In the world of Love Island, there are some reassuring constants. Tape-in extensions, xylophone abs. Dodgy filler, caterpillar lashes. And, perhaps most dependably of all, the annual statement by Women’s Aid scolding one of the male islanders for how he treats women — something that has happened at least six times since 2019. This year, the recipient of the domestic abuse charity’s telling-off — among a glut of options — has been the smooth-talking Harrison Solomon, a 22-year-old footballer from Burton-on-Trent who engineered a brutal love triangle involving two women, the feisty Yank Toni Laites and the Yorkshire wet wipe Lauren Wood.
Lauren was eventually booted off the show — probably, fans speculate, by producers who hoped to limit her humiliation. But she wouldn’t go quietly. Instead, she burst into tears and begged Harrison to leave with her, uttering the immortal phrase: “I think everything we’ve had for the last 10 days is real.” Twenty-four hours later Harrison, no doubt encouraged by producers in the wake of the Women’s Aid statement criticising the show’s “unhealthy patterns of behaviour”, decided to quit to win her back. In a final scene also probably set up by producers, he apologised to Toni, crying manfully as he said he’d be “mortified” if someone treated his little sister as he had treated her. Off he went into the Spanish night, wheeling his monogrammed suitcase into a dubious future and preparing to face a British public who had come to hate him. Covert clips of him mopily journeying home, filmed by Brits on their way back from their own Mallorca holibobs, appeared all over TikTok over the weekend. It seems that Love Island, which acts as an annual record of British sexual culture, has finally killed off the fuckboy.
Harrison is not the first Love Island “boy” to choose a path of romantic villainy, nor will he be the last. But his shaming has been exceptionally vitriolic this year. Why? Well, a few short episodes ago Harrison, who the other male islanders have nicknamed “Young Bull”, made a critical error. He had sex on TV.
Lauren met Harrison in the Lynx-fug of Casa Amor, where new girls must “graft” the boys at all costs in order to win a spot in the main villa. Because of the format, each year Casa Amor becomes little more than a brothel: the men know the women will make themselves sexually available to secure their places on the show, and even the ones in solid couples take advantage of this before returning to their “wifeys” anyway, albeit covered in love bites. When Harrison brought Lauren back to the main villa, she sensed him slipping through her fingers in the magnetic pull of cabana girl Toni — and so did the one thing that could be relied upon to keep him. She had sex with him. Unfortunately, this didn’t work: the next day, he abandoned her, leaving her a puddle of tears. Learning of their clinch, Toni told her: “It’s really off-putting to me. How can he do that to somebody?” Lauren replied: “I don’t just sleep with anyone… it’s not like a kiss or something. It’s a big thing.”
We should not let the importance of this moment pass us by. In one sense it is trivial, a conversation between two wannabe reality stars about a man whose name we will soon forget. But in another, it signals a revolution in how women today are supposed to talk about sex.
Let’s be clear: if this exact tryst had happened 10 years ago, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But the era of the swaggering fuckboy is over; the sun is setting on his randy reign. Between 2007 and 2017, the proportion of 18 to 23-year-olds who’d had casual sex in the past month dropped from 38% to 24% among men, and from 31% to 22% among women. In the years since The Atlantic published its 2018 cover story about the “sex recession”, young women have dreamt up increasingly bizarre ways to reframe chastity, from “boysober” and the “nun phase” to the 4B movement and “voluntary celibacy”, generally inflected with the vibe of wellness or healing.
What we’re seeing is a revolt against a culture which has taught young women to make themselves available to men in order to be liberated, telling them that sex is “no big deal” — and so we mustn’t complain about being blatantly used for it. Hook-up culture, supercharged by the progenitors of Love Island — Geordie Shore, Ex on the Beach — celebrates those who have “no-strings” sex as not being uptight or needy. Women’s magazines coach readers to be “sexually adventurous” in order to retain a man; sex columnists encourage women to indulge their boyfriends’ fetishes not because they desire it themselves, but in order to “affair-proof” their relationships. Girls are encouraged to act out their partners’ favourite porn scenes, have anal sex, be choked and slapped, for the prize of keeping him around a bit longer. The greatest insult is being “frigid”. Attention and affection from men, we are told, is a trade deal: our part of the bargain is putting out. Fail to do so, and you deprive him of a sacred entitlement. Like a hungry animal, he will stray and pounce on another, more liberated woman. He can’t help it: it’s in his nature.
“The era of the swaggering fuckboy is over; the sun is setting on his randy reign”
But all this has begun to tumble. As Lauren put it, scrambling for the final scraps of her dignity on national telly, sex is a “big thing”. The rewards of availability at all costs are meagre; rejection hurts more when you realise you’ve literally been had. Casual sex, as I’m sure Lauren discovered, is rarely good anyway — but the liberal taboo on being cautious about who you sleep with mistakes discernment for prudishness, and wisdom for the desire to control women’s bodies.
These attitudes will be familiar to those who read Jia Tolentino’s takedown of Louise Perry’s book, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, in the New Yorker last month. Perry’s advice, targeted at younger female readers, is to “avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know, or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut”. Tolentino calls this sensible suggestion “fundamentalist”. Perry’s counsel to avoid men who are “aroused by violence” is met with a sneer as Tolentino notes that she includes “things such as spanking and choking”; what a square! Tolentino seems to say. In response to the book’s underlying advice to be careful about who you sleep with, Tolentino makes a single smug observation: “I have been with my partner for 16 years… this central relationship in my life… would not have happened if I had followed any of her advice.” Never mind that this fact has precisely nothing to do with casual sex, and that her age, 36, automatically alienates her from the book’s intended young readership who will face pornography-twisted sexual realities far worse than any generation before them.
What many women younger than Tolentino have realised — those TikToking their celibacy journeys, or blogging their boysobriety — is that the doctrine of sex positivity is no longer fit for purpose, and the whoring of its male profiteers is grotesque. What advice would sex-positivity fans have for Love Island’s Lauren, whose reasons for sleeping with Harrison we can never truly know but which certainly looked, at least, like a last-ditch attempt to keep her man? Would they have anything to say to her red, tear-stained face after she realised she’d been shagged and bagged? Would they congratulate her for having been “adventurous”, after bonking in a dorm room full of people with cameras beaming the whole thing out to the British public?
Sex positivity is a maximalist ideology: more sex is better, and any constraint is negative. But in the coming years, as pornography and misogyny continue to warp sexual dynamics, women are likely to become more prim as a self-protection measure. When the risk of a casual encounter becomes greater — sexual violence, for example, becoming a normal part of many men’s repertoires — the understandable response from many women will be not to bother. And as encounters become more cynical with the continued growth of dating apps and the consequent lack of accountability between strangers, women will become more cautious about false promises from men who only intend to abandon them. This is a depressing situation, but paranoia and hypervigilance is the only possible response to a sex-positivity movement which has eroded our right to protest against being used.
Poor Lauren’s future is uncertain. In a predictable face-saving exercise, she and Harrison have reunited (for now). She did not win much sympathy from viewers, who tend to slut-shame rather than reflect on the broader culture which compels women to sleep around. And she lacks charisma, so a television career seems unlikely. But she will be remembered — and, I hope, commended — for the moment that she admitted, on national television, this fundamental fact: sex really is a big deal.
