Love Island 2025: Society on Steroids - Power, Race, and Gender Dynamics

Written by Charlotte Lewis

UK Love Island Season 12 is a revealing microcosm of society’s persistent tensions around patriarchy, misogyny, and racial bias. As the contestants navigate love, friendship, and conflict under the relentless spotlight, we witness a condensed performance of social codes and power struggles that shape everyday life. The Majorcan villa becomes a pressure cooker, intensifying the complex intersections of gender, race, and power in ways that are uncomfortable, captivating, and all too familiar.

All Images (the sun)

The Repetitive Cycle of Harry’s Romantic Rollercoaster: Control, Confusion, and Complicity

At the heart of this year’s villa drama is Harry, a figure whose romantic entanglements tell a story about power, control, and the performative nature of masculinity. Harry’s pattern of jumping between Shakira, Helena, Emma, and Angel, only to return to Shakira again, is not just chaotic dating; it’s a repetition compulsion playing out live. In psychoanalytic theory, repetition compulsion refers to unconsciously reliving relational dynamics that are emotionally charged, often harmful, in an attempt to master or resolve unresolved conflict (Freud, 1920). For Harry, it seems he enjoys the thrill of the chase more than the substance of the relationships themselves, treating romantic connections as performances of dominance and control rather than genuine intimacy.

For Shakira, taking Harry back despite this revolving door of attention highlights the complex emotional calculus women navigate in such spaces. It could be hope for change, the pull of familiarity, or a defiant refusal to be defined by his treatment of her. This dynamic invites questions about the boundaries between love, power, and self-preservation.

Meanwhile, Helena’s role as Harry’s “yes woman”, willing to dismiss his manipulative tendencies and support him uncritically, underscores how internalised misogyny functions within the villa. Helena’s alignment with Harry blinds her to his harmful behaviour, illustrating how female complicity can uphold patriarchal power structures (hooks, 2000). Dejon, Harry’s and Helena’s close friend, is another crucial figure. Fully aware of Harry’s behaviour, Dejon chooses to feign ignorance - a strategic silence that shields him from culpability while implicitly endorsing the toxic culture. His role as enabler highlights the social mechanisms by which harmful masculinities are maintained and reproduced (Connell, 1995).

The Mothers’ Presence: Enablers of Toxic Masculinity?

The recent entrance of Harry and Dejon’s mothers into the villa adds another layer to understanding these men’s attitudes. The mothers’ uncritical support and enabling behaviour reflect broader societal tendencies to excuse actions with a shrug and a cliché: “boys will be boys” (Kimmel, 2008). This permissiveness nurtures entitlement and lack of accountability. As the season comes to a close, Dejon’s repeated references to the cameras reveal a man painfully aware of how he is perceived, yet lashing out in frustration when that perception clashes with his self-image. This performative consciousness intensifies the villa’s drama but also exposes the fragile egos behind the bravado (Butler, 1990).

In a cultural moment where figures like Andrew Tate have become symbols of hyper-toxic masculinity online — promoting aggression, misogyny, and entitlement — the villa’s male contestants appear as real-world enactments of these harmful archetypes. Tate’s online rhetoric, which champions domination and often dismisses women’s autonomy, echoes in the villa’s “boys’ club” mentality, where emotional repression and control are badges of honour (Kimmel, 2017).

Female Alliances, Exclusion, and Intersectionality

Inside the villa, alliances and exclusionary cliques form along racial and cultural lines. Toni and Shakira’s “bitchy” candid conversations are relatable coping mechanisms for women who feel isolated in an environment that can be cold and exclusionary. These private moments of solidarity contrast sharply with the icy alliances of Helena and Meg. One of the recurring themes this season, echoing every season before it, is the marginalisation and late selection of Black women and women of colour. This troubling pattern reflects not only casting choices but also the social dynamics inside the villa. These women frequently face exclusion, tokenism, or racialised stereotyping that echoes broader societal patterns of othering and devaluation (Fanon, 1952; hooks, 1981). Shakira’s group, which includes women of Persian, Pakistani, and other ethnic backgrounds, forms a multiethnic refuge from the exclusionary white majority. This dynamic powerfully illustrates bell hooks’s idea that solidarity among marginalised women is both necessary and complicated by the intersecting axes of identity (hooks, 1981; Crenshaw, 1991).

Why We’re Hooked: Toxicity as Reality TV’s Currency

The intensity of Love Island 2025’s drama is precisely what many critics and viewers hail as a return to form: the “best series in years.” But this acclaim is a double-edged sword. The show’s popularity is driven by its toxicity: the constant power plays, betrayals, and emotional explosions. Viewers are drawn in by the spectacle of human flaws laid bare, the thrill of social judgement, and the reinforcement of cultural hierarchies by designating “winners” and “losers.”

Love Island’s success depends on reproducing real-world inequalities, even as it purports to be light entertainment. The villa becomes a small-scale version of cultural norms that regulate who is desirable, who is visible, and who is allowed to wield power (Fanon, 1952; hooks, 1981).

Final Thoughts: The Villa as Cultural Text

Love Island 2025 provides more than just a guilty pleasure; it is a cultural text that invites critical reading. Beneath the sun-drenched flirtations and Instagram-ready moments lie enduring social tensions that mirror our broader world. The performances of masculinity and femininity, the racialised double standards, and the enablers within and beyond the villa reveal a persistence of patriarchal and racial hierarchies.

In the end, Love Island reminds us that reality TV, though scripted and produced, is a stage for real social forces. It exposes how patriarchy and racial bias operate in intimate spaces and challenges us, as viewers and critics, to reflect on how we engage with these dynamics: both on screen and off.

References (for further reading)

• Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.

• Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. University of California Press.

• Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299.

• Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press.

• Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

• hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press.

• hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. South End Press.