Love Island and its body diversity issues.
Is the Love Island body type representative of men’s and women’s bodies in the UK?
The hit reality programme presents a similar cast selection every year, and it’s starting to get a bit boring…
The images above show that year after year the body typecast for Love Island is tall, toned, and slim. Washboard abs seem to be the recurring feature for the men on the show, and a small waist with a petite frame is seen as a defining feature for the women on the show.
It is difficult to comprehend that this is representative of society when the average dress size for a woman is a UK Size 16, and the male sizing closely follows this. But clearly, anyone with curves cannot be cast in this band of ‘sexy singles’ looking for love, which is disheartening.
This is without including how there is an obvious pattern of cosmetic procedures being promoted by contestants on the show; with the most common beauty enhancements being breast augmentation, veneers, and filler. The culture that surrounds television and celebrity culture is overwhelming, with many of our favourite celebs have had cosmetic enhancements in order to be ‘TV-ready’ or to avoid the vicious nature of online trolling.
Reality TV in particular represents an artificial construction of real-life as argued by many literary theorists, with its enclosed environments making it quite detached from society. Surely this would imply that the bodies we see on the show are separate from real bodies too?
The bodies we see repeatedly on the show are clearly a body type that exists in society, so I am in no way shaming people who naturally look like this. However, my concern lies with how the body representations we see are limited to just one type of body, this is being shown to young and impressionable viewers, who often may not conform to this body type observed on the show.
It can begin to create the obsessive lifestyle of working out for hours a day, following a strict diet, or even the extremities of having plastic surgery to achieve a look that for many is aspirational and not normal.
I know this because I was that girl.
This tweet summarises the thoughts in my head growing up (and still now to some extent). The blatant lack of body diversity that Love Island AND other reality programs perpetuate is undermining real bodies and real people by limiting contestants to fitting into one slim ideal of attractiveness.
I have grown up alongside the popular Love Island we all know and love, and in 2015 I was a young, naive, and very impressionable 15-year-old girl. Seeing the picture-perfect bodies of the women on the show whether that was natural or enhanced had a huge effect on my perception of body image, and my own self-esteem.
The amount I began to work out gradually increased, as well as my restriction from any food that I enjoyed, very quickly led to my unhappiness increasing too. All in order to try and look like the people I was seeing on TV.
And as you can probably guess, it took me a while to come to the conclusion that I should be happy with my own body. It was around the same time I had reached some form of body satisfaction that a lot of my friends discovered how popular beauty enhancements were becoming, and the urgent need for them to get lip filler to look like the celebrities and influencers they were seeing on social media began to enforce to me how damaging media had become.
The culture of scrutiny that is so blatant in society sits at the forefront of our lives, with the constant call for criticism about other people on social media through trolling people’s photos and videos has created the need for many to airbrush and filter everything to avoid scrutiny. It means we are starting to warp our own reality, as many of us are victims of being unable to post without a filter as we want to look smooth and flawless.
This continues in the tabloid press to an extreme level for celebrities and influencers, as many have their faces and bodies analysed extensively for flaws in the tabloid press all for the purpose of increasing circulation and selling figures. The vicious nature of this scrutiny culture we surround ourselves with makes it that much easier to understand the choices behind people having cosmetic procedures to change how they look, or to partake in rigorous workout regimes to maintain a toned figure.
It is quite clearly indicative of the need to adhere to an unattainable beauty standard that quite often isn’t even real.
So, what I struggle to understand from the culture that has been created by the media, is why can’t we change it? Why is there a lack of body diversity in the casting process of Love Island when it is clear the selection process is damaging to many? There become too many questions regarding this to even begin to contemplate.
Each year there are over 100,000+ applications, and each year they choose the same style of contestants just in slightly different fonts and the images above speak for themselves when proving that point. It is clear that producers of the show place physical appearance above anything else, with a particular interest in selecting those who fit the desired body type. Effectively, this implies that men and women will only be considered attractive if they look like this.
Personally, I think that needs to change as it has damaged and will continue to damage the self-esteem and body image perceptions of many people.
Let me know what you think about this on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram and stay tuned for more.
