The Dictatorship
‘Love Island USA’ exposes Gen Z’s messiest dating traits — and it’s hard to look away
While there’s been plenty of pop theorizing on why young people aren’t having as much sex as previous generations, if you were born before Y2K, you’re probably not witnessing how these generational hang-ups play out. Unless you’re watching this season of “Love Island USA.”
Contestants spend most of their days in the Love Island villa half-naked in high heels, using therapy-speak to navigate what is essentially a polycule.
“Love Island USA” is an appealing escapist counterweight to historically bad national vibes. It’s got hot and stupid people. It’s got sweethearts and schemers. It’s got kissing and fighting. It’s got butts, filmed in slow motion. It’s got a guy who is at most 5-foot-8 lying about his height. It’s got a retina-burningly bright set that is always sparkling clean. And there are hours of new content from the island per week, almost enough to drown out the sound of the world ending.
“Love Island USA” makes other dating shows seem anachronistic. On Love Island, there’s no one anodyne male who looks like he was selected from a JCPenney catalog, no gaggle of prom dress-clad dental hygienists with ambitions to host “Access Hollywood” being manipulated into believing they are falling in love with him after a 20-minute helicopter ride.
On “Love Island USA,” there’s little moralizing about other contestants’ being “here for the right reasons”; it’s tacitly acknowledged that the cast’s main goal, in addition to “finding love,” is growing one’s Instagram follower count as much as possible.
One of the show’s stars, 24-year-old Huda Mustafa, has a 5-year-old daughter she left behind in order to jet off to Fiji for months — a fact that nobody involved with the show seems to have a problem with. Mustafa is known for twerking so impressively that many fans believe she must be a stripper outside the show and for her near-constant state of emotional dysregulation. She now has over 1.2 million followers on Instagram. If the show is working as designed, she has no idea.
Islanders can’t have their phones while the show shoots and airs — for some, the first time since they were preteens that they haven’t had instant access to strangers’ opinions of them. Savvier contestants arranged for their accounts to be run by somebody else in their absence, carrying on without them like digital haunted houses. Others, like breakout fan favorite Amaya Espinal, haven’t posted in months. They have no idea who viewers like, or why.
Season seven’s islanders are predominantly in their mid-20s or younger — which means they’re the first batch of contestants who probably don’t remember a time before social media existed. They are natives to the digital panopticon and have spent their youths being bombarded with streams of surgically enhanced celebrities and influencers on their feeds.
And you can see that fact reflected in the overfilled faces of younger female “Love Island USA” contestants. Some of them have had child-scaringly large amounts of conspicuous facial cosmetic procedures. One contestant, 24-year-old Cierra Ortega, has been ridiculed by fans for constantly pursing her overfilled lips. Another, 21-year-old Vanna Einerson, was on the show just long enough to raise eyebrows about somebody that young’s getting that much work done.
Contestants spend most of their days in the Love Island villa half-naked in high heels, using therapy-speak to navigate what is essentially a polycule. When they aren’t talking “exploring their connections,” contestants stare at themselves in their individually assigned mirrors, work out, pretend to cook breakfast and sleep.
The islanders aren’t getting past third base. They’re barely even holding hands.
“Love Island” episodes are broken up by “challenges,” which are semi-sensical games that serve as excuses for the contestants to become intimate with contestants they aren’t coupled up with. The fallout from what occurs during the challenges often causes interpersonal drama in the aftermath, which leads to the climax of the mostly plotless show: “recouplings” and subsequent banishment of single contestants from the island.
During the challenges, it’s clear that this season’s contestants know how sexiness looks — they gyrate on one another for the cameras with the nonchalance of people performing a dance they learned on TikTok. But outside of the challenges, they’re not able to reattach sex and emotions.
Most people in the 25-or-younger demographic reported to have seen pornography by the time they’re teenagers. It therefore stands to reason that they grew up understanding sex as a performance. And now, like the Gen Z kids the think pieces worry about, the islanders, too, seem caught in a sexual conundrum — they are simultaneously hypersexual and sexually conservative.
The islanders aren’t getting past third base. They’re barely even holding hands. It’s whiplash-inducing to watch them dressed in fetish wear pantomiming expert sex positions during one scene and in the next quibbling over whether they’re ready to kiss “outside of challenges.”
The islanders seem to understand that sex can be an intimate act but also can’t figure out how to achieve emotional intimacy. Despite the fact that they are made to share beds and spend most of the day in bathing suits around one another, only two of the couples — the now-broken-up Huda and Jeremiah and the still-on Cierra and Nic — have admitted to having had sex this season.
Another way Love Island USA’s emotionally sadistic reality playground exemplifies sex panic about younger members of Gen Z is the underwhelming nature of its men. Despite the fact that most fans agree that the female islanders are, at the very least, beautiful and interesting, the same can’t be said for the guys. A member of Gen Z might classify them as “mid.”
The men — surrounded by some of the most amazing-looking women who are currently on television — seem to believe that somebody even hotter could walk into the villa at any moment. They’ve never dated during an era without the infinite options presented by dating apps, and it shows.
Fans are particularly vexed by the treatment of 27-year-old Olandria Carthen by 24-year-old Taylor Williams. Carthen is cartoonishly out of Williams’ league (one contestant described Olandria as one of the most beautiful women in the world), but Williams treats her like a nuisance. Even after Carthen’s attempts to win Williams, he eventually dumps her for another contestant in front of the entire cast.
Now we are seeing the first results of an unfortunate coalescence of two large-scale human experiments: Does social media harm human development? How about forced Covid isolation during a formative emotional time? How about we take a medium-sized group of these messed-up young adults, take their social media away and film them constantly while only occasionally letting them know how they’re being perceived?
It’s no wonder “Love Island USA” is such a fascinating — and revealing — watch.
Erin Gloria Ryan
Erin Ryan is a writer and podcaster. She’s the creator, co-host and executive producer of Crooked Media’s “Hysteria” podcast and a frequent contributor to other Crooked Media podcasts and video series. She’s written for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” The Daily Beast, Jezebel and other TV shows and publications.
The Dictatorship
Monday’s Campaign Round-Up, 6.22.26: Why Trump backed both Republicans in a key S.C. race
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* In South Carolina’s gubernatorial raceDonald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pam Evette last month. Last week, however, ahead of this week’s primary runoff election in the race, the president published an online item telling voters that “you can’t go wrong” with either Evette or state Attorney General Alan Wilson.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Trump has done this before. Around this time two years ago, for example, he endorsed both Republicans running in a congressional primary in Arizona. And two years before that, he endorsed two leading contenders in a Senate primary in Missouri.
Only the president can say for sure why he ended up endorsing Evette and Wilson in the South Carolina race, though it’s worth emphasizing for context that GOP primary voters have already ignored his direction into two gubernatorial primaries this month, and it stands to reason that he hoped to avoid a third.
* We’re one day away from a variety of notable racesincluding but not limited to South Carolina’s gubernatorial race. There are also some congressional primaries in a handful of statesincluding Maryland, New York and Utah.
* In took a while, but the ballots have been tallied under Maine’s ranked-choice systemand we now know that Democrat Hannah Pingree, the former state House speaker, will face off against Republican Bobby Charles, who worked at the State Department during the Bush-Cheney era.
* As for Maine’s closely watched congressional racestate Auditor Matt Dunlap won the Democratic nomination in the battleground 2nd District, defeating state Sen. Joe Baldacci, who enjoyed the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Dunlap will run in the fall against a familiar figure: former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who had moved to Florida a few years ago, but who returned to run for Congress.
* In California’s congressional special electiontwo Democratic candidates — state Sen. Aisha Wahab and Melissa Hernandez, a Bay Area Rapid Transit director — have advanced to an Aug. 18 special general election. The winner will fill the vacancy left by disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April.
* In a new commercial shared first with MS NOWDemocrat James Talarico has launched his campaign’s first multimillion-dollar ad buy in Texas’ gubernatorial race. In the 30-second spot, Talarico focuses on affordability and the cost of living. The state lawmaker will face scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the fall.
* And in New Jersey, Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.who has been missing from Capitol Hill since early March, will reportedly return to work on June 30according to a statement from his spokesperson. Neither Kean nor his office have offered any public information about why he has been away.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
The Dictatorship
Trump tries dual endorsement in South Carolina as his pick for governor flounders in polls
After President Donald Trump’s pick for governor in Iowa lost in the Republican primary earlier this month, the president argued that he “would have endorsed the other person” if he had “the proper information.”
Trump is taking no chances in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. Over the weekend he rescinded his exclusive endorsement of Pamela Evette, the lieutenant governor, announcing instead that he would support both Evette and her runoff opponent, Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general.
The move put Evette’s political future in jeopardy: Even before Trump’s dual endorsement, she trailed in limited public polling and was seen by political observers in South Carolina as a weak candidate with little to show besides the president’s coveted endorsement.
“Her chief distinction from Alan Wilson was that Trump endorsed her,” said Dr. Dubose Kapeluck, a professor of political science at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina.
Trump’s dual endorsement “was a kiss of death,” he told MS NOW.
Evette, who moved to South Carolina from Ohio to found a successful payroll and HR company in 2000, has been lieutenant governor since 2019, serving under Gov. Henry McMaster, who is term-limited.
In office, she has pursued meaningful but little-celebrated policies, like a key tort reform bill, according to Gil Gatch, a Republican member of the South Carolina state House and an Evette supporter.
But voters could be forgiven for knowing little about Evette besides the fact that Trump endorsed her, which he did just days before the June 9 primary. Visitors to her campaign website are greeted with a full-screen message labeling Evette as “Trump-endorsed.” The first line in her X bio states the same. Pro-Evette television ads are quick to tout the endorsement.
An accomplishment like tort reform, while noted on Evette’s website, “maybe could have been something that was highlighted more heavily,” Gatch told MS NOW.
The political makeup of South Carolina nearly guarantees the next governor will be whoever emerges on Tuesday between Evette and Wilson. They survived a crowded primary field on June 9, and nearly every challenger who fell short of the runoff publicly endorsed the attorney general.
“She’s just not a good candidate,” Josh Kimbrell, a state senator who failed to make the runoff and has since said he’d back Wilson, said of Evette.
“She kind of assumed this was a coronation, and that was never going to go over that well,” he added.
Even some pro-Trump voters were confused by the president’s initial endorsement of Evette, whom he called “a good friend, fighter, and WINNER” in a social media post in May.
“I have no clue why Trump would endorse Pamela Evette,” Leland Lemmons, a 30-year-old Trump supporter told MS NOW as he exited a polling site in the Greenville suburb of Easley on June 9.
“She’s served, you know, a decent time. I just haven’t seen much fruition of what she’s done in office,” he added.
In a post on Truth Social Friday announcing his dual endorsement, Trump wrote, “I can’t hurt one of them by only Endorsing the other, so, therefore, I am going to Endorse, for Governor of South Carolina, both Pam Evette and Alan Wilson!”
In a subsequent statement on X, Evette said, “I was proud to come in first as [Trump’s] endorsed candidate for Governor on June 9th. Looking forward to doing it again on June 23rd.”
After The Washington Post foreshadowed the dual endorsement last Tuesday, allies of Evette were quick to denounce the possibility.
“I would guess that’s fake news,” Suzanne Pucci, a member of Evette’s finance committee, told MS NOW of the chance Trump would also endorse Wilson. “She’s probably not real worried about it.”
Another close ally and supporter told MS NOW at the time the report was “a total, fabricated lie.”
“[Trump] is invested in Pamela Evette because she invested in him. He’s a loyal guy. That kind of stuff is important to him,” added the supporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“With or without Trump, I think she is going to win,” they said.
On Thursday, a senior campaign aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, brushed off the idea of a dual endorsement, telling MS NOW in a statement, “Pamela Evette has earned the complete and total endorsement of President Trump. She is the only Trump-endorsed candidate in this race and we look forward to delivering a big win for the president on Tuesday.”
Roughly 24 hours later, Trump retracted the exclusive endorsement.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.
As last week’s G7 summit in France got underway, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether his purported deal with Iran was final. “No, it’s not final,” the president replied. Later that day — during a visit to Versaillesof all places — he signed the framework anyway.
But moments after signing his name to the memorandum of understanding, Trump offered an unsubtle hint about what he was thinking at the time. Amid applause from those around him, the American president pointed down and then up while saying“Oil down, stocks up.”
In other words, Trump’s focus had nothing to do with natural security and everything to do with the economy. What’s more, the four-word phrase was part of a larger and underappreciated pattern. The Washington Post reported:
In the more than 100 days since President Donald Trump launched a war with Iran, he has offered a shifting list of reasons for why he started the conflict. But in explaining his push for peace, he named a priority much closer to home: protecting the stock market.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains, France, after the Group of Seven summit.
As the summit wrapped up, the Republican similarly said“I’ve studied presidents, some good, some bad, some great. Not too many are great and some really bad. … And the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that and who knows what would have happened.”
He pushed the same point in an interview with Axios, which was released over the weekend.
“If I went further, the stock market would be much lower,” the president said. “Now think of this: I have one primary wish as president, in terms of people: I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover.”
The comments came days after Trump similarly argued“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people.”
Whether the president fully appreciates the implications of his own rhetoric, this string of comments doesn’t just shed light on his motivations for accepting a defeat, it also suggests he saw his failed policy in Iran as pushing the global economy toward a dangerous cliff.
In other words, based on Trump’s own comments, the war he started was poised to create an “economic catastrophe,” which he was desperate to avoid — and which led him to accept a framework that empowered Iran to get what it wanted in exchange for effectively no concessions at all.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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