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Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.
Now that the latest season of Love Island has been fully wrapped and digested, I think we can be honest about what it is we were watching: beautiful people being constantly tortured on camera for our entertainment. It’s likely that not even the stars of the show themselves know how many lenses were aimed at them at every waking—and sleeping—moment. All that really matters is that they constantly believed the cameras were there, observing them, and thus they behaved accordingly.
But look around: it’s not just Love Island where people act like this, is it? With our phones in our hands, Flock cameras coming for every intersection, and home security systems recording you every time you walk down the street, we are already being watched all the time. Whether we’re entirely conscious of it or not, we are also already watching ourselves and everyone around us, behaving accordingly for our surveillance state.
There’s a word for this phenomenon, of people becoming conscious of their own surveillance and in turn, surveilling themselves and everyone around them. The panopticon. As a show like Love Island perfectly encapsulates, the panopticon has the potential to entirely distort and disrupt our romantic lives. We’ve become so cautious about being watched and the possibility of our innermost desires being broadcast to the world that it’s inhibiting our ability to seek connection and pleasure — instead, we’re consumed by policing other people’s pleasure.
The word first emerged in 1791 as a literal prison design by Jeremy Bentham and was later extrapolated into a metaphorical structure of political power by French theorists like Michel Foucault. In the panopticon, prisoners are housed in a circular formation, cells facing inward toward a central surveillance tower. From this tower, guards could easily see inside every cell and monitor prisoner behaviors from one vantage point. Crucially, prisoners do not necessarily know precisely if and when they are being watched, and so the assumption becomes they are always being watched. With prisoners also able to see across the structure toward other prisoners, they’d naturally begin to monitor each other, as well.
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,” Foucault wrote in the 1975 book Discipline and Punish. “So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action… in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”
In the contemporary context, Love Island is an obvious parallel to the Bentham-ite prison, albeit with far more neon lighting and skimpier outfits. Even on a show dedicated to making out with multiple people, contestants were constantly concerned about appearing and accusing each other of being “lustful.” There were a series of unspoken rules about exactly how horny a person could be and the ways it was allowed to be displayed, and if one broke these unspoken rules, they’d become the subject of ridicule and criticism not just in the villa, but all over the Internet.
Many have made the comparison between the prison and the series on TikTok, which is potentially why people are increasingly beginning to talk about the panopticon in broader contexts on social media, as well. We as viewers, then, took part in the punishment.
“Gen Z will never be able to live freely and happily until we learn the meaning of privacy… we’re aware that everywhere we go we’re being watched but a lot of people in Gen Z just end up perpetuating that same thing,” creator Kaitlyn Taylor said in a TikTok this week. “A lot of Gen Z is willing to volunteer themselves to live in a panopticon just for the sake of policing morality.”
Policing morality is something Foucault was explicit about in his discussion of the panopticon over 50 years ago. He wrote that the sort of physical punishment we might associate with the medieval era—torture, impalement— had been replaced with the “learned economy of publicity…the example is now based on the lesson, the discourse, the decipherable sign, the representation of public morality.” Surely we do not wish to replace becoming a viral topic of conversation online with having our tongues torn out, but still. Whenever we engage in this digital surveillance of each other, we are enforcing the dominance of technological power.
Last month, a 45-year-old Manhattan lawyer and his 29-year-old colleague were “caught” making out on a bench in a quiet portion of Central Park by a stranger who decided to record them and share it online.”Get a room,” the person recording them said. Since then, the video has been covered by international news outlets, with the elder of the duo at risk of losing his high-paying job. It also turns out that he’s married. On the one hand, maybe it indeed reflects a poor sense of personal responsibility and risk-management for this married hot-shot lawyer to make out in a public park with a colleague. On the other… who fucking cares?
The current digital panopticon encourages us to make a spectacle of everyone’s sex life, trading in our own privacy in return. You don’t have to be a married lawyer making out in Central Park to feel the panopticon’s effects. Who’s to say you and your perfectly ethical partner won’t one day indulge in your desire for a smooch and be blasted all over the Internet next? Maybe that wouldn’t happen to you because you simply have no interest in kissing in public, or maybe that lack of interest in kissing in public is your own way of participating in the panopticon yourself. Whether it’s kissing in the park or noticing who has liked which posts on Instagram, we’re often active participants in the digital panopticon whether we’re conscious of it or not.
That a new audience of people are catching on to the term and this reality is a cause for optimism, and not a moment too late. The sex recession is real, people are lonely, they’re afraid to relax and have fun in social settings for fear of being filmed and embarrassed. As we become more isolated and fearful of sexuality, the restrictions on so-called “morality” may only tighten — something we’re already seeing as attitudes towards LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive freedoms grow increasingly conservative in the mainstream. Can we all opt out of the panopticon and live in a world of sexual liberation and respect for each other’s privacy? Probably not entirely. But we can, at least, choose not to become the enforcers of the panopticon, ourselves.
