The contestants have been selected, not only for their beauty, but also for their particularly casual attitude towards romantic love. “I don’t really do relationships” says one, while another claims to have sex with a different woman every night. All are accustomed to effortlessly attracting suitors with their Instagram-perfect good looks but, as time goes on, we discover that they are less confident in their ability to form lasting relationships. This is, supposedly, the high-minded intention of the show: to teach these shallow young things how to form meaningful bonds without recourse to sex.

Of course the real appeal to viewers is schadenfreude. How deliciously satisfying to watch vapid, beautiful people told that they can’t have exactly what they want all the time, although I must admit that I found myself feeling more tender towards the contestants as it became clear how psychologically fragile they all were. No one acquires a body like that without excellent impulse control, and yet it seems that an ability to resist refined carbs doesn’t translate well into an ability to resist lust, perhaps because the challenge for these young people was less physical than it was emotional.

More from this author

What sort of sex do women really want?

By Louise Perry

When one woman failed in her efforts to persuade a fellow contestant to break the rules, she seemed to crumble, having never before experienced sexual rejection. What do you do, when the only thing you’re good at is attracting sexual partners, and you’re not allowed to do that any more? Like all reality TV, this show places people in painful situations, and then lets the camera linger on their pain. But, unlike other reality TV, this shows pretends to be noble while tormenting its contestants.

Too Hot to Handle is a product of our times. The contestants arrived on set expecting to have sex with people they had just met for the entertainment of a TV audience. And, for the first 12 hours, before they learned the true premise of the show, they got right to it, with the camera zooming in on undulating tongues and kneading hands. This is a show that feeds on the toxic combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism encouraged by social media. It also relies on, and then manipulates, the expectations of our hypersexualised culture.

How quickly things change. In 1994, Wonderbra’s ‘Hello Boys’ posters were blamed for causing traffic accidents, with passing motorists distracted by Eva Herzigova’s boosted cleavage. A generation later, sexually explicit advertising is just wallpaper on the streetscape, barely even noticed. Graphic sex scenes in films have also been normalised, so much so that the idea of cutting away as characters kiss, leaving the rest to the imagination, now seems bizarrely old fashioned.

In her bestelling book Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy described the environment for modern teenagers as like “a candyland of sex…every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie Roll tree.” That was in 2005, when audiences could still be shocked by Big Brother contestants fumbling under the covers, whereas Love Island has long since jumped the shark when it comes to showing real sex on TV.

Suggested reading

Do men want sex more than women?

By Tom Chivers

Of course, we mustn’t fall into the trap of assuming that our forebears were models of sexual propriety. For men who can afford it, prostitution has always been a source of sex on demand, often tacitly condoned. And, for men of particularly high status, sexual access to social ‘inferiors’ has frequently been accepted as a perk. But, for everyone else, and particularly women, our culture of easy access to casual sex — both real and virtual — is historically unique. The availability of reliable contraception and the decriminalisation of abortion has freed women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, radically altering sexual politics among heterosexuals. Meanwhile, the arrival of the internet has heralded a new era of access to online porn, with an attendant shift in sexual norms.

Which means that, several decades on, hypersexuality doesn’t have the ability to scandalise us as it once did. In fact, it has become rather boring. Our culture has gorged on sex, so much so that it’s easy to glaze over when yet more taut flesh is paraded before us. The cleverness of Too Hot to Handle, and the secret to its success, is that it recognises this fact. If we can’t be surprised by sex any more, then what can we be surprised by? Chastity.

The continuing influence of the NoFap movement is a testament to this overloading of sexual stimulation. Founded in 2011 by the American web developer Alexander Rhodes, NoFap encourages followers to give up both porn and masturbation (‘fap’ being slang derived from the sound of a man pleasuring himself). Followers — overwhelmingly male — are offered freedom from the addictive power of porn, and the consequent sexual dysfunction that is shockingly common among young men, alongside more dubious promises such as greater energy and mental clarity. In general, NoFap adherents are not interested in feminist criticisms of porn, and in fact there is plenty of misogyny within the online community, with women often portrayed as succubi. Instead, NoFap is a movement orientated around self control as a masculine virtue.

Suggested reading

Sex strikes: a dangerous game to play

By Julie Bindel

This may be starting to sound familiar. NoFap is not an explicitly religious movement, but it undoubtedly draws from Christian themes, and Christianity is unusual among religious traditions in applying expectations of sexual continence not only to women, but also to men, framing the ability to resist the body’s demands as a sign of spiritual integrity. As the UnHerd contributor Tom Holland argues in his latest book, Dominion, we mustn’t underestimate the importance of Christianity in shaping our contemporary moral ideas, and the Christian emphasis on sexual restraint, however inconsistently adhered to, continues to resonate in our secular times.

Christians have often interpreted sexual impulses as opponents to do battle with. Saint Augustine writes of his body as an adversary:

“I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. The enemy held my will in his power and from it he made a chain and shackled me.”

Expressing the same idea, one of the Too Hot to Handle contestants speaks of her desire to challenge her willpower by resisting sexual desire: “I want to test my limits.” These old ideas lie in wait for anyone who wants to pick them up again, with or without any kind of religious framing, and indeed the vocabulary of chastity has already been put to good use by the diet industry, with much talk of temptation, indulgence, and sin. Much like dieting, which can only exist within an environment of abundant food, this form of self-denial can only exist within an environment of abundant access to sexual pleasure.

Suggested reading

Why Incels are the losers in the age of Tinder

By James Bloodworth

And we are living through an era of unprecedented sexual abundance. Historically, it is not uncommon for periods of Bacchinalian excess to alternate with periods of austerity, for instance the randy Georgians, reacting against their Puritan forebears, and in turn condemned by their Victorian grandchildren.

But then the Georgians didn’t have The Pill or the internet. Our culture is more pornified than any that has come before, so much so that perhaps we are about to hit a ceiling, no longer capable of adding any more breasts or buttocks to our screens or public spaces. And, in a culture that still honours Christian moral ideas, we shouldn’t be surprised to see a reaction against the decadence of hypersexualisation. When viewers become bored with a particular style of plastic sexiness, producers are forced to innovate, and may call upon older ideas about sex and the body that remain meaningful.

Too Hot to Handle offers up a lucrative combination of these two impulses, giving us the opportunity to drool over beautiful bodies, while simultaneously idealising chastity, or at least pretending to. And by playing with both hypersexuality and puritanism at an historical moment in which they are in tension, this shallow, exploitative, and compelling show, now tipped to be more successful than Love Island, may just have struck gold.

It kicked up a great big fuss, because various other women said: wait, hang on, I enjoy sex, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be a thing that I grant to a man like a favour. But it also caused a lot of hilarity, when a bunch of men said things like “women may CLAIM to like sex, but you really don’t”, or “I have yet to meet a hetero woman who enthusiastically participates in sex”. (I’m not going to link: they’ve been piled on enough already.)

Suggested reading

Sex strikes: a dangerous game to play

By Julie Bindel

As people pointed out, this is what the kids today call a spectacular self-own. “I have yet to meet a hetero woman who enthusiastically participates in sex WITH ME”, they rephrased. Or, alternatively, “People hate food, it’s a known fact! Just ask anyone I’ve ever cooked for.”

It’s obviously true that the “women don’t enjoy sex” guys are wrong: women do enjoy sex. A slightly more interesting question is whether, on average, they want it as much as men do. And the answer, there, is almost certainly no.

The most famous research on the subject is a 2001 meta-analysis by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs, combining the results of 150 earlier studies. You can’t measure “sex drive” directly, so the study looked at a wide range of proxy measures. They found that men had more frequent sexual “thoughts, fantasies, and spontaneous arousal” – for instance, one study they looked at reported that “nearly all the men (91%) but only half the women (52%) experienced sexual desire several times a week or more”.

Men’s “desired frequency of sex” was higher, too, throughout the lifetime of a relationship: one study found that “wives consistently reported that they were quite satisfied with the amount of sex they had in their marriages, but men on average wished for about a 50% increase”, another that “a majority of husbands (60%) but only a minority of wives (32%) said they would prefer to have sex more often”.

And men masturbated more frequently. The authors admit that this could be due to social disapproval of female masturbation. But they also argue that male masturbation is discouraged just as much as female – “it’ll make you go blind”, and so on – and point out that boys were more likely to have “discovered it themselves”, meaning it’s not that boys are being “taught” how to do it and girls aren’t. “Anyone who wants to masturbate can probably figure out how to do it,” they say.

Women are more willing to go without sex: notably, female clergy do better at keeping to their vows. Sexual desire emerges earlier in boys than in girls, despite girls usually reaching puberty and physical sexual maturity earlier than boys.

Men initiate sex with their partners around twice or three times as often, and refuse it less often. One experimental study had “a moderately attractive, opposite-sex” person approach men and women and offer sex that evening; 100% of women refused, compared to just 25% of men.

Men are more interested in a wider range of sexual practices. Men sacrificed more for sexual pleasure, whether in financial terms – they spent more on pornography – or in terms of risk – they were more willing to have extramarital sex. In general, men have more “favourable attitudes to sex”, being more permissive regarding casual sex and promiscuous sex. And overall, men are less likely to report low sexual desire and more likely to rate their level of sex drive highly.

And, interestingly, gay men have sex more often than lesbian women: 47% reported having sex more often than once a week, compared to 32% of lesbians.

Suggested reading

We've been underestimating the genetic differences between men and women

By Peter Franklin

It’s not just this one study, for the record. The most recent British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL) found that 22% of British women aged 16 to 74 had masturbated in the last four weeks, compared to 50% of men; the ratio was consistent across ages. Women were roughly twice as likely to report lack of sexual interest, lack of arousal during sex, or lack of enjoyment during sex. Men were about 30% more likely than women were (61% to 47%) to want sex “much more” or “a bit more” often than they currently get it.

Another, earlier (1993) meta-analysis (by two female researchers) found large gender differences in masturbation practices and attitudes to casual sex. And, fascinatingly, a 1995 study (which was admittedly very small so should be treated with caution) found that when female-to-male transgender people were given androgen hormones as part of their transition, their “sexual arousability” went up; likewise, when male-to-female transgender people were deprived of the same hormones, their sexual arousability went down. (The same effect was seen in levels of aggression and spatial ability performance, while the opposite effect was found in verbal fluency.) This is backed up by anecdotes from trans men, if you want to read about what it feels like.

This isn’t the same as saying that men enjoy sex more than women. I suspect that’s like asking whether alcoholics enjoy a drink more than social drinkers do: “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word.

And, of course, it’s not that all men want sex more than all women. It’s two overlapping bell curves, in the same way that men are usually taller than women, but some women are taller than men.

More from this author

The latest front in the gender wars

By Tom Chivers

It also doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference is innate, although the transgender androgen response (if it’s real) sort of hints that it is. There may well be socialisation or cultural effects as well – there is some evidence, for instance, that certain fetishes are affected by how many siblings you have and how old they are. But many of the differences in sex drive are large effects, and most research these days finds that even major events like schooling and parenting have only a modest impact on other aspects of personality, so I would be surprised if socialisation is the only driver.

The thing is, we shouldn’t really be surprised. Men are the ones who commit sexual assaults and rapes, who pay for sex, who visit porn sites, who are found dead wearing stockings and suspenders with an orange in their mouth (deaths from autoerotic asphyxiation are overwhelmingly men).

You can explain this with complex hypotheses about how society is set up, or you can reach for the much simpler explanation, which is that men want sex, on average, more than women do.

And, of course, if it is innate, then that makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, because – as in almost all other sexually reproducing species – females have to invest much more in pregnancy and birth (and, often, childrearing) than males do.

Neither men’s nor women’s sex drives are right or wrong; they just are. And both the “women don’t want or enjoy sex” guys and the “actually women want sex just as much as men” lot are ignoring the evidence. There is wide and overlapping variation in how much women (and men) want sex; it’s just that, in men’s case, this variation is at the higher end of the spectrum.

All this makes Alyssa Milano’s plan rather more understandable. The average woman is more likely to be able to successfully stick to a sex strike (they are more willing to forego sex), and the average man is much more likely to give into it (they are more willing to make sacrifices for sexual pleasure). The Iroquois in 1600 knew this and so did the Kenyan women in 2009. I think it’s a bit of a weird idea – though I would say that, being a man – but you can’t deny the sex strike’s leverage.