Virgin Island’s humiliation kink TV execs are manipulative libertines

Do you remember the first time? I do. I was nervous, self-conscious, and not quite sure if what I was doing should even be allowed. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable; it was all a bit painful and shocking. I was watching two people on a TV reality show have sex with each other. One televisual low then followed another, each more extreme than the last. Now I find myself watching “therapists” taking the virginities of their clients for a new show on Channel 4.

Virgin Island  — for that is the show’s name — is effectively Dangerous Liaisons rebooted for the modern era. In the 18th-century French novel, manipulative libertines systematically despoil the innocence of various naïve virginal types, ruining them for polite society thereafter. Victims are forced to spend the rest of their lives sheltered in some rural convent or monastery, safely away from disapproving eyes. In the updated version, manipulative libertines sequester 12 sexually inexperienced young adults in a rural convent-like environment, systematically despoil their innocence, and send them out into the world again, remade as newly respectable and technically adept members of the pornified 21st century. Or that’s the theory anyway.

I watched the first two episodes, released this week, between my fingers. Corrupter-in-chief is the “groundbreaking sex therapist” Danielle, flanked by her right-hand woman, Celeste: two MILFs on a mission to save the earth from the perils of mass chastity. “One in eight people aged 26 are still virgins in the UK,” warns Danielle in concerned tones. “This is happening all over the world,” adds Celeste. “Even the French are having less sex.” To combat the problem, they have come up with what they call the “Somatica Method” — building what they call “mutually vulnerable, two-way relationships with clients” and teaching “real-life intimacy tools to them within a safe, non-judgmental space”, according to their website.

On the show, they put their anxious, socially-challenged clients on an island, dress them in mandatory grey garments, do a few breathing exercises, show them a few sex toys, then dive into the main business: touching them up more and more intimately, in order to bring about “disinhibition” and overcome their “shame”. Celeste and Danielle are willing to get to second base for the cause, but apparently leave the harder stuff to a team of “sexological bodyworkers”, all of whom look like they just arrived from a yoga retreat in Goa. Taking charge of any “emotions that come up” is an accompanying “licensed mental health clinician”, though I’d like to know who gave her the licence.

In case it’s not already obvious, none of these people are British. Their clients, in contrast, are very much so. It’s like watching Adrian Mole at a sex-positive boot camp run by Kamala Harris. “Take a deep breath down into your belly and connect your body with your hands,” seductively drawls Danielle to Brummie Jason, exhorting him to touch her limbs as the rest of the group look on appalled. “Think of your hands as if … ‘I’m going to get pleasure out of her arms’, do you know what I mean?” Jason nods nervously, keen to show he understands: “I’m going to wank off your arms.” Another bloke in the group, a parliamentary researcher called Ben, tells the camera he is a “logical person” who has created a spreadsheet listing all his previous dates. “I see dating in the same way a football manager would see their team. I like to analyse things and see what I can do better.”

The dominant emotion during group sessions is abject embarrassment. Faced with the sight of middle-aged Celeste moaning in ecstasy before them, or pretending to be an animal in heat, the rigidly averted gazes and squirming body language of the onlookers speak for many of us. The therapists pretend they can’t understand why participant Emma feels tearfully overwhelmed, forced to watch two weird strangers get hot and heavy in front of her, the cameras focused tightly upon her face all the while. “Witnessing sexual desire is clearly unsettling,” one would-be Dr Freud suggests; “I feel like she is a bit stuck.” But actually, the reactions of “the virgins” (as they are collectively referred to by the chirpy Northern narrator) are refreshingly normal. “It was like watching a sex scene with your parents but times 100,” said one. Pronounced another: “it was very Jungle Book, and I was feeling very Downton Abbey.”

In other ways, too, these youngsters seem reassuringly old-fashioned. In every reality show, the closest that viewers are likely to get to a revealing glimpse into real personalities is via the unselfconscious participants of the very first series: they haven’t seen the format, don’t really know what they are getting into, and aren’t acting to camera with the perception of some earlier version of the show in mind. In the case of Virgin Island, the touchingly awkward and likeable cast don’t seem to be doing it to chase fame, but because they each genuinely believed its makers could help them find love and connection. It’s almost as if they have never seen reality television before.

Porn doesn’t seem to have corrupted the men’s preferences; the internet hasn’t turned them into bitter incels, or the women into man-haters; they all still apparently long for monogamous romance, and are sweetly supportive of one another without much drama. And despite knocks to confidence in the past, and many expressions of self-doubt, they still seem hopeful and willing to give relationships a whirl. They haven’t, for instance, defined their lack of sexual experience as a core part of their identity, called themselves “asexual”, and given up the libidinal ghost.

Whether they end up scarred for life by the whole experience is another matter. Says the team’s resident mental health expert at one point, explaining the concept behind having sex with a supportive stranger, “this is a container to practise a relationship”. But what her clients apparently crave above all is intimacy; and I don’t see how practising certain complicated physical gyrations and accompanying sensations gives them much help with that. Intimacy with another person requires that your sexual activity isn’t paid for, and that it hasn’t become a weird kind of spectator sport.

The idea of ordinary therapy is already strange enough: practising some kind of friendship with a sympathetic but distant figure, unguardedly spilling your guts to them, yet with a steep fee and a sharp cut-off time on the hour. Any professionally inappropriate feelings, arising as a result of the therapist’s unusual degree of access to the very depths of your soul, are pathologised as “transference”; but that doesn’t necessarily make them go away. God knows what happens to tender hearts starved of affection when the therapist also starts shagging you. Should any proto-romantic ideas emerge on the show, presumably the mental health expert will come along with her licence to remind participants it was only ever pretend. But never mind: at least they’ll have the solace of knowing their fumbling amatory “practice” sessions have been immortalised on screen, with an option to be sold onto Netflix later.

Given the usual redemption arc for this sort of series, it’s probably more likely that in future episodes, our innocent anti-heroes will finally arrive in the 21st century. Under the tutelage of Celeste and Danielle, the lovably stammering, cack-handed geeks will cast off their inhibitions and become the gimlet-eyed, icicle-hearted progressive Lotharios they have always secretly dreamt of being: pangender, polyamorous, and wielding ethical vibrators made out of ocean-bound plastic with great aplomb.

Already by the end of the second episode, there were worrying signs of encroaching technical ability and emotional disassociation from a few. Strangely protective as I now feel towards the inhabitants of Virgin Island, I won’t be watching to find out the results of this gruesome piece of televisual conversion therapy. I suspect the finale will be as painful as when Winston Smith comes out of Room 101.

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Kathleen Stock is Contributing Editor at UnHerd.

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