Everything is sexual, but nothing is sexy.
Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.
If someone walked in on me watching Love Island, I would promptly turn it off. It has all the makings of a sex party porno: a dozen or so bikini-clad women and buff shirtless guys, surrounded by camera and fluorescent lighting, constantly making out on outdoor furniture. And that’s on a tame day! On some episodes, one might even catch people twerking on each other, giving under-the-blanket handjobs, or even sitting their nearly-bare asses down right on a whole cake.
The reality, though, is that Love Island is, well, a reality show. And for all its porniness, it represents one oft-repeated sentiment about today’s culture: everything is sexual, but nothing is actually sexy.
With its six-times-a-week hour-plus long episodes, watching Love Island isn’t all too different from gooning. Gooners are people who watch pornography in several hour stretches, often across multiple screens. Love Island, meanwhile, has taken up a similar format. Fans are devoting what might as well be entire work shifts to the show, watching it not just on their televisions but also on their phones through clips on TikTok, Instagram and X.
In an episode this week starring Megan Thee Stallion, contestants were asked to sit their butts—many in thongs or, at most, cheeky booty shorts—onto round cakes. Many then proceeded to twerk and do the splits with their asses covered in sugary frosting. This isn’t just some quirky concept: cake sitting is explicitly a fetish. On independent custom fetish clip site ManyVids, there are thousands of videos for sale of women sitting on and playing with cake. Some are charging upwards of $30 each. In this way, for some viewers, Love Island literally is porn.
But it isn’t just these bizarre scenes that make it feel that way. Jaz Melody, a pop culture commentator, has been going viral on TikTok recently for her analysis of the show. In one, she discussed the precise sentiment that, for all its horny moments, the show lacks any real sense of eroticism. “The key element of seduction is actually restraint,” she explains. And if there is anything that characterizes Love Island, it’s a lack of restraint.
The same can be said for gooning: indulging in your most base, reckless instincts is embraced in the goon-world. And notably, many gooners are perfectly content to goon to softcore pornography, or even just sexy Instagram pictures. For that reason, Love Island has indeed become goon material for some guys. There’s even a whole subreddit with 23,000+ members called r/LoveIslandHotties where members talk about masturbating to images and clips of women on the show. And yes, they talk plenty about gooning.
In another recent video, Melody discussed how the introduction of Jasmine, a woman with outspoken feminist values, onto Love Island UK (which is also airing right now) led to chaos. “We get to witness a society-less villa where people essentially get to escape the mundane and treacherous things of everyday life and societal structures and power imbalances… until something happens and a feminist brings something up. The whole villa crumbles,” she explains.
There are obviously plenty of feminist Love Island viewers and feminist gooners (well, at least a good number) alike. Both watching porn and watching reality TV can be an escape, separate from one’s everyday values. But both the show and the act of gooning share this sense of a suspension of reality — no politics, no socioeconomic hierarchy (at least not explicitly), just chaos and pleasure and hedonism. Entire dissertations could be written on how all of these things and more influence the Islanders, but within the bounds of the Villa, and through the eyes of the contestants, outside pressures may as well be a long-distant problem.
Melody notes that the overall freakiness of the current season of Love Island differs from that of Love Island UK, the original iteration of the show. “I think [the porniness of the show] is such a result of how sexually repressed the U.S. is, that we lean onto such overt performative sexuality but then all the cast members are calling each other ‘lustful,’” she tells me. “It’s been so interesting watching the UK season in tandem because they move so much slower, some don’t even kiss each other for a week. But then you have the US season where everyone made out with each other within the first episode and categorized each other by favorite sex position.”
She suspects this is the result of US producers attempting to keep ratings high through shock value. The reason why it comes off as so unsexy, though, could be because of the castmembers own Americanized sexual repression. They want to grab people’s attention and stay on the show, but fear the consequences of coming off as people with authentic desires — hence the use of the term “lustful” as an insult this season.
If the cast were genuinely just having fun and embracing a few weeks of sexual liberation, it all might feel a bit different. It might actually feel sexy. Instead, we as viewers have an overwhelming feed of content of these young men and women publicly embarrassing themselves in the name of horniness. What other purpose does making them sit on cakes or greet each other in their favorite sex position serve? It is all designed to suggest the abundance of sex without any real passion behind it. There’s no depth, and certainly no restraint. It makes for addictive television, sure. The same could be said for a lot of what’s streaming on PornHub.
