Temptation Island: Pimps and whores

One contestant likened Fox's new reality show "Temptation Island" (Wednesday, 9:00 p.m.) to the Pepsi challenge, "with ladies instead of soft drinks."\nNow how can I add to insight like that? "Temptation Island" is indeed a show about four couples, each partner on a different side of an island, who get to sample 13 men and women before deciding if they want to stay with their significant others.\nGoethe championed such arrangements in his novel "Elected Affinities," in which he argued relationships such as marriage do not adequately represent love because they stifle humans' natural urges to break and reform bonds of intimacy.\nGoethe was also an overrated hack, and I'm against anything he's for. That's why I say "Temptation Island" is merely about pimps and whores.\nOK, I can't legally write or insinuate that the show's producers are pimps because a pimp offers sex for money, and I don't think the couples are paying Fox for services rendered. But I can say that the producers are acting like pimps: They researched the couple's preferences in the opposite sex to find single men and women to lead them astray.\nThat might be legal, but what's legal isn't always what's moral. \nMy oft-quoted source, "Deep Throat," agreed, adding that the show is, "The most vile and disgusting and exploitative piece of crap I've ever seen. And, I would like to (expletive that sounds like duck) the blonde."\nThat brings up my next point: The singles and the couples together are pseudo-whores. Both exist for the amusement of others.\nThese are not paid entertainers -- as far as I know, they're not paid -- who are trained to perform in front of an audience. These are people who merely satisfy our "primordial wish for pleasurable looking," as Laura Mulvey wrote in her essay dealing with how the audience gets erotic pleasure from watching movies.\nAs Mulvey would say, they are simply beautiful people, whom the audience subjects to a "controlling and curious gaze."\nIn the opening episode, the single men and women paraded themselves in front of the couples in a scene reminiscent of a slave auction. Worse yet, the two singles voted off the island by the couples were both black. Leave it to Fox to add just the right touch of racism and misogyny right before Martin Luther King Day.\nOne final thought: Ashley, a member of my television criticism class, adds that the show's premise "makes a mockery of relationships" because it is so far-fetched. Even though "Temptation Island" is billed as a reality show, how realistic is it that you'll find yourself one day on an island with 20 beautiful people picked specifically to accommodate your most erotic desires?\nI am reminded of the classic movie "Dr. Strangelove," when the the Doc suggests moving specimens of the population into mine shafts with a ratio of 10 females to every male to ensure procreation. Strangelove then agrees with one character that this arrangement will "necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship."\nFunny how life imitates art.