’t even worth considering and should almost be pitied.
However, things aren’t quite that simple. The Heartbeat Challenge, where the contestants give an erotic dance to try and get the most heart rates up, shows that Danica is where the distinction between fuckability and Desirability comes into place. The boys are willing to foam at the mouth for her at the challenge where she is performing ‘exotic’ sexuality (in a striking outfit you’d expect to see at Carnival) but they cannot imagine her as someone they would actually enter a serious relationship with. Since long-term monogamy is the vision of the show they have no purpose for coupling with her. Instead, they must turn to the women who are further from Blackness than Danica and also fit a little more easily into the trad wife mould. Replicating the violent dynamics of the broader British dating scene, Black* women are sometimes seen as fuckable, but are (D much never Desirable.
This is also something that is true but manifests differently for Black men. Every one of them has been seen as neutered and non-threatening, with a particularly egregious moment happening earlier on where Andrew says to Tasha (the woman he’s coupled up with) that it would have been fine if she kissed Dami or Ikenna in the challenge because they’re just her friends in the villa, whereas her kissing Luca was a Problem. There is a clear undertone here by which there is an automatic assumption that the Black men are also unDesirable because even if they flirt with or kiss one of the white women, the women will always come home to their natural place with the white men. It must be said that Black men have historically fared a little better on this show than Black women due to the homosocial solidarity shared between the men, for example, the heinous shit which happened to Rachel last year would not have happened to a Black man, but their racial position still affects their prospects.
(Ikenna and Amber, two of the original Black contestants, were booted from the island after an audience vote)
None of this is to say that there have to be #swirl relationships all over the place and Black people should be forcibly shackled to white people they don’t like. However, it is a thing that’s worth analysing within a broader cultural framework, especially since the exclusion of these Black contestants from the mythical Top 3 is also reflected in the edit.
Writing for POPSUGAR, Kelle Salle points out: “I don't think it's controversial to assume that producers seem to favour white contestants in the edit of the show. Black islanders appear to feature more in the show's Saturday night recap of "unseen bits" rather than in the main weekday slots.” This is no accident, the editing process of a reality TV show is the most revealing show of its ideology. These producers/editors are clearly working in their interests for what they think will keep viewership numbers high (this seems to have succeeded) - and the logic seems to go as follows:
Love Island is a show that is built around Desirability, the fantasy being sold is that ITV 2 have collected the nation’s hottest singles in one place for a summer of love. By extension, the people who are cast, and the people given the most time in the edit will be the ones who are seen to have the potential to create the most drama (reliant on being desired by other islanders) and are fan favourites (reliant on being desired by audiences). Adding to that, producers are casting from a demographic (Desirable British and Irish people) who broadly refuse to see Black women as worth desiring, and seem to have no interest in consciously counteracting that refusal while casting, all playing to a presumed white audience. As such, the Top 3 mentality also clearly forms on the production side as well creates a self-reinforcing loop constructed by an edit where people like Luca and Tasha dominate, while you’d be forgiven for forgetting Afia or Amber were on the show at all.
(Afia, another Black contestant who didn't get much time before being kicked off)
It is also worth noting what groups of people are deemed so wildly unDesirable by default that they cannot even feature. There are never any women bigger than midsize (especially not with non-hourglass fat distribution), and never fat men on the show, rarely any Asian people (especially Asian men), and noticeably disabled Islanders are few and far between with the camera and production team doing their best to make sure those disabilities aren’t in shot (until they can be used extremely cynically for Inspirational Moments). A whole swathe of people, much more than I can list here, are excluded because the producers cannot imagine the public they are aiming at finding them even remotely attractive - and the worst part is they probably aren’t totally wrong.
In her piece, Salle goes on to talk about how these issues make the show harder to watch as a Black woman and this is important but well-trodden ground so I won’t be re-treading it. She also discusses a sort of moral imperative to produce a Love Island which allows for a Black experience to flourish in the escapist fantasy, but I want to look bigger picture than that and instead use this as a jumping-off point for an analysis of the material effects of desirability politics.
(previous Love Island winner Amber Gill)
While the promise of Love Island is ostensibly about finding love, it’s also about building a brand on national television to access the ever-profitable realm of brand deals and celebrity. After all, most people know they won’t win and even if they do, £25k is a significant amount of money but won’t last forever. Visibility is essential for getting those deals which really make appearing on the show worth it. If the public doesn’t know who you are, how will they follow you after the show and use your discount code on Boohoo? Even the most popular Black contestants like Amber Gill or Yewande to the runaway success of Molly-Mae. So, the double bind of antiblack producers/editors and antiblack contestants means that Black islanders have a worse time on the show and also benefit materially less from it. Crucially, these issues aren't limited to reality TV.
Moving into the lives of ordinary people, we can immediately see how antiblackness has a material effect, from receiving an increased amount of violence from state authorities to significantly worse health outcomes. As Sabrina Strings writes about extensively, antiblackness is foundational to fatphobia, both in its past and present. In The Fat Pay All - The Political Economy of Obesity, Alice Julier then points out how this links together in issues of employment discrimination:
“In both media reports and scientific studies, obesity is disproportionately associated with poor African Americans and Latinos, populations who also suffer discrimination in the job market and are increasingly asked to do the jobs that middle class white Americans don’t want to do. Often lacking the type of social capital that whites use for employment advantages, people of color are routinely positioned in less desirable jobs.”
She also points out how this issue exists on gendered lines as well:
“People who are perceived to be overweight find it harder to get jobs, are paid less for the same jobs, and are less likely to be promoted (Roehling 1999). Using data from the National Bureau of Labor, Cawley (2000a) suggests that white women are most apt to experience a loss in wages and job opportunities when they are large. Women as a group already experience a measurable wage disparity as well as greater responsibility for unpaid domestic labor—we can surmise that large women are particularly targeted for the low end of the wage scale (Hebl & Heatherton 1998, Fikkan & Rothblum 2005).”
Given that fatness, gender and race are co-substantive central tenants of the politics of Desire, we can see how the structure can be used as a way of analysing the discrepancies in treatment on the show and how they branch out into the broader world. As such we can see that unDesirable people are treated worse in employment on the basis of their unDesirability, and that is just one sliver of the ways that Desirability materially affects those who end up on the bad side of the system.
(the 2021 cast)
While the islanders are operating within the unusual space of reality TV, they are still ultimately workers and thereby subject to conditions set up by their employer (in this case ITV Studios) as well as the material issues that come with not being Top 3 material. Though this is just the tip of the iceberg - most Islanders are nowhere near the butt end of Desirability. What about the beast-like traits attached to Black masc people that make them especially subject to police violence? Or the ways that passing, which is essential for the safety of many trans people, is harder for the unDesirable - especially when transfemme?
These are issues that reach beyond the island and beyond just the sphere of dating - and it’s worth doing the work to interrogate how much of our lives are affected by this, even when the cameras aren’t rolling.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.