Laura Craik on body representation on Love Island

Plus trainer toe holes and a Trump-free NHS
The Love Island contestants for 2019
ITV/Shutterstock
Laura Craik13 June 2019

We become the things that surround us.

After 20-odd years in London, this is why I have turned into a coffee snob with too many shoes, a raging Deliveroo habit and a pair of Powerbeats Pros effective enough to drown out the screech of the Northern line between Camden and Euston. It’s also why I regard the women on Love Island as a fairly healthy size. Accustomed as I am to the kaled-up, yoga-bodied carb-deniers of London, I was surprised at the outcry that this year’s contestants were too thin, with Anna ‘Have I Mentioned I’m Tall?’ Vikali slammed for presenting herself as plus-sized when, in the words of one Twitter user, ‘her stomach’s flatter than my ironing board’.

Maybe the dress size is a red herring: the real issue is that both male and female contestants alike have been picked to align with the most clichéd heterosexual fantasies in the book, as though all men want women with massive tits, plump lips and cascading hair extensions, and all women want men with square jaws, tight glutes and oiled-up six packs. Please, can someone make Indie Love Island next year, where everyone wears bucket hats and keeps their clothes on?

This is not edifying to admit, but it was only when I was in Iceland, where they make you shower — naked — before entering a public swimming pool, that I realised how dangerously removed I was from the reality of what real women’s bodies actually look like. If you think you’re seeing them in a Dove ad, you’re wrong. While the public appetite for watching people with overhanging stomachs and liver spots cavorting in bikinis on TV is undoubtedly smaller than it is for watching Lucie and Joe, it doesn’t hurt to carry out your own reality check. It’s easy to lose perspective on the virtues of your own body when presented with nothing but idealised versions, not least if you’re a teenager, many of whom are #obsessed with Love Island without being possessed of the requisite maturity to take it with a pinch of salt. It might be entertainment of the lightest kind, but the consequences of the message it sends out are pretty heavy.

The hole story

The Marc Jacobs non-sports shoes

Either I have peculiarly sharp toes like a crow, or something’s rotten in the state of trainer design. Ultra-light running shoes are all very well, but the fabric isn’t what you’d call durable. Surely I’m not the only person to resent dropping £120 on trainers that develop holes in the toes a few weeks later. In a sea of performance-related hyperbole, at least one designer is telling it like it is. ‘These Marc Jacobs sports shoes are not manufactured for world champion athletes because we do not know the first thing about sports,’ says the label on his sneakers. You and several others, MJ.

NHS worth the Q

Protestors in Parliament Square 
Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

My doctor sent me for a blood test. Nobody ever goes, ‘Cool, a blood test!’, but I’m the sort of person who immediately thinks death is imminent. I went ASAP, only to be confronted by a three-hour queue. Back I went the next day at 9am: the queue was even longer.

On my third attempt, arriving at 7.21am, there were 33 people in front of me, and a 45-minute wait. Under an hour is acceptable; having to take half a day off work for a blood test is not, particularly if you’re self-employed, on a zero-hours contract or just plain scared of losing your job. Yet I’d wait all day rather than have Trump put our NHS ‘on the table’ as part of a trade deal. Just: no.

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