Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
March 2001 – Temptation Island. It's not exactly a witty title for the six-week show that became the source for water cooler chatter, but it certainly spells out the entire idea plainly enough. The blockbuster TV miniseries on Fox took four real-life couples in "committed" relationships to an exotic resort island off the coast of Belize in the Caribbean Sea. Then producers separated them into two tiny knots of four men and four women, and plunked them down into the midst of 26 singles who had been chosen for their ability to tempt members of the opposite sex.
Great television or not, Temptation Island was popular television. It may wind up being the biggest "reality" television hit ever--perhaps eclipsing the previous champ crowned just this past summer, Survivor.
The show attracted plenty of criticism as a bore, a tease, "tacky," or a symptom of the decline of Western Civilization.
The fact of the matter is, Temptation Island is as much about where we've come from as a nation as it is about where we're going, and the same can be said concerning what the show reveals about the medium of television itself.
All about relationships?
Of course, the show doesn't occur in a vacuum, since it is classic Fox programming--sleaze by the bucketful. Promotions for the show took every pain to flash images of hard bodies in flimsy swimwear and as much sexual suggestiveness as possible.
On the January 24 episode, for example, the couples--sans their regular partners--all have had dates with some of the singles. While most of the couples have had fairly innocuous dates with their single counterparts, Fox made sure one date entailed the man and woman getting a massage and mud spa treatment while virtually naked.
Mandy, one of the women whose relationship is being tested while on the island, is shown later that night inside a hut with her date. They take turns licking various substances off one another's bodies. Later, Mandy's boyfriend Billy--staying on the other side of the island--is forced to watch the intimate scene on video. He's visibly shaken, and later gets angry. Soon, scenes from the next show are promoted, and Billy is shown retaliating by turning up the heat with some of the single women.
However, network executives insisted that the show was not about sex, but about "exploring the dynamics of serious relationships." That bit of hooey failed to explain why all the participants on Temptation Island were tested for sexually-transmitted diseases before being allowed into the 21st Century version of the Garden of Eden.
Nonstop network sex
Sleazy or not, Fox appeared to have a bona fide hit on its hands. For a debut episode, Temptation Island outscored last summer's blockbuster reality show Survivor, and clobbered everything else on television--including the hugely popular The West Wing (NBC) and the rejuvenated Spin City (ABC). According to USA Today, the viewership for the second installment grew 9% over the debut episode--from just over 16 million to 17.6 million. The age group tuning in the most was the one networks lust for: ages 18 to 34.
Whether the show's success is despite its obvious sexploitation or because of it, one thing is for sure: the claim that the show is not about sex should be taken with a grain of salt, since so much of what is on prime-time television has everything to do with sex. While Fox may be one of the worst when it comes to sexploitation television, it is not alone. Every one of the other networks--ABC, CBS, NBC, WB, and UPN--consistently fill their programming dance card with sex and illicit relationships, and nothing is represented as being outside the moral continuum.
Thus, we have a father who nonchalantly mentions to his family that he enjoys watching pornography on cable (Grounded for Life, Fox, 1/10/01); a grown man shamelessly watching a woman in the next building with binoculars, complete with a crude comment about the woman's physical form (Friends, NBC, 1/11/01); euphemisms for male genitals (Spin City, ABC, 1/17/01), female genitals (Will & Grace, NBC, 1/4/01), and masturbation (The Drew Carey Show, ABC, 1/17/01).
Permissiveness about sex is pervasive. In The Object of My Affection (ABC, 1/15/01), Nina is a counselor in a Brooklyn community center, and advises the teenage girls about sex. When one young lady asks if a girl should have sex with a guy who doesn't love her, Nina pitches the Hollywood party line: "If I have sex with a guy, I want him to be my friend. So let's start with, 'Do you like him?'"
The sexual adventurer is often a heroic figure. In James Bond films, for example, the 007 character is a womanizer who is as likely to end up having casual sex with beautiful women as he is to bring down the usual terrorist suspects. In Tomorrow Never Dies (CBS, 1/14/01), Bond even has sex with the wife of the bad guy--a woman with whom he'd carried on an illicit sexual relationship when she was single years before. As is typical for such fare, there are a host of suggestive comments and double entendres.
Who ARE these people?
Of course, network television represents the Tinseltown version of reality--including sexual realities. The participants on Temptation Island, however, are not professional actors or Hollywood hot shots. They didn't get paid for being on the show, and they were not competing to win a prize.
Instead, the couples risk losing their relationships with people they say they love, and are threatened with a very public humiliation should those relationships end due to a partner's decision to choose one of the single "tempters." The singles? Well, they end up either with nobody or they end up with someone else's somebody--while America watches them break up a "committed" relationship.
As Chuck Colson said in an article, "You have to wonder what kind of people would agree to this arrangement."
Unfortunately, the answer to the question, "Who are these people?" is troubling. The participants--all of whom appear to be in the age 25 to 34 range--are members of the generation that grew up in the highly sexualized TV landscape of the 1980s.
In fact, if one were to subtract about 15 years from the participants' ages, it would drop them right in front of the TV for shows like Kate and Allie, Who's the Boss?, Cagney and Lacey, and Heart of the City. Back then, AFA regularly blasted shows like these because of their permissive messages about sex among teens.
In a feature article about the issue for AFA Journal in 1987, for example, editor Randall Murphree said, "The networks' treatment of the theme amounts to no less than a campaign to legitimize sexual activity among teens and even preteens."
Is it any wonder that, with the media leading the charge, a decade or so later some of the kids who watched Kate and Allie would be gleefully sailing off to Temptation Island?
In fact, Murphree said the most troubling aspect of Temptation Island had nothing to do with the promise of sex between the participants, and everything to do with how the mainstream media had ignored the marital status of the participants.
"The show introduced four 'committed couples'--i.e., couples who it is implied live together and/or are having active, illicit sexual relations. In other words, none of them are married; thus, they obviously are not 'committed' in any real sense," he said. "So the strongest element of the series (the commitment of the couples) begins below the bar of morality."
In a commentary for USA Today, conservative media critic Michael Medved said the critics of Temptation Island "fail to emphasize the crucial distinction between holy matrimony and nonmarital romantic relationships--and thereby highlight our cultural confusion more clearly than any example of trash TV."
Lost by following their elders' lead
It is probably fair to say that parents worry most about their children's friends leading them down the wrong path. However, what may be even more tragic is that it is adults that are, for the most part, leading their children astray when it comes to sexual matters. If kids are sexually promiscuous, parents have only their own generation to blame.
After all, it is adults who market to kids, not only trash TV, but sex-laden movies, music, video games and the like. Adults are the ones who write, direct and produce the episodes of Friends and Spin City, and develop the ideas for new series like Temptation Island.
On NBC's Dateline (1/2/01), reporter Keith Morrison examined the growing casualness with which kids as young as junior high school are experimenting with sex. Fifteen-year-old Josh told Morrison that the cultural deck is stacked against even parents who clearly verbalize their disapproval of premarital sex.
"I don't think parents get the fact that they're...up against, like a whole army," young Josh said, adding, "Your parents are at home saying, 'OK, this is what you should do, I'm caring for you, I'm thinking about you, and what's best for you.' Then you have every person in the media saying, 'Sex is OK and you should do it.'"
Morrison found that kids were shocking their elders by taking their advice on sexuality, and uncovered disturbing evidence of widespread hedonism among young people. Tommy, also just 15 years old, said that for many kids in both junior and senior high school, sex "is just for fun--recreation."
So if the older generation produced the participants of Temptation Island, who knows what the Temptation Island generation will produce?
An off-handed comment from Mandy may have put it all in perspective. On the evening of the fifth day, while being carried to her hut by her date, Mandy looked back over the man's shoulder and said to the camera, "I'm in heaven right now, but tomorrow I'll be in hell."
Unfortunately, many of this generation may be going with her. 
