Warning: Major spoilers for Love Island USA Season 8 ahead.
At the end of Sunday night’s finale of Love Island USA Season 8, it came as no surprise when 22-year-old Trinity Tatum and 30-year-old Bryce Dettloff were announced as the winners after being voted America’s Favorite Couple. After all, theirs was a swoon-worthy love story—a slow-burn friends-to-lovers fairytale, where both parties took their time establishing a romantic connection that, by the end, resulted in one of the season’s only true “boyfriend-girlfriend” relationships. Across the season, Trinity rose through the ranks to become a bona fide fan favorite (right now, she is the only Season 8 Islander whose Instagram followers have surpassed the 2 million mark), and Bryce, with his lost puppy-like affect, had also done plenty to warm the hearts of America.
But the win felt expected precisely because the pair’s loving relationship was such an outlier on an otherwise bleak season. Love Island—a show where an endless stream of men and women “couple” and “recouple” in the eventual hopes of finding The One—has never been the pinnacle of respect for women. But on Season 8, it felt as if new levels of male chauvinism had taken root inside the villa. And as cast members like KC Chandler, Sincere Rhea, Corbin Mims, and Zach Georgiou were shown treating their female costars with blatant misogyny, it felt like the show was mirroring our continually devolving heterosexual dating landscape. If reality TV offers a window into our collective psyche, this one showed an undeniable rise in male entitlement and deepening rift between the genders—and offered a rare opportunity to reject it.
Love Island USA, a spinoff of the UK’s decade-plus running Love Island, is trash TV at its most addicting. Unique for its quasi-real-time airing, where viewers watch events that played out just a day or two before, the series has grown into a true watercooler juggernaut over its last few seasons, reliably drawing viewers in the millions despite airing six new episodes each week. (“Everyday but hump day,” goes the familiar saying.) It would be easy to credit the show’s popularity to its embrace of petty drama, crashout fights, and bottomless supply of hot 20-somethings. But Love Island USA also stands out for its appeal to audience participation, where viewers get to feel like a “part” of the show by casting votes that directly impact who gets to stay, who is forced to leave, and eventually, who wins the $100,000 prize.
Kayda Reese Bosse, Parmida Keshani, Mackenzie “Kenzie” Brooke Annis, Trinity Celeste Tatum, Jen Terry, Jaiden Bacciocco, Amora “Amora Cachee” Robinson, Tierra Davis, Melanie Moreno, Aniya Harvey (Photo by: Ben Symons/Peacock)
For the uninitiated: The Peacock original series follows a relatively simple structure. Each season kicks off with a group of “OG Islanders” (usually an equal number of young men and women) who immediately “couple up” based on challenges and one-on-one “chats” meant to test chemistry and compatibility. As the season progresses, producers send in “bombshells,” who enter the villa hoping to build a connection with one of the already coupled-up islanders. Occasionally, cast members are given the option to stay paired with their current partner or ditch them for someone new. Any Islander not in a couple is declared “single and vulnerable,” at risk of being “dumped” from the island.
Which is to say that, in its purest form, Love Island has always necessitated some form of continuous “exploration”—as it’s called on the lingo-dense show. Though it’s ostensibly about “finding love,” the series has never lent itself to any ideal of strict monogamy. Even the challenges themselves—where kissing, touching, grinding, and exchanging any number of bodily fluids with people outside one’s current couple is par for the course—are deliberately sexualized. By design, it’s shamelessly lascivious.
But “exploration” doesn’t have to entail disrespect, and that’s where the men and women of Season 8 seemed to be ideologically split. Take “Casa Amor,” a two-day test period where the coupled-up islanders are separated by gender and introduced to a new set of potential partners. It’s a time when exploration is not only encouraged, but expected. This season, the women entertained new connections while also being mindful of the bonds they had already built.
Meanwhile, nearly all the men threw caution to the wind at the first chance they got. There was Corbin asserting that he was “going back with somebody different” before he’d even had a real conversation. There was Sincere, barely recovered from the messy love triangle he’d previously formed with Melanie Moreno and Sol Dean, lying like he was being paid to do it. KC made a petulant comment during one of the challenges about how “the girls are just really giving all those [Casa] guys at the Villa what we should have been getting,” while Corbin joked about how the women in Casa felt like “college girls” compared to the “high school” girls they had previously been coupled up with. Though these were all adult men, suddenly they were the ones behaving like high school boys in a locker room.
While it may not have been apparent to the islanders in the villa, from the outside looking in, it was impossible to separate the manner in which these men talked about women from the red-pilled manosphere logic that has extended far beyond the reaches of right-wing circles to infiltrate mainstream culture—and, it seems, the Love Island villa itself. That Season 8’s audience ultimately chose to reward Trinity and Bryce, the one couple defined by genuine mutual respect, suggests that viewers recognized exactly what was on display this season and voted accordingly. In a landscape where misogyny has become disturbingly normalized, that rejection—however small—felt meaningful.
