Exploitative, awkward and horny – dating shows have gone too far

My American friend recently visited the UK and was struggling to sleep from the jetlag. She flicked through TV channels in her hotel room until she came across reruns of Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, a dating game show where strangers judge each other’s genitals before even hearing their voices.

“This is crazy,” she texted me. “Is this normal??” The answer, I realised, is yes. I’d never really given it much thought, blaming the laissez-faire attitudes to sex and nudity from mainland Europe crossing the English Channel. When we met up the following day, she admitted she didn’t get much sleep. “I just couldn’t turn it off!”

And that, I suppose, is exactly the point. These shows are designed to shock, to intrigue, to keep your eyes glued to the screen with ever-escalating sexual spectacle. Once a new boundary is crossed, the bar is reset. Producers need the next gasp-inducing moment to arrive quickly, or risk losing viewers. But that has led us down a slippery path – one littered with alarming ethical conundrums.

Shows like Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, where couples test their relationship boundaries and explore polyamory in front of a national audience, or Dating Naked, where contestants walk into paradise in the nude while the host remains awkwardly clothed, push the limits of what qualifies as entertainment.

Then there’s Virgin Island, the latest in this new breed of soft-core porn TV. Marketed as a social experiment, it promises to help young, anxious Gen Z-ers become more comfortable with intimacy. In reality, it parades a group of vulnerable people through a series of bizarre, sometimes humiliating tasks under the guise of therapy.

Perhaps some of the “therapeutic” exercises were logical: everyone could do with confronting their naked selves in the mirror and learning to love every inch. But tantric touch and sleeping with your therapist? Seriously? Point 36 of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s ethical framework clearly prohibits this.

It wasn’t always like this. In 2016, there was something of a flashpoint moment in reality TV during season two of Love Island, now a decade-old summer staple. Zara Holland, then a contestant and reigning Miss Great Britain, lasted 22 days in the villa until she got drunk on the alcohol supplied by the show, had sex with another contestant and was subsequently stripped of her pageant crown. Mortified by the public embarrassment, she left the show and cited the free booze as partly to blame.

In response, producers implemented stricter rules limiting contestants to just two drinks per night and removing the iconic smoking area, which had once doubled as a hotbed for unfiltered gossip. Others followed suit, with shows like Big Brother adopting similar guardrails to curb controversy. But taking away alcohol meant Love Island producers had to find new ways to generate tension and keep audiences hooked.

This season is packed with bizarre challenges and emotionally manipulative games, carefully engineered to manufacture drama and hurt feelings. Take the now-routine “Snog, Marry, Pie”: a cringeworthy reimagining of a game more at home in a Year 9 sleepover than on national television. Contestants are asked to kiss the person they fancy, exchange fake marriage vows with another, and quite literally smash a pie into the face of whomever they like least. Compared to the extremes of Virgin Island or Dating Naked, it’s relatively tame, but it shows how producers are locked in an arms race of provocation and actively encourage gaslighting, lying and infidelity.

Maybe I am a prude. But there’s something undeniably jarring about watching people reach for intimacy through such theatrical extremes and missing out on the endearing, awkward charm of real connection. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of horny TV, but if you have a regrettable sexcapade on one of these shows, not only your parents, but the entire country, can rewind and watch it play out in HD.