POV: It’s 70 minutes into Love Island, you’ve already had more adrenaline coarsing through your body in the last hour than any other night this year, your capacity for cringe is reaching its limit and before your jaw even has a chance to drop, contestants are sucking each other’s body parts.
This was us, last night, completely overwhelmed by the excitement that was Love Island episode one. Don’t worry about waiting until the strip-tease episode, producers said, we’re giving you stripping, twerking and toe-sucking right off the bat.
Honestly, it was everything you could want from a Love Island premiere, apart from that one, eye-widening moment where every viewer seemed to collectively shut down in horror… yes, we’re talking about Jake Cornish recording said toe-sucking incident.
In case you need a reminder (and we sincerely apologise for re-traumatising you if you don’t) it occurred when Toby Aromolaran was dared to suck partner Kaz Kamwi’s big toe for 30 seconds. He knelt down, looking incredibly squeamish, before he proceeded to participate in said dare, but not before Jake whispered excitedly to Liberty Poole ‘I’m recording it.’ The 24-year-old proceeded to stealthily record a close-up shot of Toby sucking Kaz’s toe, giggling before telling Liberty ‘I got it’ and asking Toby ‘What did it taste like?’ with a vigour that immediately made viewers tense up in sheer horror.
It was the moment that spawned a thousand memes as everyone reacted online, namely asking the question: WHAT IS HE DOING AND WHY ISN’T ANYONE STOPPING HIM???
Of course, no one was stopping him because none of the contestants knew the context we did… Jake has a ‘thing’ for sucking toes. ‘I like sucking toes,’ he laughs in his introduction interview. ‘All I ask for is blonde, blue eyes [and] little feet cause I have a massive foot fetish.’ Jake also specified his affinity for a white pedicure – which Kaz happened to have during said toe sucking dare – and so generally, viewers have gathered that he will have some sort of sexual gratification from the dare.
And truly, that context matters, because it’s what took him recording the dare from something everyone might brush off to something just… creepy. At least that’s what many are saying online.
Love Island have already memed the moment off, posting on Twitter ‘For all those wondering, Jake got the shot.’ To them it’s all just a big joke, and to be honest, given that all the contestants are on a reality show knowingly being recorded, that seems to be the way a lot of people are treating it.
But for others, seeing someone secretly record another person without their permission and knowing the context of sexual gratification, it rang alarm bells. ‘I hope this isn’t normalised! Can’t be filming that without permission,’ one person responded to Love Islands tweet. ‘Just because she’s given consent to the film crew doesn’t mean she’s giving consent to the guy filming it to keep on his personal phone, big difference… consent for one thing isn’t consent for everything if get you me.’
It's not the fact Jake is into toe-sucking that's creepy, let's be clear, it's the fact when he saw something he finds sexually appealing occuring between two other people, his first instinct was to secretly record it - meanwhile none of the other contestants are seemingly aware he would find it sexually appealing. If you were Kaz or Toby in that situation then, and you found out later he's got a fetish for toe-sucking, you might find it uncomfortable knowing he has that saved on his phone.
Like many dodgy moments on Love Island, this will likely be swept over and forgotten about by 9pm tonight - but if there's one thing we can hope comes from the wave of memes about this, it's the reminder that secretly recording your friends doing things you take sexual pleasure in is wrong in all kinds of ways. Plus, that we never need another toe-sucking dare on Love Island again... thanks producers, but one toe in a strangers mouth is enough for us this summer.
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