Today’s edition of Spitfire News is a little different. This month, I have a student journalist working alongside me to build out a social media strategy and contribute some of her editorial insights, too. She’s pursuing a master’s at the Vogue College of Fashion in London and she covers the intersection of feminism, fashion, and pop culture. Her contributions to Spitfire News this summer are part of a work study program, and you’ll see some blogging under her byline! Welcome Cassidy! (And here’s her Instagram.)

Personally, I’ve never been a big reality TV fan. But when I dip my toe into the viral conversation around Love Island, I can see how it tracks with bigger shifts in a popular understanding of feminism and politics. There has been a rise in something called “girl’s girl” feminism, a watered-down and in many cases inverted version of the progressive fight for women’s rights. It’s more of a social playbook for how to tear down women, which actually benefits their male peers in distinctly antifeminist ways. The average Love Island viewer is a Gen Z or millennial woman, and the way many of these women (and some men) talk about the contestants on the show reflects this playbook. 

Thankfully, we have Cassidy to illuminate how and why this is happening. It involves high-stakes social media scrutiny, gendered double standards enforced by producers, and even the resurgence of 16th century terms for slut-shaming. 

by Cassidy Gays

Not much has changed for women on reality TV since the early 2000s, except that today, the culture of hostile parasocial surveillance and regressive gender politics around them has been rebranded as “girl’s girl” feminism. Love Island is a UK dating show where young singles try to find a connection on an island in Fiji, with the constant threat of a bombshell—an individual whose appearance fits the ever-evolving beauty standard—arriving and stealing their partner and their spot on the island. Over the past three summers, the US version has become can’t-miss TV for even non-reality fans, and the epitome of this pseudo-feminist backlash. The fandom expects moral purity from all contestants, while at the same time believing no punishment is too extreme for bad behavior. This is not just exclusive to Love Island and has affected the real lives of many reality TV show cast members.

In this piece, I will refer to the islanders by their first names, as the show does not provide their last names, playing even more into the parasocial relationship between fans and stars. Despite reality TV being performative in every way, viewers increasingly feel that they know who these contestants really are. But the contestants who face the biggest consequences for this parasocial policing are women.

Before the season even started this year, fans were digging for anything they could find on the cast members that could indicate their political views. A fiery, 24-year-old Georgia native named Kenzie was suspected to be a Donald Trump supporter after fans found a photo of her floating around social media with a Trump flag in the background. Her friends and family spoke to outlets like TMZ in the aftermath to vouch that she was not a Trump supporter and did not vote for him, but it didn’t quell the hate. Around the same time, news broke that another islander, Sean, was a newly-appointed police officer. Both Sean and Kenzie received backlash for appearing at odds with anti-Trump progressive values like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bastards,” an anti-police sentiment with a long history that surged online after the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement).

But once the show started airing, fans began to soften up to Sean. Criticism of him almost disappeared entirely, while Kenzie’s haters remained consistent. I have never seen such a negative online response to a cast member getting dumped after Sean’s exit five episodes in. In comment sections of videos about Love Island, he is still frequently brought up, even though it has been over 25 episodes since then. “I cried,” posted one TikTok user, while another wrote “He left his son to be there. Why couldn’t Zach or Bryce leave?” (One can imagine how a female contestant who “left” her child to be on Love Island might be—and has been—treated differently.)

While Kenzie is still in the villa, she has not been able to win over fans in the same way. They now seem to view her as the worst thing a woman can be on social media: a “mean girl” and “male-centered.” When asked if the hate people have for her is valid or justified, the excuse presented is that she is MAGA, so it really doesn’t matter.

Even though Sean being a police officer was real and the hate against Kenzie seems more like a manufactured smear, the supposed “girl’s girl” perspective here is to coddle a man’s feelings and ruthlessly attack a woman—for the crime of being mean and centering men. Projection, much? It calls back to the smear campaigns engineered against celebrity women like Blake Lively, where misogynistic online abuse is justified because the woman was a “mean girl.” Whether the commenters are the real “mean girls,” or more accurately, mean women, is never taken into consideration.

On the last season of Love Island, a woman named Cierra was removed from the villa a week before the finale after viewers discovered she had posted an anti-Asian slur on social media prior to going on the show. While many fans were rightly upset by this, some took it too far. Cierra later shared that people had falsely reported her family to ICE in an effort to get them deported. This is an extreme but illustrative example of how some reality fans root for disproportionate punishment, but mainly when the target is a woman, and even if the punishment falls under the same category of racism that the crime fits. It's also reminiscent of how some Reddit snark communities will harass their targets under the guise of their targets behaving badly—again, a kind of projection.

A less extreme threat Love Island fans frequently make is saying they will vote disfavored contestants out. One of the reasons the show has gotten as popular as it has is that it gives fans a sense of control over islanders’ fates through voting on the Love Island app. However, many of these fans are totally misunderstanding how much influence they have compared to the producers. In some cases, their posts are actually ensuring their targets’ longevity on the show, since producers know those cast members are creating buzz. A contestant that producers want to stay is never leaving the villa until they are ready for them to leave. The producers can manufacture the circumstances of the dumping (the show’s term for an elimination) to guarantee their desired outcome. For example, Kenzie was saved from elimination by winning a karaoke challenge involving singing and dancing. Kenzie was a competitive dancer growing up and was pretty much the only good singer in the entire cast. It’s quite possible that production orchestrated this challenge right after she and her partner Dylan were in the bottom three of a public vote. The probability of them being voted off by their fellow islanders was high, had she not been protected by the producers’ challenge. But by keeping her on the show, the producers also guaranteed more online outrage would be sent her way, incentivizing fans to attack Kenzie and generate more engagement with the series. The house always wins.

In response to past controversies and fan outrage, Love Island USA host Ariana Madix has occasionally taken to the show’s official Instagram to ask fans to be respectful. But this has not effectively deterred fans from harassing contestants, and the production has otherwise ignored it. The bid for engagement, even when it’s driven by antagonistic parasocial relationships with islanders, continues. This is despite the tragedies involving contestants on the UK version of Love Island after enduring extreme online scrutiny. Two former islanders have died by suicide, as did former Love Island host Caroline Flack, who was separately facing assault charges she pled not guilty to. In the aftermath of these suicides, the series did at least provide the contestants with help monitoring their social media and required them to attend at least eight therapy sessions after leaving the show. While this was a move in the right direction, they could do more to discourage the most aggressive members of their fan base.

When it comes to Kenzie, the specific phrasing fans are using to condemn her also rings an alarm bell for regressive, psuedo-feminist politics. Starting week one, she has been referred to as "lustful.” This is a relatively new term in the world of Love Island that contestants and fans have been using this season to shame many of the contestants on the show, mainly women. It has its roots in the 16th century, and its usage today does reflect the puritanical Christian origin of the term as a pejorative. It’s also nonsensical in the setting of a show like Love Island, where exploring romantic and sexual connections is the entire purpose. Why would viewers be drawn to such a series if they simultaneously judge the behavior it encourages? 

As explained by “Josh the RHONY Stan” (RHONY stands for The Real Housewives of New York City) on TikTok, fans of Love Island require moral purity from reality TV personalities now and are rewarding boring personalities. Then, when the show is boring, they complain and want more. The Love Island spinoff series Beyond the Villa exemplifies this pattern. The first season, which follows contestants’ lives after leaving the villa, was criticized for lacking drama. The producers responded by adding more tension in the second season. But cast member Hannah was forced to issue a public apology for being a “mean girl” to her castmates. Women on these shows are damned if they do and damned if they don’t when it comes to creating conflict with their peers. Audience ire is then disproportionately targeted at these women, even when their male counterparts are doing the same things in more egregious ways. 

“Movie night” on Love Island is a segment where the islanders watch footage of themselves and react to compilations of their own behavior in a group setting. This season, both Kenzie and a man named Sincere were singled out for exploring multiple connections at the same time. Sincere actually had double the footage of his “exploration.” In the villa, it is supposed to be understood that everyone is open to exploration until they agree to exclusivity with one other person. The only rule is to be honest and respectful while doing so. But there’s a clear gendered double standard. When the men on the island were shown videos demonstrating their dishonesty and disrespectful comments about the women, they became very defensive. When Kenzie was shown her video, she was remorseful and apologized—and she was honest about everything besides a single kiss. Sincere lied to his connection, Melanie, as well as other women. He was shown saying the same things to different potential partners. But when the entire group sat down to watch these videos, the men ganged up on Kenzie and referred to her behavior as a “double standard,” which became a false equivalence that fans latched onto. The criticism of Kenzie that was already palpable only intensified. 

At the midway point in the show, “Casa Amor” brings in a new group of “sexy singles” to lure committed contestants away from their partners. The women brought on during Casa Amor always have it the hardest and are quickly villainized. This is due to the situation the show puts them in: to stay on, they have to mold themselves into someone the show's men want to bring back to the villa. This season, many fans specifically criticized contestant Sydney for asking KC whether there was any way she could improve or change herself for his benefit. Instead of assessing the structural sexism built into the show’s format, fans immediately called her “male-centered” and other terms used to criticize and shame women. It’s almost like a microcosm for the way society often demands women debase themselves to succeed, opening them up to criticism as individuals instead of the system itself. 

Love Island is far from the only reality TV series plagued by misogynistic fan engagement and production-driven double standards. Previously on Spitfire News, Kat covered how upcoming Bachelorette star Taylor Frankie Paul has been villainized as she navigates an ongoing custody battle with allegations of domestic violence in multiple directions. Despite her Bachelorette season getting yanked as a result, executives are reportedly pondering airing it anyways. It’s something many of Paul’s most ardent haters are eager to consume, assumedly because they’ll have even more ammo to use against her. 

On The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the show Paul initially starred on, gender-based violence allegations are an entire plot point. A major focus of the third and fourth seasons was Demi Engeman accusing a different reality star, Vanderpump Villa’s Marciano Brunette, of sexual assault. He has since filed a defamation lawsuit against Engeman, creating a reality universe version of Depp v. Heard. And just like with Amber Heard, the women around Engeman have lobbed every victim-blaming trope in the book in her direction. The fact that this is all generating revenue for the avowedly family-friendly Walt Disney Company, which owns Hulu, which creates the surreal reality world these stars occupy, is the rotten cherry on top.

This disturbing pattern of victimizing and revictimizing women on reality TV in every way possible—from the producers to the fans to the other cast members—has been consistent since the early 2000s, where Snooki and Sammi Sweetheart were calling women sluts on Jersey Shore. But back then, these shows weren’t presenting anything happening onscreen as feminist. The cast of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Love Island viewers, however, are. They present themselves as “girl’s girls” while simultaneously saying their former friend is lying about sexual assault or abuse in instances highlighted on and off the show. Maybe the shift in language is to account for the progressive movements of the 2010s, which as the 2020s have already shown, didn’t go nearly far enough. They instead laid the groundwork for regressive backlash, as demonstrated at the highest levels of politics and in the lowbrow culture that keeps the lights on at the major studios. The facade of “girl’s girl” feminism may also be helpful in luring women into appearing on these shows at all, considering how much of a risk you take in the likelihood of becoming another villain instead of a victor. 

Reality TV doesn’t have to be a circus of sexism, but for fandoms, producers, and even cast members, it reflects a certain status quo. Why question the structure created by those in power? We can just call a woman male-centered and move on. Why question the backlash a woman is getting? She isn't perfect, so she deserves it. And why is it that a woman is punished twice as hard for something that a man did but twice as bad? Well, she should have known better. The promise of this kind of television is that you can see the messy sides of everyday people that are relatable and still root for them. In practice, it has become more about punishing women for being human.