While there’s been plenty of pop theorizing on why young people aren’t having as much sex as previous generations, if you were born before Y2K, you’re probably not witnessing how these generational hang-ups play out. Unless you’re watching this season of “Love Island USA.”
Contestants spend most of their days in the Love Island villa half-naked in high heels, using therapy-speak to navigate what is essentially a polycule.
“Love Island USA” is an appealing escapist counterweight to historically bad national vibes. It’s got hot and stupid people. It’s got sweethearts and schemers. It’s got kissing and fighting. It’s got butts, filmed in slow motion. It’s got a guy who is at most 5-foot-8 lying about his height. It’s got a retina-burningly bright set that is always sparkling clean. And there are hours of new content from the island per week, almost enough to drown out the sound of the world ending.
“Love Island USA” makes other dating shows seem anachronistic. On Love Island, there’s no one anodyne male who looks like he was selected from a JCPenney catalog, no gaggle of prom dress-clad dental hygienists with ambitions to host “Access Hollywood” being manipulated into believing they are falling in love with him after a 20-minute helicopter ride.
On “Love Island USA,” there’s little moralizing about other contestants’ being “here for the right reasons”; it’s tacitly acknowledged that the cast’s main goal, in addition to “finding love,” is growing one’s Instagram follower count as much as possible.
One of the show’s stars, 24-year-old Huda Mustafa, has a 5-year-old daughter she left behind in order to jet off to Fiji for months — a fact that nobody involved with the show seems to have a problem with. Mustafa is known for twerking so impressively that many fans believe she must be a stripper outside the show and for her near-constant state of emotional dysregulation. She now has over 1.2 million followers on Instagram. If the show is working as designed, she has no idea.
Islanders can’t have their phones while the show shoots and airs — for some, the first time since they were preteens that they haven’t had instant access to strangers’ opinions of them. Savvier contestants arranged for their accounts to be run by somebody else in their absence, carrying on without them like digital haunted houses. Others, like breakout fan favorite Amaya Espinal, haven’t posted in months. They have no idea who viewers like, or why.
Season seven’s islanders are predominantly in their mid-20s or younger — which means they’re the first batch of contestants who probably don’t remember a time before social media existed. They are natives to the digital panopticon and have spent their youths being bombarded with streams of surgically enhanced celebrities and influencers on their feeds.
And you can see that fact reflected in the overfilled faces of younger female “Love Island USA” contestants. Some of them have had child-scaringly large amounts of conspicuous facial cosmetic procedures. One contestant, 24-year-old Cierra Ortega, has been ridiculed by fans for constantly pursing her overfilled lips. Another, 21-year-old Vanna Einerson, was on the show just long enough to raise eyebrows about somebody that young’s getting that much work done.
Contestants spend most of their days in the Love Island villa half-naked in high heels, using therapy-speak to navigate what is essentially a polycule. When they aren’t talking “exploring their connections,” contestants stare at themselves in their individually assigned mirrors, work out, pretend to cook breakfast and sleep.
The islanders aren’t getting past third base. They’re barely even holding hands.
“Love Island” episodes are broken up by “challenges,” which are semi-sensical games that serve as excuses for the contestants to become intimate with contestants they aren’t coupled up with. The fallout from what occurs during the challenges often causes interpersonal drama in the aftermath, which leads to the climax of the mostly plotless show: “recouplings” and subsequent banishment of single contestants from the island.
During the challenges, it’s clear that this season’s contestants know how sexiness looks — they gyrate on one another for the cameras with the nonchalance of people performing a dance they learned on TikTok. But outside of the challenges, they’re not able to reattach sex and emotions.
Most people in the 25-or-younger demographic reported to have seen pornography by the time they’re teenagers. It therefore stands to reason that they grew up understanding sex as a performance. And now, like the Gen Z kids the think pieces worry about, the islanders, too, seem caught in a sexual conundrum — they are simultaneously hypersexual and sexually conservative.
The islanders aren’t getting past third base. They’re barely even holding hands. It’s whiplash-inducing to watch them dressed in fetish wear pantomiming expert sex positions during one scene and in the next quibbling over whether they’re ready to kiss “outside of challenges.” The islanders seem to understand that sex can be an intimate act but also can’t figure out how to achieve emotional intimacy. Despite the fact that they are made to share beds and spend most of the day in bathing suits around one another, only two of the couples — the now-broken-up Huda and Jeremiah and the still-on Cierra and Nic — have admitted to having had sex this season. Another way Love Island USA’s emotionally sadistic reality playground exemplifies sex panic about younger members of Gen Z is the underwhelming nature of its men. Despite the fact that most fans agree that the female islanders are, at the very least, beautiful and interesting, the same can’t be said for the guys. A member of Gen Z might classify them as “mid.” The men — surrounded by some of the most amazing-looking women who are currently on television — seem to believe that somebody even hotter could walk into the villa at any moment. They’ve never dated during an era without the infinite options presented by dating apps, and it shows. Fans are particularly vexed by the treatment of 27-year-old Olandria Carthen by 24-year-old Taylor Williams. Carthen is cartoonishly out of Williams’ league (one contestant described Olandria as one of the most beautiful women in the world), but Williams treats her like a nuisance. Even after Carthen’s attempts to win Williams, he eventually dumps her for another contestant in front of the entire cast. Now we are seeing the first results of an unfortunate coalescence of two large-scale human experiments: Does social media harm human development? How about forced Covid isolation during a formative emotional time? How about we take a medium-sized group of these messed-up young adults, take their social media away and film them constantly while only occasionally letting them know how they’re being perceived? It’s no wonder “Love Island USA” is such a fascinating — and revealing — watch.
Erin Gloria Ryan
Erin Ryan is a writer and podcaster. She's the creator, co-host and executive producer of Crooked Media's "Hysteria" podcast and a frequent contributor to other Crooked Media podcasts and video series. She's written for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," The Daily Beast, Jezebel and other TV shows and publications. 
