Love Island has a double standards problem. That’s not a controversial take at this point — it’s practically the consensus. Scroll through any comment section after a dramatic episode and you’ll see it: the men get away with things that would end a woman’s airtime. The men stray at Casa Amor and come back heroes. A woman does the same and she’s a villain before the recoupling ceremony is over. A man keeps his options open and he’s being “real.” A woman does it and she’s a snake.
But here’s what the conversation almost never acknowledges: the double standards on this show run in more than one direction. And if we’re actually going to talk about this honestly — not just the comfortable version of the conversation — we have to be willing to look at all of it.
The Part Nobody Disputes
Start with what is genuinely, documentably true: women on Love Island are held to a stricter standard than men when it comes to their sexuality, their emotional expression, and their general behavior in the villa.
Research published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior examining ITV2’s Love Island from 2016 to 2020 found that the show systematically reinforced a sexual double standard — men were celebrated for their sexual prowess, while women were shamed and deemed unruly for the same behavior. The “Do Bits Society” — a group male contestants in Season 4 formed to celebrate their sexual encounters — was played for laughs. When women discuss their sexual histories, they get interrogated.
This season’s Love Island UK made the double standard visible in real time. During a challenge, when contestant Priya admitted she keeps a list of names of people she’s slept with in her phone, the male contestants were visibly disturbed — even as it was simultaneously revealed that male contestant Lorenzo couldn’t remember the names of most of the women he’d slept with. He thought this was funny. She was treated like she’d confessed to something troubling. Same behavior, opposite reactions.
Season 8 USA: A Case Study in Gendered Judgment
Love Island USA’s eighth season has been a particularly sharp illustration of how these dynamics play out in practice.
Kenzie Annis was torched by her fellow islanders for stringing multiple men along — but when the group found out that Sincere Rhea was simultaneously pursuing two women, Sol and Melanie, and eventually Amora from Casa Amor, he wasn’t attacked with nearly the same intensity. Kenzie went on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and described breaking down crying in the shower multiple times over the reaction she faced. Her take? She made no fake promises and tried to be transparent throughout. Sincere, by multiple accounts, actively lied to Melanie’s face for weeks. He finished third. She was dumped.
The season’s Casa Amor twist was itself tilted: the women were subjected to a live feed of the men meeting new bombshells, with the new men’s arrival delayed to the following day. The men got to have their cake and eat it too, while the women were emotionally tortured ostensibly for the sake of their growth.
KC Chandler and Corbin Mims were dubbed red-pill poster boys from early episodes for disparaging women who wouldn’t get intimate with them, while Zach Georgiou became notorious for his dismissive attitude toward his partner Kayda and his habit of telling her he was “joking” whenever he showed vulnerability. The men bonded over their collective contempt and largely faced no villa-wide reckoning for it. When women pushed back, the boys closed ranks.
In the Casa Amor women specifically, the structural sexism becomes almost impossible to ignore. The women brought in during Casa Amor always have it hardest — to stay on the show, they have to mold themselves into whoever the men want to bring back to the villa. Sydney, one of the Casa Amor arrivals this season, was widely mocked online for asking KC if there was anything she could change about herself for him. But the criticism landed on her as an individual — not on the system that put her in a position where debasing herself was the only viable path forward.
The UK Front: Manosphere in the Villa
It’s not just an American problem. Love Island UK’s 2025 series drew serious alarm from commentators and domestic violence organizations alike. Glamour’s Fleurine Tideman said watching it felt “like scrolling through Andrew Tate’s TikTok FYP,” and Women’s Aid posted publicly asking: “What’s going on with the men on Love Island this year?”
Ofcom received over 1,000 complaints about the season, with over 200 specifically surrounding the treatment of one contestant, Shakira, who viewers felt was being collectively ganged up on by the men in the villa. The boys had formed what amounted to an echo chamber — reinforcing each other’s behavior, covering for each other, and telling each other they’d done nothing wrong even when they obviously had.
In one argument, contestant Ben shut down Yasmine by accusing her of “creating content” mid-confrontation — as if her emotional reaction was just brand-building. It’s pure manosphere logic: women’s feelings are strategy, men’s are reality.
This season’s UK series picked up where 2025 left off. Lorenzo bragged about sleeping with women whose names he couldn’t remember — framing it as a marker of status — while contestant Jasmine pushed back, pointing out that his inability to remember was hardly something to celebrate. When the women reacted, several of the men accused them of hypocrisy and double standards. The irony of men claiming double standards in the same breath as defending behavior that only a man could get away with apparently went unexamined.
But Here’s the Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
The above is the easy version of this article. The version where the men are the problem and the women are the wronged parties. And while much of it is true, stopping there isn’t honest — it’s comfortable.
Because there’s another category of double standard on Love Island that barely gets discussed: the ways women on this show escape scrutiny that men would never survive.
When women cry, it’s almost always treated as evidence of emotional depth. When men show the same vulnerability, they’re frequently labeled weak, immature, or manipulative — and sometimes by the women themselves. Love Island UK’s Olivia Attwood, who was one of the first contestants to publicly accuse the show of sexism against women, was simultaneously filmed telling her partner Chris Hughes to “man up” and stop crying in front of their task baby, adding “you don’t want to set that kind of example” — the implication being that teaching a boy it’s acceptable to cry is something to be ashamed of. She cannot occupy both positions. And yet, the conversation about gender on the show tends to flatten men’s emotional experience entirely.
Women on Love Island are also consistently let off the hook by fellow female contestants for behavior that would be unforgivable if the genders were reversed. When the men returned from Casa Amor on Season 8 USA, many of the women spent the afternoon at the fire pit crying and indicting the men’s character. Then, at the recoupling ceremony, nearly every one of them chose the same men they’d been crying about a few hours earlier. Complaining about him doesn’t cancel your vote of confidence. Leaving him would.
Melanie was warned by two different men — Corey and Corbin — that Sincere was playing her. She cried. She took him back. Aniya was told by essentially every woman in the villa that KC didn’t deserve her. She cried. She took him back too. When those men continued behaving badly, the narrative became: “look what these men are doing to these women.” The women’s choices — which were real and consequential and worth examining — largely disappeared from the conversation.
The men are guilty of not respecting women, yes, but the women are guilty of not respecting themselves. And a woman who stays with a man who treats her badly, cries about how badly he treats her, then chooses him over and over again, turns from innocent victim into active participant. That’s a hard thing to say. It’s also true, and the refusal to say it isn’t feminism — it’s just a different kind of condescension.
The Show Itself Is Part of the Problem
Here’s the thing that ties all of this together: Love Island isn’t just reflecting the double standards that exist in broader dating culture. It’s actively manufacturing them.
The format is built to reward certain behaviors and punish others, and those rewards and punishments don’t fall evenly across gender. Several challenges this season were seemingly structured in the men’s favor. Corbin received unilateral power to couple up with someone ahead of the girls’ choice recoupling — a privilege that wasn’t offered to any woman. The Casa Amor twist, which is the centrepiece of every season, consistently puts women in a structurally inferior position: either they trust their partner and wait, or they explore and risk being branded disloyal.
The producers also make editorial choices in post-production that shape the narrative around gender. In Season 4 UK, the video shown to Dani during Casa Amor was purposefully edited to cause her distress — Jack remained faithful to her throughout, but producers withheld footage of his reassurances, deliberately amplifying her anxiety to increase viewing figures while reinforcing the stereotype of women’s paranoia and irrationality. The women’s emotions become content. The men’s become plot.
The Honest Takeaway
Love Island’s double standards problem is real. Women are held to stricter sexual standards, their emotional reactions are weaponized against them, they face harsher public judgment for the same behaviors as men, and the show’s structure routinely places them in positions designed to be lose-lose. That’s all true, and it’s worth saying clearly.
But the conversation that only ever goes in one direction does nobody any favors — least of all the women on the show. If the standard for men on Love Island is accountability for their behavior, then the standard for women has to be the same: accountability for theirs, including for the choices they make after they’ve been shown exactly who they’re dealing with.
The men of Love Island are running a recognizable playbook, and calling it out is necessary. But the women who stay with those men, carry their water in the villa, and then cry at the fire pit deserve a more honest conversation too. Not blame. Not the same vitriol that gets hurled at women for far less. But honesty.
The double standard on Love Island runs in multiple directions. So should the conversation about it.
