What Love Island tells us about what it means to be sexy

Being sexy on Love Island is not just important it's key to the game. How else can you land your love interest with so much competition?

The sexual tension in the villa is particularly heightened by the difficulty in hooking up and the ban on “self-love,”. Everyone wants what they can't have.

As viewers we are expected to find the villa's occupants sexy as part of the enjoyment of watching them. This clear by the "sexy" games.

Women covered in pancake batter anyone?

So what can we learn about what it means to be sexy on a show like Love Island and therefore in mainstream society by the "heart racing" game?

The challenge was boys V girls whoever gets the other side’s heart rates the highest – as judged by "hi-tech gadgets"– is the winner. This was achieved by each person wearing a sexy outfit and doing a sexy dance.

The girls' outfits and dances used power play to be the best effect. Maureen and Anna were dominant in a leather catsuit and as a "sexy" policewoman, both took control in their dances and were sexually confident.

More submissive was Molly-mae as a french maid, this fits into our ideas as a society of how a woman in a relationship should act. She needs to keep her sexiness under wraps for her boyfriend, Tommy, alone.

Joanna also took on a submissive role, crawling across the floor towards Michael. I can't help but think she is signaling to Michael, "I am not like Amber, I won't threaten your masculinity."

Many of the men choose to dress up as traditional masculine roles: soldier, sailor, gladiator. Because nothing says sexy like a job where you kill or be killed.

Gender stereotypes aside, I appreciate that Love Island is equal in it's pressure to be sexy, both genders were expected to perform for the other gender.

This what I like about Love Island, sexy dressing in so much media is presented as being performed by women for male enjoyment.

In Love Island women are expected and encouraged to have sexual agency and be sexual excited just as much as the men.

However it is clear that this is unusual from the way the men and the women respond to the sexy tasks.

The women are used to being looked at as sexual object, they are able to perform and being "sexy" because society expects this of them in everyday life.

As women we are observed and judged on our sexiness everyday in a way then men are not.

For this reason the men clearly struggle, they are all attractive men but they didn't seem to know how to dance or act in a way that women will find sexy. The women also struggled in how to respond to their efforts. This normally results in laughter and of course the women won the challenge.

At the end of the day, Love Island is a mainstream show presenting sexual enjoyment as two way, a bit of fun and nothing to be ashamed of, which in rare in our society.