BRITAIN’S most popular love reality show, Love Island has returned for its sixth season.
Just like the colonisers centuries ago, the conventionally good-looking contestants descend upon the shores of the Western Cape.
Cape Town has been picked as the new holiday destination for the show and, 11 episodes in, it’s still as weird and entertaining as the first episode I watched in 2018.
We all have our reality show guilty pleasures – who remembers Geordie Shore? Reality TV has been a part of our viewership for almost two decades now and I came to this realisation when a friend of mine posted a thread of reality TV’s finest moments.
Some of those highlights stretched back to the early 2000’s! Madness right? Shows like MTV’s The Hills, Flavor of Love (Flavor Flav’s version of the Batchelor) and Girl’s of the Playboy Mansion on E! were some of the earliest reality shows our generation watched and all of these “classics” were hilariously cringe-worthy.
A common trend among all reality shows is the promotion of conventional beauty standards and historic, racial sexualisation: a mixed-raced or Asian girl will always be called exotic while the black men who are cast in these shows are mostly tall and incredibly muscular.
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The white women, with nice bodies and somewhat bubbly personalities, will always find a love interest that fits the “tall, dark (normally white) and handsome” description. Hilariously enough, on Love Island, that’s the first thing most women on the show are looking for. What worries me about the way all contestants describe their “type”, is how they mention someone’s features before they get to their personality.
This has been a recurring theme in every season I’ve watched. It shocks me how blatantly shallow the contestants are.
In the first season I watched, one of the finalists, Wesley, made it very clear that he was into blondes. This is a bi-racial man who’s my age (22).
Another woman contestant from the same season, Samira Mighty, who is black, was seeking a guy with long hair and blue eyes and sadly, like most black women on the show, she struggled to find a partner. When she did – he was voted off. Something that makes me incredibly uncomfortable about the show is the experiences of black women and, this season, an Indian contestant, Nas.
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There’s been plenty of discourse about non-white contestants not being viewed as viable romantic options. Although, there have been past contestants who haven’t struggled as much to find a partner, such as black and bi-racial men (probably because they’re fetishised).
Past contestants, like Samira and Yewande Biala, are as beautiful as their fellow islanders but weren’t instantly desired by the men in the house. The same can be said about Nas, who is as good looking as his male peers, but has barely been looked at because he’s not of a certain height?
Nas, like Samira, has been pigeon-holed into the ‘fun contestant’ role in the house and is described as ‘the life of the villa’ but isn’t desirable enough to date.
This raised a question in my head. Do these reality shows perpetuate real-life dating preferences? Do people actually identify with islanders that will only date taller men, or date girls of a certain body type, regardless of their personalities?
It’s scary to think about because these people will be famous after the show and, as a society, we shouldn’t normalise being this shallow.
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