Chill out everyone... Love Island is fantasy, it doesn’t really exist
YIKES! The annual “Mum, can you get out of here, I’m watching the telly” time is upon us again.
My 16-year-old son is obsessed with Love Island and, for a reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, he doesn’t want to be accompanied by his old mum (who clearly knows nothing about the birds and the bees) while he’s viewing Laura and Wes (such a cute pairing) snogging in bed.
Do they actually say snogging any more btw? Or should I say “sticking it on” now? Help me out here.
Anyhow, part of me wants to trash the island and damn it for celebrating all the wrong values. It’s superficial, it’s fake, it’s exploitative, it seems to be deliciously unaware that even young people come in all shapes and sizes... but that’s all true of modernday dating. Social media sites, though, are already bursting with the weight of comments criticising contestants’ perfect physiques, particularly – groan – of course, the girls’ amazing bodies. “Would be nice to see some girls with curves for once,” remarked one tweeter. “Nothing like a bit of Love Island to make you feel like a fat potato,” said another, with many agreeing that the show’s perfectionism is “destroying young people’s confidence”. Yes, it probably is, but aren’t Instagram, Facebook and Twitter etc already doing a pretty good job of that with people posting to show off their glamorous holidays, diet-shrunk, toned and buffed bodies, dark tans and designer labels?
Isn’t TOWIE, too, promoting a lifestyle that’s out of most people’s reach? Not to mention Made In Chelsea with its posh trustafarians who rarely rub shoulders with the real world – the world that most young people are having to negotiate their way through. The thing with Love Island is we’re meant to be looking at a kind of paradise, a place that doesn’t exist.
Love Island is a pretend place, one where everyone is physically perfect and spending a disproportionate amount of time in bed (although my 19-year-old could beat any of them on that score, he actually just sleeps in his though).
It’s a sort of Majorcan Venus and Adonis version of your everyday Benidorm Dave and Brenda.
It’s perfection in place of ordinary. It’s ripped abs in place of beer guts. It’s bodies how they actually should be if we fed them healthy food and got off our backsides more.
So, why not indulge in a long, hot Love Island summer, confident in the fact that it only lasts for eight weeks. Because it’s NOT reality.
It’s perfection in place of ordinary. It’s ripped abs in place of beer guts