Our ideas about adult virgins are fraught with unkind misconceptions – from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to stereotypes of heavy-breathing outcasts living in their mum’s basements. So it’s easy to get the wrong end of the stick about Channel 4’s controversial reality show Virgin Island. With its echoes of ITV meat-market Love Island, the name alone conjures images of awkward misfits forced to cop off as the nation leers and jeers; irresponsible at best, more likely outright cruel.
Spoiler: that’s not what happens. On the contrary, the show itself – in which a group of young people are guided by specialist therapists towards the intimacy and connection that has eluded them – is one of the tenderest, most heartwarming on television today. And why shouldn’t it be? Arguably, assumptions that a show about sex therapy could only be exploitative reveal a cultural undercurrent of sex negativity – something that has compounded many of the islander’s issues in the first place.
Surely it speaks volumes that several of this season’s participants decided to apply after seeing the first series. “When I watched it, I said, ‘Oh my god, this is something that could really help,’” said 26-year-old Marianne, who struggles with trusting men, in an interview with Metro.
So many of the islanders’ worries are internalisations of societal hang-ups – if we didn’t collectively police which bodies can have sex, with whom, and in what context, then there’d be nothing for them to agonise over in the first place. In the words of therapist Celeste Hirschman: “You cannot get to the other side of shame until you expose it.” What more thorough exposition could there be than having that journey made into prime-time TV watched by the millions who made you feel the shame in the first place? What’s more, if season one inspired this cohort to reach out for help, presumably this series will do the same.
Will and Danielle on the new series of ‘Virgin Island’ (Photo: Channel 4)How does someone reach their twenties, thirties, forties, without having experienced the formative fumblings that most of us get out of the way as teens? Virgin Island shows that there are myriad answers to that question, each as specific as they are relatable.
Take 28-year-old data analyst Alex, a personable perfectionist with a couple of exes under his belt – yet, performance anxiety has always stopped him sealing the deal. When he diligently volunteers for a stroking exercise with one of the therapists, his conscientiousness is immediately apparent: “Was that OK?” Learning to allow himself pleasure without worry will be a struggle – but following a successful session with sexologist bodyworker Ilil Lunkry, in which he gets an erection, he is practically walking on air.
No question, such sessions make for the show’s most toe-curling viewing (and that’s saying something: a scene where two therapists got on all fours to show the islanders how to find their “inner animals” was watched largely through my fingers). But just because something is difficult, doesn’t mean we should look away. On the contrary, the process of therapy itself – the sense that even the knottiest, most private problems could have a solution, worked towards with kind, patient professionals – feels powerfully liberating.
One of the toe-curling exercises on ‘Virgin Island’ (Photo: Channel 4)While in standard psychotherapy, sexual contact between therapist and therapee would be unthinkable, sessions with both the show’s bodyworkers (like Lunkry) and surrogate sexual partners (Andre Lazarus; Kat Slade) are part of a coherent therapeutic framework, and feel decidedly practical rather than inappropriate or irresponsible. Providing a training ground beyond the high stakes of a real-world relationship, participants feel safe to make the mistakes they’ve been so scared of; often, that freedom alone is transformative.
That goes for hands-on sessions as well as more fundamental ones; with 23-year-old Joy, who struggles with vaginismus stemming from shame instilled by a strict Christian upbringing, Hirschman starts at the beginning. “You deserve to have that circuit of pleasure,” she says, simply. “Thank you,” replies Joy, as though she’s truly computing it for the first time.
Religion and addiction, social pressure and bullying; like all of us, the island’s resident virgins are products of their environments and experiences. And while their problems – and therefore, the solutions to them – are sexual, it would be hopelessly reductive to let that limit the show’s relevance.
Human, messy, at times breathtakingly close to the bone yet always gentle, Virgin Island dives into decidedly choppy waters but never feels out of its depth. The editing is nuanced and respectful without feeling prudish; meanwhile, the show’s experts radiate the kind of warm authority that lets viewers and participants alike relax, even luxuriate, in the excruciating awkwardness of bodies, wanting, hurting, having. As Hirschman says to 24-year-old Bertie, whose autism has made connection difficult: “Intimacy is super-awkward, so let’s just be awkward together” – an invitation to the audience as much as her client.
With the loneliness epidemic only deepening, people of all ages increasingly atomised by the technology that promised to connect them, the problems faced by individual islanders might seem hyper-specific – their longing for connection, though, couldn’t be more relatable. Thanks to Virgin Island’s delicate, diplomatic touch, it feels reachable, too.
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