From Kady to Faye: Love Island has gone too far with how it presents explosive women

We’ve seen it all before with ‘Hurricane Olivia’ and ‘Storm Anna’

3 years ago

Love Island 2021

Faye Winter is this year’s most erratic female Love Islander. In recent weeks we have seen her scream at Teddy, Dale, Jake and other Islanders and it’s distressing to watch. The producers of Love Island play on this idea of an explosive, irrational and angry woman to provide a nation with quality entertainment – it’s fucked up.

It’s even got to the point where people are questioning whether Faye’s distress is legitimate. She has worked herself into such a state and the producers or mental health team are nowhere to be seen. This means we make our own judgement about her, we watched heavily edited episodes and base our understanding of her character on that. Not to mention when she leaves the villa she will be left to deal with trying to piece together what was happening between clips and what the audience viewed every night.

But this isn’t the first time we have seen female Islanders being portrayed as explosive for the sake of TV. We saw it in 2019 with “Storm Anna“, a distressing episode to watch when she was totally heartbroken and made to come across as aggressive and confrontational. Same for “Hurricane Olivia” two years before in 2017. The YouTube description on the Love Island account diminishes any justification for Olivia Attwood’s anger, it says: “Uh-oh, you do not want to cross our Liv tonight…she’s not a happy bunny and after letting rip at Sam and Montana, Marcel’s next in the firing line. Whilst we’re super impressed with Marcel the Mediator’s interventions, we fear even he may not be able to weather this storm.”

Even before Olivia, Kady McDermott from Love Island 2016 was called “Crazy” and put on a break in the hideaway. The clip for her “meltdown” is called “Kady’s Gone Crazy“. The producers are not doing enough to stomp out the stigma around being an angry woman, we are allowed to be angry if we want to.

It’s the same with Casa Amor, the new Casa girls are always vilified and hated for turning the original boys’ heads whilst the new Casa guys are never taken seriously. Then when the two villas merge, the divide between the Casa and original girls is always played up by the producers. The original girl Islanders are painted as psychotic girlfriends who are obsessed with their man and the producers want a reaction out of them. This years’ stupid postcard proves the theory – it was sent in to get the girls riled up. Why not send it to the boys??

Love Island producers have to stop showing female Islanders as angry and uncontrollable people – it’s so toxic. What they need to start doing is taking Islanders out of toxic situations, start being kind and not let arguments get so chaotic that the Islanders end up exploding on national TV in front of millions of people.

Love Island 2021 continues on ITV2 at 9pm tonight. For all the latest Love Island news and gossip and for the best memes and quizzes, like The Holy Church of Love Island on Facebook.