Former Miss Great Britain Zara Holland has been stripped of her title after having sex on a British reality show about dating, and the internet is not pleased. Zara won Miss Great Britain in September 2015, reigning through 2016, and was revealed as a contestant on this season of Love Island on May 24. The goal of Love Island is complicated, but contestants are essentially attempting to create the strongest “couple,” represented on the show by a night on the island’s “love shack,” while competing for £50,000. Zara’s trip to the love shack with scaffolder and model Alex Bowen resulted in sex, and that’s where the Miss Great Britain organization claims she crossed a line. That's right, an organization thinks it can tell a woman what she can and can't do with her body and her sex life. K.
Now, many of the show’s viewers are calling out the organization for blatant sexism, pointing out that pulling Zara’s title after she dared to have sex, an act that most of the population engages in at some point, is an affront to her personal rights, an outdated requirement for women, and almost certainly a double standard, since almost no one is mad at Alex, and most can’t imagine him getting the same flack.
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The Miss Great Britain executives, however, are refuting these claims, explaining their decision to strip Zara of her title isn’t sexist at all, because Zara had agreed to not have sex on the reality show.
“For those saying ‘going into Love Island, it’s inevitable that she would have sex', that is not true,” the organization said in a statement to Daily Mail, “it is not a prerequisite of the show that you have sex. We gave our permission for Zara to enter, as our current winner, under the stipulation that she did not have sex on TV. Zara fully agreed to this and knowingly went against our wishes.”
It should be noted that this statement, released a few days after the initial outrage, veers from Miss Great Britain’s original response from June 15, directly after the episode aired, on their official Facebook page, which stated that “Zara is a 20 year old, single woman and her behaviour is not controlled or dictated by our organisation.”
“[To] those stating we are ‘slut’ shaming,” the current statement continued, “we have never, and would never ever use this word to describe Zara, it is a huge shame that people are attempting to put words into our mouth. Zara is a lovely girl, we understand that this is out of character for her and that she truly regrets her actions; however the decision simply comes down to the fact that she has broken the rules of the competition. Miss Great Britain works with charities, children & young, impressionable people; our title holder must be an ambassador and this public behavior does not support the ethos of our brand.”
To recap: the Miss Great Britain executives “allowed” Zara, under her title, to appear on Love Island, a show whose only real function is to couple strangers for entertainment, usually resulting in the very public consumption of intimacy, physical or otherwise, by the viewers and the tabloids that obsess over the show for the duration of its season. That every appearance she makes as Miss Great Britain is an advertisement for the Miss Great Britain organization is not included in their reasoning, but is included in the understanding of the way the world works. Their only stipulation was that she not have sex, because sex is a behavior that they consider out of character for an employee, which is what Zara is. Upon having sex, she could not longer represent them, and was essentially fired.
To be clear, this fairly obvious mechanism of sex as views is not a phenomenon of Love Island. British reality shows, much like their US counterparts, are a well-oiled machine of obsessive viewership and the media that profits from it. But unlike US reality shows, which of late largely follow or attempt to the follow the Kardashian model of using someone already famous, powerful, or at least extremely talented characters to build up a world where the people you’re watching are working in ways that matter at least to them, most of the talked-about shows in the UK, such as Big Brother and Sex Box still rely on everyday people who frankly just wanted to be on TV. The results are pretty cut and dry: a reality show following talent, wealth, or power has a myriad of options for plots, locations, and characters, while a show largely uninterested in the professional futures of its cast is far more likely to rely on much easier, simpler ways to create drama. A show about a pair of prodigy teen chefs who just happens to be heiresses has a million places it can go to ensure the plot stays on track and everyone profits; a show about a few people taking six weeks off from their normal jobs to live in a house with strangers can really only send them upstairs without taking too much of a risk.
It should be noted that Miss Great Britain is not exactly the fame-builder of other nation-wide pageants. Started after World War II to boost interest in seaside resorts, the competition isn’t televised, and Zara’s win in September 2015, for which she was awarded £10,000, was announced on Facebook in the way you might announce a new afterschool job – with very little fan fair, and not a lot of returned excitement. The website isn’t well-kept, and most of the “latest news” focuses on minor sponsorships. When the 2016 cast of Love Island was revealed, Zara was named “the most notable,” and is listed on the show’s Wikipedia page as a “model,” rather than her title. In terms of fame and power, Zara was still relatively normal; she essentially came from one reality show to another.
All of this is to say: it feels highly unlikely that the people behind Miss Great Britain assumed that Zara would be able to appear on this show, which needs characters like Zara to go out of bounds in terms of “proper” behavior, without tarnishing the image they require of her, which is apparently chaste, “lovely,” and wholly private about the more human aspects of herself, like the fact that she has sex. It seems more likely that, upon putting her into an arena where the goal was to create drama out of the opposite of their “values,” the organization allowed for a risk they weren’t actually willing to take.
Still, the organization maintains that their reaction to Zara is perfectly reasonable.
“To put it into context, for those outside of the pageant industry,” their statement to the Daily Mail reads, “if a school teacher took part in the show, that person would have a level of responsibility they would be expected to uphold because of their role, and are certain they would face similar consequences if they took part in similar actions on National television.”
Since school teachers are fired for their unrelated or past sexual behavior all the time, this argument makes sense: the precedent for not allowing women to be sexual while holding jobs we consider to be chaste is there. But that doesn’t make it right.
Putting a woman in a position where the denial of her sexuality is the only thing standing between her and losing her job is sexist, outdated, and unfair. But more than that, creating an environment where the woman you’re profiting off of in only destined to fail is exploitation. The Miss Great Britain organization put Zara in a situation where she lost and they gained – in recognition, in solemn “respectability,” and in the money earned from new ads, new contestants, and new interest in their business. Any system in which a woman must be manipulated and maintained to be able to earn a living must be reexamined, and the pageant and reality industries are no exception.
Related: What It’s Like to Be Slut-Shamed When You Own a Condom Company
