Gabrielle #6 – Body Count
Caught a stray watching the current season of Love Island and it sent me down a wormhole about reality TV and casual sex, which I am now dragging you into.
I’ve been trying not to write about Love Island. I spent a good five years writing and briefly podcasting (RIP VICE Does Love Island, Brooklyn HQ wouldn’t let us do more because they hate to see dumb broads thriving) about this stupid fucking programme so you’d think I’d be sick of it by now. And I am, mostly. But I find myself drawn back to it during my first winter of rest (sobriety) and relaxation (giving myself a lobotomy with low grade TV and Russian hardbass). I should be using the time to stack money for the warm months ahead, but I’m too content watching some lad from Bolton with insane veneers ask a blonde who reportedly “went knickerless and wild at Playboy mansion parties” if she’s had her arse done. Also it’s an All Stars edition, so those mentally ill enough to be familiar with villa lore are treated to some choice returning characters such as “Messy Mitch” and the Liverpudlian angel who got dragged through the tabloids for having a blow dry before her caesarean. God forbid women have hobbies.
I’m not wading into the weeds so don’t worry if you haven’t been keeping up with the movements of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s most photogenic PTs. I only mention it because I was dialled in the other day, minding my business, and ended up catching a stray over body count. In a crowded field I think one of the more interesting social changes I’ve observed, from being a teen in the 00s and crashing disgracefully into middle age now, is the attitude towards casual sex – and, consequently, body count. So mainly I want to talk about that.
Sidebar: it’s moments like this where I think Gabrielle would thrive as a podcast, because if I could drop a soundbite of Ice-T saying “body count” every time it comes up it would really elevate the content as a whole. So from here on whenever you read the words “body count” please do so in Ice-T’s voice, thanks.
To summarise: the producers have thrown a former couple-of-three-years in the villa and it’s been revealed that, in the six months between them breaking up and being on reality TV together, the guy slept with sixteen people. Shocking! There’s some unfinished business that colours things slightly but in response the girl (Molly, 29, if you even care) bragged that she’d slept with one person in the same amount of time and then made a fuss about being able to list her total body count on one hand. The boy (Callum, 27 – you don’t care, I know) was dubbed “tragic.” It becomes a minor but ongoing plot line.
This is confusing because, to me, sixteen is not a notable number of shags. Over half a year that's what, 2-3 a month? Seems fine for a single person whose full-time job is Instagram. Still, it’s proven divisive. Viewers thought it was “nasty,” the ‘girls girl’ hivemind of the villa considered him a dodged bullet, the tabloids went nuts with it obviously. So as a thought experiment I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who thinks this is worth kicking off over. And as far as I can see, you’d first have to believe that there’s a direct correlation between body count and moral purity. The higher the number, the less “good” someone is. If that’s true then I’m eating brimstone like Colin Farrell eats pussy – for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – but let’s press on.
Other assumptions about people with high body counts are usually: they’re impulsive, they’re irresponsible, they’ve got commitment issues, they’re emotionally damaged… Now we’re getting somewhere. A few years ago I’d probably have called that ‘slut shaming’ but to be honest it’s kind of fair. My pile of bodies stacks to Pluto by Love Island standards and there’s definitely something the matter with me. Still, I don’t think it’s helpful to make sweeping psychological assumptions about anyone who needs more hands than Vishnu to count their total. Callum’s a former scaffolder with kind eyes who’s been on telly for goodness sake, let him pipe.
What’s funny is that, 10-15 years ago, if there was a reaction at all it would have been a loud one in the opposite direction. It was 2012, I believe, when British culture was forever altered by the words: “My name's Scotty T, I'm 24, I'm a club promoter, I'm from the heart of Newcastle, I'm a fucking weapon and I grill more birds than George Foreman." (For what it’s worth I genuinely think this man is a poet, like Walt Whitman on Huel.)
Fast forward 12 years and Geordie Shore’s “shag pad” has been confined to the bargain bin of history, along with back issues of Front and clubs having a designated “fingering corner.” And sometimes I wonder whether society is even better off. Like, yeah we did well to lose a lot of the double standards, normalised drunken passing-out-during, and rampant HPV that came with that weirdly long period of time. From the lad’s mag 90s through to the teen sex comedy 00s and the ego-driven promiscuity of the mid-00s to mid-2010s, the dominant sexual culture of former class clowns trying to up their status by jackrabbitting as many women as possible (who were kicked to the gutter for doing the same) was crap. It’s good that isn’t a thing anymore. But what’s it been replaced with? The widespread belief that anyone with nine sexual encounters is ran through? Loaded attempting to relaunch itself as a serious publication for the fifth time in a decade? Combination kink and techno events??? I’d rather get backshots in Tiger Tiger.
Body count comes up on every season of Love Island and the way contestants talk about it has become more conservative over time. I distinctly recall the jarring moment in Season 5 (2019) when the girls were congratulating each other on keeping their numbers down, which would have been fine if it wasn’t framed as a point of pride. I didn’t watch it last year but there was apparently a big kerfuffle over a guy who’s been single his entire life fucking 100+ girls and shrugging it off with “pulling and shagging is all I know” (real). I could go on, but there’s a growing moral weight attached to body count that’s always been there for women and is now inescapable for everyone.
Things should have gone in the other direction after lad culture was killed off. Body count: not something you should base your entire personality on or use as a measure of self-worth, but also no biggie for anyone of any gender. Instead we’ve doubled down on the suspicion that it’s impossible to have loads of casual sex without all these negative implications around health, consent, and the condition of one’s soul. This would never have happened if we had just accepted all those years ago that the best person on TV was Charlotte Crosby, but whatever.
One thing about reality TV, and Love Island specifically, though, is you can’t take people at face value. The contestants temper what they say – especially on ‘spicy’ topics like sex and politics – because there’s a very clear record of how viewers and the media will react. Since the vast majority of contestants go on to become influencers, reported on almost exclusively by the tabloids, their careers are intrinsically linked to public opinion and right-wing media. To thrive in that economy, your safest bet is to have the blandest possible vibe. Suppress your quirks and become the human equivalent to a grey plush couch or the Nissan Qashqai. Just look at Molly-Mae – possibly the most successful influencer in the UK, Creative Director of PLT at 22 – who I’m sure is nice but presents as a smart fridge with earrings. Wardrobe full of basics in four colours (white, black, grey, beige), girl-next-door activities (iced coffee, walks in the park), sitting on a grotesque pile of money that’s signified through accessories but mostly obscured by clean, Kardashian minimalism. The tabloids have nothing to pick at because on the surface, like Patrick Bateman before her, she’s simply not there.
By contrast, anyone who strays too far in the other direction will face the same vilification as Amy Winehouse, Tulisa, Katie Price, Charlotte Crosby, literally pick a woman. If there’s one thing the tabloids hate it’s a working class person with rizz (the most influential form of social power), and that goes double for the ladies. Any hint of passion or authenticity has to be stamped out like a burgeoning forest fire lest the general public get any big ideas, which is why we’ve seen previous beloved Islanders like Megan Barton-Hanson and Maura Higgins suffer years of press abuse because their blood runs palpably hot. Why would any prospective reality TV star, having seen that happen, choose to bring it upon themselves?
So, due to the idle hand that is British media, attitudes on Love Island tend to reflect the assumed state of the nation rather than any real opinions that people hold about the way they go about their lives. It’s been interesting, this year, watching the show’s new puritanism rub shoulders with returning cast members from Season 1 (2015), when it was more in line with the salad days of Geordie Shore. It’s not surprising that earlier contestants – already entrenched as public figures and less reliant on catering to contemporary taste politics – are the most unfiltered.
It’s also not surprising that a dating show airing at peak time on one of the five major public service broadcasters skews conservative – even if it is a show about seeking fame, thinly veiled as a show about looking for love, in which all the contestants are essentially naked roughly 90% of the time. It sits at a unique political intersection, where two forces collide like crossed streams of evil piss. On one side there’s the regressive rhetoric trickling down from Westminster into suburban pubs and hair salons across the UK, which is only becoming more poisonous as we blow through Cabinet ministers like Scotty T on the Toon. And on the other there’s social media discourse, where the left and right often meet on the subject of sex due to a shared insistence on moral order. All things considered, Love Island does an alright job of walking the line. It’s everything around it that’s the problem.
And no wonder. British culture is very sexually confused. Sex is inescapable across every aspect of life here, but it’s always accompanied by a colossal wagging finger going ‘ha ha’ or ‘no no.’ Sex can’t ever be good or normal. It has to be salacious but also sinister, which is a conflict millions of people are presented with when they open The Daily Mail each morning to see photos of X celebrity ‘showing off curves in racy bikini 10 days after giving birth!’ next to a hit job on someone’s OnlyFans and an investigation of BBLs gone wrong. When sex the source of a political scandal it’s headline news for a month (kissing someone besides your wife is, of course, infinitely worse than destroying the national health service and stating that you should personally get to decide who lives or dies during a pandemic). We have this mean spirited, laughing dictator sort of attitude towards sex that’s completely at odds with anything libidinal and, I’m sorry to bring this into the mix but it’s true, deeply classist. It’s hard to define but if you look closely at a photo of David Walliams you will immediately understand what I mean.
At its worst Love Island mirrors this confusion back at us in a more ambient way; a bit of goop in the eye of a nation that refuses to look at sex as healthy or benign. Even outside of reality TV, sex only shows up on screen these days in the form of a therapised drama about something dark like addiction (Fleabag) and assault (I May Destroy You), or a rubbernecking documentary that lazily dresses up trauma porn as hard-hitting reportage (the recent slew of docs on Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, and Jeffrey Epstein).
Obviously Love Island doesn’t have a vested interest in challenging any of that, nor should it. It’s just showbiz, baby. It serves to entertain while avoiding controversy as much as possible, and the only way to do that is to toe a non-partisan line on promiscuity despite being the world’s most public goon cave. Nobody, myself included, is watching Love Island expecting to witness two dozen sexually liberated 10s having a roaring yet ethically sound time in South Africa. We want them to neck and scrap about petty nonsense so we can become over-invested and text about it (sad tbh we should just be out rutting what is wrong with us all). Still, it’s a reliable temperature check on social values at large and, unless you live in a weird bubble where you don’t experience conflict and everyone just reaffirms what you already think, it does well to engage with those regularly.
Callum, to his credit, shrugs the whole thing off without much guff. They were broken up, it’s a moot point, if there’s hurt feelings those would be there regardless of the number. I would Stand With Him on that front to the point where I don’t even see the purpose of counting in the first place. Six, sixteen, six hundred – who cares? I don’t actually know what my body count is. I’m rich in experience and numerically dyslexic and after a point you kind of stop paying attention, anyway. I’ve tried to do a full count once or twice but it always ends up like that episode of Sex & The City where Miranda has to write down everyone she’s had sex with for STI-scare reasons and it’s just multiple A4 pages of like, “guy from deli.”
Personally I prefer to think of things the David Lynch way, or the Leonard Cohen way. Picture someone getting annoyed about Leonard Cohen’s body count and you will quickly see how stupid it is as a concept. You might call him damaged, a man who “went through women like water” according to one biographer, but “754 bodies, Leonard?!” – (I’m guesstimating) – “really? That’s sick.” No. Wouldn’t happen. Why is it so different for anyone else? Why do we consider the shagger differently depending on whether they’re, say, an artist or a footballer? Why can’t sex be fun by default with room for moments of regret that allow everyone involved to learn and grow as people? Don’t we all have the capacity for profound spiritual commitment but also an earth shattering one-night nut? Who knows, maybe when I die I will go out like a great man and leave an enduring myth of “the men she loved, and the men who loved her.”** Why not? Regardless, life’s too short to worry about what other people might think of you. Fuck ‘em, literally.
**I am aware that this won’t happen, by the way. I’m not deluded. I’m friends with the handful of people this might apply to and the best case scenario is they will all gather around me like priests when I eventually get euthanised by the state for not having a pension, gently thank me for my nudes, and everyone else will curse my name forever if they remember it at all.
**body count** This was a really great read.