Happy Thursday! 

Love Island USA picks back up tonight and I’m itching to see what they’ve got in store for today’s Casa Amor episode. I watched Monday’s episode—which featured 12 sexy men sailing on a boat toward the women in the villa—on the silver screen. It felt like watching my X feed IRL. I’m glad everyone was on the same page about one thing: Aniya Harvey deserves better than her current partner KC Chandler (more on that below). Genuinely, the collective whoops for her exploring other men were inspiring.

I—and really the whole internet—noticed a lot of incel and generally misogynist behavior in the last few episodes. This may not feel particularly surprising, but it has felt quite jarring to watch and listen to. Subscribe to the Yapper tier for the full newsletter.

Love Island USA always reflects the current state of dating. Over the past week, it seems to be capturing a hot-button issue that’s been much-discussed in recent years: The gender divide in heterosexual dating.

This divide has been a major roadblock, particularly for young women who have a strong desire to find serious relationships but struggle to find partners that—frankly—respect them. With the mainstreaming of the manosphere over the past couple of years, it’s no wonder that some of that incel-driven subculture has bled into a dating show like Love Island USA.

And the ways this manifests isn’t always obvious. In fact, up until this week, this season’s slate of singles has seemed mostly respectful, modest, and boo’d up, inadvertently creating “Couples Island.” (This is a direct contrast from last year’s establishment of “Situationship Island,” in which everyone wanted to explore each bombshell instead of committing.) It should come as no surprise that this year’s couples seem more closed off, as most of them are firmly Gen Z, a demographic that overwhelmingly prefers monogamy. In fact, a 2024 study from dating app Feeld and the Kinsey Institute found that 81% of Gen Z fantasize about monogamy. 

Young people prefer relationships that feel more stable in this increasingly unstable world. As a result, it’s easy to fall into what’s comfortable rather than explore. In reality, some of these long-standing (by Love Island metrics) couples are trading healthy connections for a false sense of security.

But now that we’ve reached the infamous mid-season challenge Casa Amor, which tests existing relationships in the show by splitting the men and women into different houses and throwing in a group of new singles who want to pursue them, the men are showing their ass. 

Specifically, KC Chandler—who has been coupled up with Aniya Harvey since day one of the season—has been caught on the hot mic and shown in confessionals saying some particularly gross things about Aniya and the other women on the show more generally.

The switchup that he has had during this experiment illustrates a major fear that a lot of women have in dating these days. What happens when your man thinks no one is watching? KC went from seemingly playing the “nice guy” role and reassuring Aniya that she had nothing to worry about to moving disrespectfully with the new girls who have come in to court him.