'Love Island is still making a huge mistake after 10 years - we need change'
Love Island has been on our screens for 10 years. That's 10 years of 'my type of paper', 10 years of 'grafting' and 10 years of being 'pied'. But 10 years later, there's one thing Love Island is still doing so wrong.
The ITV2 show made its return this week for a brand new series - its 12th - with a new set of Islanders entering the villa. The show has had a number of civilian series and two All Stars series and yet we still have the same issue as we've always had.
Love Island has seem to step around the memo on body diversity. Whilst the average women is a size 16, Love Island has never featured a woman over a size 12. In a world where we're told to celebrate and love our bodies, how can a show as big as Love Island make such a huge mistake by not including both men and women of all body shapes?
Are we meant to be believe that women - or men - over a certain size are not deserving of love, that they should not appreciate their body, that they should hide away?
I finally thought we might be getting somewhere this year, when the show opened with a different form of matchmaking. The women were tasked with picking who they wanted to couple up with based on the person's name, job and one line about themselves. Finally, one part of this show might not be about how you look!
Love Island reaches millions of young people every single episode. Why can't we use this time to promote and encourage body diversity? Social media is full of body positive influencers encouraging us to love ourselves for who we are - did Love Island just miss the memo that everyone else got a few years back?
I - and many women and men - have spent years not feeling good enough because of the size of their stomach, or their arms, or the clothes size they wear. Surely, Love Island could use their huge platform to remind people that love comes in every shape or size. That is not to say the women and men in the villa don't deserve love themselves, of course they do, but so do all the other men and women across the UK that don't fit into a 'specific' body type.
Love Island has a long way to go before it proves it can be fully inclusive. From someone who is tired of seeing one body type on our screens in big reality shows like Love Island, you deserve to be anyone's type on paper - for who you are and not how you look.
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