Every mother should watch Love Island

As ANY mother of a teenage girl will tell you, they are on a very different wavelength from the rest of us. Even more so in an age when internet sites such as Instagram and snapchat create secret virtual worlds into which parents are not allowed to venture and where any attempt to engage is met with anger or derision.

But I have discovered a very unlikely — and rather insalubrious — path to my teenage daughter’s consciousness: ITV2’s smutty dating mega-hit, Love Island.

I’m not the only one, either. several of my female friends, also mothers of teenage girls (and boys, for that matter), have also been watching. Not just because it provides precious common ground with their children — something to break the sullen silences at the dinner table — but also because it is a window into the elusive existence of the modern teenager.

For anyone who was born in the last millennium, I should warn you: Love Island is likely to be a bit of a cultural rollercoaster ride, because it offers a terrifying insight into the sexual climate our children are growing up in.

For those still blissfully unaware, Love Island is a sort of spiced-up version of Big Brother, set in a villa in Majorca, where the contestants — the Islanders — compete for each other’s sexual attentions in the hope of securing a £50,000 prize.

Viewers vote them off, and those who have sex with each other have a better chance of survival. At least three couples, none of whom had met before the show, have now had sex in the current series.

The contestants are ordinary members of the public — if being willing to sleep with a stranger in front of cameras can be termed ‘ordinary’.

Their talents lie not so much in their intellect, but more in their physical proportions and appearance. All are primped and preened to within half an inch of their bikini lines, and are determined to stop at nothing to be famous.

In that respect, you might think they’re not much different from the ‘stars’ — the pneumatic girls and muscly men — on scripted ‘ reality’ TV shows such as TOWIE ( The Only Way Is Essex) and Geordie shore, set in Newcastle, which film the daily lives and relationships of a bunch of young, often semi-clad, friends. BUT

while it’s true that the characters on those shows display a relaxed approach to sexual morals, they don’t spend the entire series half-naked and in bed,

in flagrante, with colleagues. Yet while sex and relationships are a central plank of the format of TOWIE and Geordie shore, the sex is not, as it is on Love Island, the central component.

In shared dormitories in full view of other contestants, hard-bodied young men with groomed eyebrows and not an inch of unwaxed muscle on show have intercourse with smooth-skinned beauties with false eyelashes so thick it’s a wonder they can even identify their partners.

It is, to all intents and purposes, what my generation would term soft porn.

The sort of thing that, in any normal circumstance, would carry an 18 rating. I would have been utterly mortified to watch it in front of my own parents.

But for my daughter and her friends, observing these individuals perform their mating rituals is just another form of entertainment, no more shocking than watching a pair of penguins on one of David Attenborough’s natural history programmes.

At this point you might say: why do you let her watch it? A very good question — to which the answer is simple: I have no choice.

In the same way that my own mother could not stop me putting on eyeliner at the bus stop on my way to school, I cannot control what my daughter watches on the internet when she’s out of my sight.

short of locking her in a leadlined room, there is very little I can do to prevent her from being exposed to a programme that — for her generation — is universally acknowledged as

the show to watch. For my daughter’s age group — she’s 14 — technology is an essential part of existence. And part of the secret of the current series’ success has been its ability to hook viewers in via digital platforms.

Teenagers can download a Love Island app, which they can use not only to vote, but also to catch up on highlights such as this week’s striptease and lap dance by male contestants.

There’s also Instagram, on which the show regularly places video footage and pictures that young girls can look at. In these ways, the show has harnessed an army of avid fans.

As one fan explains: ‘I feel like I’m in Majorca with them.’

Another adds: ‘It gives you something to share with all your friends, and when you meet a new person you can immediately have something to talk to them about.’

Another says she’s enjoyed learning a new lexicon of dating terms, such as ‘cracking on’ (flirting) and ‘on paper he’s 100 per cent my type’.

Personally, I can’t think of anything more boring or soul-destroying.

But then it’s not about me, it’s about understanding my daughter’s world — a world in which sex seems to have less meaning as an act of intimacy between two individuals than ever before in the history of civilisation.

Young people today are increasingly desensitised towards it, and consider it no more remarkable really than eating or drinking, or lighting up a cigarette.

It says everything about today’s approach to sex that Ofcom has had more complaints about the amount of smoking that goes on in Love Island than the sex.

And that it why it is relevant to us all. Because this show does not represent the values of a few morally casual or especially promiscuous individuals (one contestant claims to have slept with more than 300 women); it is a mirror on the world we live in.

For all the manicures and gym-honed physiques that contestants display, there is a caveman mentality here that speaks to our species’ baser instincts — one that, as a mother, makes me fear for the future of our children.

so how did we get here? What are the origins of this de-sensitisation of sex?

You can’t blame the sixties or Cosmopolitan magazine: my generation grew up after all that sexual liberation stuff, and still the majority of us