Love Island, which started again last night, flirts with virtue just a little more obviously each year. The show is racially diverse, and overwhelmingly working class, despite featuring the odd medic. Hugo Hammond, who was born with a club foot, became the show’s first disabled contestant last year. The latest series features a deaf contestant, Tasha Ghouri, a ‘dancer’ with a perfect body. If the show looks more representative, don’t be deceived: there’s nothing virtuous about Love Island. But that doesn’t mean we should hold this against its beautiful, young contestants.
Despite the name, Love Island isn’t about love. It’s about money, and specifically, about how to monetise your body. This is why the ‘body diversity’ we see only goes so far; Love Island never includes people who fall outside the market parameters of the saleable physique.
The larger women have flat bellies and enormous bums and boobs; they qualify as curvy, somewhere on the Kardashian spectrum, and bankable on Instagram.
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