Love Island Is My True Crime
Lilly digs into the intersection of true crime, reality TV, female rage, and the trauma of... interacting with men.
I don’t know how else to describe the feeling of watching the kind of reality TV that I’m obsessed with — Love Island, Love Is Blind, Perfect Match, Summer House, Vanderpump Rules — other than a controlled rage. I tune in day after day to see the most beautiful women of my generation destroyed by Just Some Guy, mascara smearing down their cheeks and hysterical in matching two-piece sets. Time and time again, the same point is proven: In their relationships with women, men are capable of debilitating cruelty, and not even a TV camera will stop them.
While people love to talk about how reality TV is fake, what I find remarkable about dating shows like Love Island or Love Is Blind is that, influencers-in-training or not, the contestants are just random, regular people. The men on reality TV may be more likely to be “models slash actors slash personal trainers” than your classmates or coworkers, but they move the same way. They meet in private to debate who’s hotter than who. On Love Island, out of earshot of the girls they are dating, they discuss the way they view relationships more honestly — which is as a transaction. On season 7 of Love Island, Jake spent his run on the show talking about how Liberty, a woman he dated exclusively and asked to be his girlfriend, was not quite attractive enough for him and how his “head might turn” if someone “more his type” came on to the show. In the politics of the Love Island men, this was no problem — since, if he left Liberty, it would be “for the right reasons,” which on that show essentially means in the pursuit of “love.”
Even as someone who’s been friends with many men in my life, I’ve never felt I’ve gotten a closer look at what an uninhibited group of guys looks like than when watching reality dating TV. I’d like to think that all of the men I’ve known in my life have been as respectful behind closed doors as they are in public, but the truth is, I don’t know and I never will.
Being a woman in this world means being aware of potential dangers at all times. It also means clocking much subtler ways in which you are treated as a commodity, as an occasional prize but more often as a nuisance. It doesn’t take incredibly progressive politics for a man to acknowledge that women are treated less-than in all the meaningful ways; they know about the pay gap and rape culture and reproductive rights and sexist frat rituals and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It’s much more destabilizing for them to acknowledge the more invisible acts that make women feel uneasy, the way they or men they know have treated women they’ve deemed to be unattractive or stupid or annoying or clingy or slutty or a buzzkill or not wife material. None of them want to say the quiet part out loud, and trying to get a confession out of them will drive you insane.
Dating shows pull back the curtain. Like true crime — a genre predominantly enjoyed by women — reality TV exposes the very real fears that women have when it comes to dating. In a Mother Jones essay on why women love true crime, P.E. Moskowitz writes: “True crime validates; it allows us to feel collectively what we’re often not allowed to discuss in public: Men are fucking scary, the world is fucking scary, and we have every fucking right to be scared.”
I’ve found so much catharsis in complaining with my girls.
It’s been theorized that many women like true crime for a few reasons: It justifies the unease they feel constantly while also allowing them to control how much of this feeling they are consuming in a given moment, and it can feel like a proactive way of ensuring their own safety. I argue the same logic draws many women toward reality dating TV. Obviously, there’s no comparing murder to being unceremoniously dumped, but relationships can be traumatic, too. Watching someone live out your worst dating nightmares on TV can similarly feel both affirming and educational.
In a post-Tinder age, which has given men the opportunity to quite literally swipe through a marketplace of women and only speak to those they’ve deemed fuckable, we’ve been able to see just how scary men can be when it comes to dating. Nancy Jo Sales has written about the psychological effects of online dating and hookup culture extensively. In a 2015 article in Vanity Fair, she detailed a conversation with a few men who told her that “there’s always something better” out there and that “guys view everything as a competition” while they were actively swiping on Tinder.
The men Sales talked to sound a lot like the men “looking for love” that we see on Love Island — and reading her articles infuriates me the same way that watching Michael leave Amber on Love Island season 5 did (if you know, you know). And yet I can’t stop — because, if I did, perhaps I’d be alone in this ambivalent feeling of being less-than-a-person in the eyes of roughly half the population.
I’ve been thinking a lot about female rage recently, and how bothered I am by how rarely I express it (another reason that’s been cited for women’s true crime obsession). Call us toxic, but one of the main things Melinda and I bonded over when we met was getting angry about things together — often completely inconsequential things, and even more often things that hadn’t even happened to us. I don’t think it’s surprising that another thing we had in common was a deep love of reality TV.
A big part of growing into a woman is realizing that how you react to men disrespecting you becomes who you are in the world; and a big part of being a teenager and young adult is hating yourself at least a little bit for the decisions you’ve made. Who among us has not given men grace they did not deserve, awkwardly smiled when someone has looked us up and down like we were literally a used car they were considering buying, or prioritized our perceived Hotness over our personal comfort? I use the first-person plural intentionally here — because at the foundation of so many female friendships is the shared experience of venting about this kind of mistreatment, of creating whisper networks and spilling gossip and reminding each other that we are better than they way we’ve been treated.
I’ve found so much catharsis in complaining with my girls. It’s in these safe circles that we take on men we know and ones we don’t. I’ve spent hours ranting with Melinda and our other friends about, say, how Kwame could hardly find a positive word to say about Chelsea in the latest season of Love Is Blind, or the negative comments Cole made about his fiancee Zanab’s looks in the previous one. If I walked outside and said the name Bartise right now, I know I’d be met with a collective groan from my community of fellow haters.
One of the fallacies of true crime is the idea that you can learn enough about the perpetrators to avoid becoming a victim. In truth, violence against women is more random and common than is comfortable to accept. Shows like Love Island prove the same thing about dating: No amount of perfectly blended contour, outfits with ludicrously placed cutouts, or Dyson blowouts will save you from a man whose boys just don’t think you’re that hot.
Hunter-gatherer corner
What we’ve read and DMed each other about lately — our internet bounty is below!
Tinder Is The Night by Nancy Jo Sales - Vanity Fair — I have to dig this out of the VF archives since it’s so relevant to this week’s issue — and I just can’t get over the fact that it was written in 2015. It’s been almost a decade of this behavior… and it’s pretty bleak to think of how things have changed for the worst. — LM
Leslie Marmon Silko Saw It Coming by Ismail Ibraham - The New Yorker — I’ve been a Leslie Marmon Silko stan ever since I read Ceremony, which completely changed how I view time and history both in fiction and reality, in a college lit seminar, and I’m always interested in getting a closer look into the mind of one of the World’s Greatest Minds. — LM
What Was Twitter, Anyway? by Willy Staley - The New York Times — I haven’t been on Twitter much because the algorithm turned annoying and I have been on social media less in general, but I think my blue check is supposed to disappear, today? Hardly even got to know her! Anyway, planning to check out this piece in memoriam. — MF
Why Not?
Why Not? is our biweekly list of recommendations. Think recipes, gift guides, podcasts, clothes, and anything we consider to be generally chic. Have a suggestion? Let us know!
White Beans With Radishes, Miso and Greens - NY Times Cooking — Like 40% of the texts I’ve sent Melinda in the last two weeks have included the words “white beans.” I’m on a kick and this was the perfect addition to my white bean recipe rotation! — LM
Hanging Closet Organizer — I’ve always been a dresser/drawers person rather than a hanging clothes person, but I’m here to admit I was So Wrong. I recently ditched my dresser and hung up all of my clothes and I feel like a new person — one who won’t have to use brute force to open and close overstuffed drawers anymore. For my wool sweaters, I got this hanging closet organizer, so that I could still fold them. — LM
Patrick Ta Major Headlines Double-Take Crème & Powder Blush - Sephora — The Sephora sale is still happening, so I’ll take this moment to rec this blush I was gifted last year in the shade “Do We Know Her?” which is the perfect orange shade for summer. — MF
If you liked this issue, recouple with us! Tell us your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter (@lillymilman | @melindafakuade), and share it during your confessional.
Wow wow wow! I’ve been pondering similar thoughts after watching the latest season of Too Hot To Handle and you worded my thoughts perfectly. Brilliant!