Love Island, Summer Holidays and the Hedonic Calculus

In the south cloisters of University College, London, sits a rather strange figure. It is the preserved body of the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, sitting in a chair and wearing his own clothes. Jeremy Bentham left his body to UCL for medical science and it is known as the ‘auto-icon’ or ‘image of self’. As he instructed in his will, his body was dissected by his friend, the surgeon, Thomas Southwood Smith, and his skeleton was then preserved, mounted by a wax head, and dressed in its finery.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher (1748 – 1832) and his ideas about equal access to education led to the foundation of UCL, one of the world’s finest universities. UCL was the first institution in England to admit students of any race, class or religion and the first university to admit female students on the same basis as their male counterparts.

Now you are of course wondering at this point why I am writing about this rather arcane feature of UCL life. It’s because of Bentham’s philosophical ideas and their relevance to the imminent summer holidays. Jeremy Bentham is most famous for the development of a theory of Happiness known as Utilitarianism. According to this theory, human beings should strive to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Bentham believed that what fundamentally motivated human beings were Pleasure and Pain. Happiness for Bentham was a matter of experiencing pleasure and a lack of pain. Bentham believed that all human beings were equal according to this principle and that no one human being’s pleasure was more or less important than another’s. This, for the 18th century, was no doubt a pretty radical idea – that the happiness of a pauper counted just as much as the happiness of a king.

Bentham also developed a slightly bizarre idea known as the hedonic calculus – ‘hedonic’ coming from the Greek word “hedone” meaning pleasure. In English a hedonist is a pleasure-seeker. The hedonic calculus was a way of calculating the amount of total happiness: pleasure minus pain. On this basis, it might have been acceptable for the Romans to throw Christians to the lions because 50,000 spectators were getting their fill of bloodthirsty entertainment versus the agony of the Christians being mauled. On this basis, violent video games like Call of Duty are potentially more worthy than the Royal Opera House because they are enjoyed by a greater number of people. On this basis, Love Island is every bit as worthy as BBC Radio 3 or a nice Lucy Worsley documentary about the Suffragettes.

However, and this is an important catch, Bentham set six strict criteria for calculating pleasure:

• Intensity (how great the feeling of pleasure)
• Duration (how long it lasts)
• Certainty (how likely the action is to produce pleasure)
• Proximity (how soon after the action will pleasure occur)
• Fecundity (how likely the action is to lead to more pleasure)
• Purity (how much pain is mixed in with the pleasure)

So, let’s see how Love Island stacks up against Bentham’s strict criteria. Because, with seven uncharted weeks of free time, our pupils need to make some sensible decisions about how they spend it. I really hope they don’t spend it watching Love Island but just in case they are considering it, I am going to do battle with Love Island – the regrettable cultural phenomenon that seems to have taken this country by storm.

Now I have to make a cultural confession at this point. I have not and never will watch an episode of Love Island. This isn’t just due to lack of time but also lack of interest. Watching bronzed men and women prance around in swimwear just doesn’t feel like an especially mind-expanding experience, no matter how witty the dialogue of the commentator and no matter how firmly your tongue is stuck in your cheek. I am afraid that I had to turn to a source of infinite wisdom and good sense for a summary of the Love Island experience. I should hasten to add that this source only watched a single episode in the interests of pastoral research. This is our very own Ms Brass on Love Island when I asked her what she thought of it and if I was missing out:  “People in bikinis kissing each other and hating each other and backstabbing each other. That’s pretty much all you need to know.”

So, let’s look at our assessment criteria and mark Love Island for its pleasure factor:

• Intensity – difficult to know, possibly dependent on the individual viewer, probably provides instant and immediate pleasure. Easy viewing, like a lot of screen time.
• Duration – the length of an episode, I assume, but I gather that episodes are very numerous and there are several series. However, I doubt it has any long-lasting impact – will you remember Love Island in 5 years’ time when the contestants are starting to look like wrinkled prunes from all their sun exposure? Probably not.
• Certainty – will Love Island definitely make you happy? I don’t know. Are you watching it out of a feeling of social duty because all your friends are watching it? Do you get depressed that your fake tan is not quite as fake as the fake tan of Grace Wardle, Ellie Brown or Megan Hanson? Maybe you won’t actually enjoy watching it then.
• Proximity – Love Island scores highly on this measure, I suspect, as the pleasure is simultaneous with the watching. Perhaps a bit of pleasure the next day dissecting the latest couplings and arguments.
• Fecundity – will watching Love Island lead to more happiness. Well it may lead to watching more episodes but I think that’s missing the point. Will it lead to any other sort of happiness? Possibly a bit of bonding with your friends if you feel compelled to watch it because they do – honestly, be a flamingo, not a sheep. But will Love Island lead to greater job opportunities, the development of new skills, a deeper sense of satisfaction with Planet Earth and all who dwell on it? Will it lead to a greater sense of personal fulfilment and a feeling of universal love towards your fellow human beings? I doubt it. Will you look back on it in your dying years and smile fondly at memories of the islanders’ grasp of Brexit? I have to say that on the measure of fecundity, Love Island doesn’t fare at all well.
• Finally, purity – is the pleasure we experience on watching Love Island pure? Well, arguably no human beings were harmed in the production of the series. These great thinkers all volunteered to be part of the show. More people in Britain applied to be contestants on Love Island than applied to Oxford and Cambridge universities combined. Arguably being a contestant brings you instant fame and a lucrative career on Instagram after the show. What’s not to love, we might ask?

At the risk of sounding a serious note before a lovely summer holiday, I do think Love Island actually produces more harm than good. It fetishises and trivialises romantic relationships, some of the most important and fulfilling relationships in all of human existence. And the fact that romantic, or rather sexual relationships, are the whole point of the programme, does further harm by suggesting that this is what life can be reduced to – which mate we choose and who chooses us. Which is of course nonsense and a very limited view of human experience.

Love Island also promotes vanity and an obsession with physical appearance – why else do the contestants look as orange as Donald Trump and why else are they prancing round in flimsy swimwear, if not to vaunt their toned physiques.  I believe it also reinforces some really awful stereotypes about the British class system. Middle class viewers watch the programme with a wonderful middle class sense of irony and laugh at people who ultimately have so few opportunities open to them that getting onto Love Island is seen as a ticket out of poverty. Race, gender, sexuality, religion – these are all protected characteristics in the UK today and there are laws in place to protect people from discrimination. There are no such laws in place, however, for class; words like ‘chav’ are bandied around unthinkingly and television programmes, staffed by graduates of Russell Group universities, create programmes that ultimately make a mockery of working class people.

We are a proud feminist school – we promote women in Science, women in Finance, women in the Arts, women in Business, women in Politics – all jobs which require high levels of education, and access to social networks. If our pupils want a new feminist cause to fight, perhaps they should look no further than Love Island. If there is a spirit in which they watch the programme, and I really don’t suggest that they do, I would suggest that they make it a spirit of enquiry about the feminist cause. Why does Megan Hanson feel that her route to fortune is through lip implants, fake tan and a programme which ultimately turns her and her fellow contestants into figures of public mockery? So any of our pupils feel they have to switch Love Island on, perhaps they should consider some of the social and feminist questions the programme raises.  I look forward to discussing these in the new term.

On that note, I wish you all a very pleasurable, enriching and mind-expanding summer.

Blog post by Vicky Bingham, Headmistress from 2017 to 2023.