Give us more promiscuity
Zoe Williams
Celebrity Love Island started last night and was, predictably, in stout contravention of the Trade Descriptions Act. The celebrities were barely celebrities, there was no love that I could make out (unless narcissism counts) and ... well, actually, yes, it was on an island. I gather.
The high concept is this: 12 attractive people who are trusted to put it about a bit are paid a phenomenally large sum of money (100k for Abi Titmuss, the biggest name, 15k for Paul Danan, the smallest) so that the public can phone-vote for the ones they want to get off with each other. It is roughly as saucy as an early Carry On, with much less of a narrative arc.
As an idea, it's pretty basic. The thought process, I'm guessing, went like this: "What do people want from shows like Big Brother? They want sex to occur. How do we make a more successful show than BB? Make it all sex." It's slightly bogus thinking, like saying: "The glace cherry is my favourite bit of the fabled bakewell tart, therefore let's make a tart that is really only cherries." A small amount of sober thought might reveal the flaws in this, but reality TV has never been known for the sobriety of its conception.
Obviously, though, objections lodged so far - by Christine Hamilton, by the Daily Mail, I think the umbrella "moral majority" covers it - are about ethical rather than narrative matters. This idea cheapens sex, it symbolises a wider moral decline, it degrades the viewers by turning them into peeping toms, it sends out a message to the STD-infested youth of the nation that promiscuity is a good thing, the people participating (I paraphrase Hamilton) prostitute themselves and behave like animals.
This last is oxymoronic since the definition of prostitution is the exchange of cash for sex, and the definition of behaving like an animal, certainly in this context, is giving it away for free. Furthermore, nobody in charge of their faculties can claim to have been turned into a peeping tom against their will.
All the arguments seem to misunderstand the relationship between flogging sex (and/or sexual attributes) and good, honest promiscuity. My objection to the show is not that it promotes promiscuity, but that it actively works against it, preferring in its place innuendo and notions of female honour so retrogressive that they work tirelessly against women even while appearing to celebrate them.
Let's be clear - the men are only there for the logistics. They are easily the less famous of the dozen (Fran Cosgrove, for instance, is not so much a star as the answer to a pub-quiz question), and are paid substantially less than the women. The big hitters are Abi Titmuss and Rebecca Loos, both well-known for spinning cash out of kiss'n'tells, taking their clothes off, putting them back on, and taking them off again. Both women claim to find liberation, of a sort, from their activities - Titmuss in her jolly-hockey-sticks "I'm having more fun than anyone!" manner; Loos with her quasi-empowered logic of "You may fixate on my breasts, but who's making all the money out of them, huh? ME!"
The economics are as straightforward as a fat pig in a market. They make money from their bodies not because their bodies are unusually beautiful (with the emphasis on surgical enhancement, the underlying message is that anyone can buy these shapes for themselves), but because they are prepared to show them. Ditto with sex. Were men and women equal partners, there would be no seller and therefore no buyer.
The whole idea of making money - indeed, a career - from any kind of sexual avenue is underpinned by the steadfastly anti-promiscuous notion that no woman this attractive will give it away for free; ergo, women are, in the end, doing men a favour. The persistence, in fact resurgence, of this view stands bullishly in the way of gender equality, and is taken by many to be an effective disproof of the feminist agenda. If, after all the strides made by the women's movement, we still, ultimately, slide into this Victorian attitude to sex, it must be because men and women are hard-wired differently. We will never achieve equality because it's not in our natures.
In fact, the human wiring at play here has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with commerce. While people - men and women - can make money from stigmatising promiscuity, they will continue to play on irrational, vaguely and spasmodically theistic associations of sex and shame, in order to keep the market buoyant. What really debases sex is not the frequency of its undertaking, but the price-tagging of it.
So if "Celebrity" "Love" Island is objectionable - and I think it is - it's because it's nothing like promiscuous enough. Though it is only one day in. I guess we should give it a chance.
mediaguardian
