It is a great shame that Karl Marx died around a century and a half too soon to extend his economic theories of historical evolution to Love Island.
The turning of heads, the pieing off, the laying on (of Factor 50), are the superstructure, but the base is always a numbers game. And the arrival of two new women is a revolution of sorts.
Until that moment, the women were the bourgeoisie, now they are the proletariat. It is they who must struggle to compete for scarce resources, those resources being the men. And the results are as predictable as they are unpretty.
Territory is being staked out, positions secured. In this scenario, other species would be darting about the villa in handstand formation, spraying pungent musk all the way from the open plan kitchen to the hideaway.
Instead, and whether this is an improvement is very much a matter of personal choice, vituperations are barked from the rooftop balcony down to the dinner table, in a desperate attempt to undermine the insertion of a spite banana into the gleefully spread eagled gob of a heavily tattooed firefighter.
It’s a war in there now, naturally. And one that not even Curtis the one-man peacekeeping force, and his bizarre talk of diffusing thermonuclear arguments with talk “achieving the end goals you want”.
Once upon a time, Tommy Fury bemoaned his luck at being stuck at the sharp end of – and we use this term lightly – “love triangles”. Now he exists at the centre of a great stellated dodecahedron of hate. Maura likes Tommy. Molly-Mae hates Tommy. Everyone hates Maura. Amber hates everyone. Anton’s emotions are hard to read, unlike the contours of his calves beneath the white spray-on trousers on which, miraculously, the paint remains pristine after more than a week.
And naturally, Love Island, like Marx himself, poses significant questions about human nature. Is ownership, possession, a social construct or a real thing? Does each not have more when all is shared? It is hard to imagine, for example, Tommy Fury objecting to his being equitably shared between Maura and Molly Mae. Though it is fair to imagine, if full collective ownership were to be achieved, goings on in the Love Island villa would quickly become unbroadcastable.
No, for now, alas, the chains of oppression have not been shaken off. Screaming rows and sullen looks it is then. Whole long weeks of it, stretching into the future with grim foreboding, all summer long.
