Cluster

Reality TV in the Social Media Economy / The Fuckboy as Entrepreneur: FBoy Island’s Neoliberal Intimacy

By Théo Evans
FBoy Island. Photo: STXtelevision © 2023.

Dating show contestants have long accused each other of being there for “the wrong reasons.” On shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the apparent “right reason” for a contestant to participate is to search for love, to submit to the show’s “process” in hopes of forming a long-term monogamous commitment. Other motives, like fame, financial gain, or personal brand building, are seen as a betrayal of the show’s premise and of each other, leading to drama and heartbreak when contestants are suspected of harboring these duplicitous intentions. Such accusations point to an inherent tension of the genre: while dating shows are built on the promise of authenticity—a “pure love uncontaminated by capitalism”1—they are also, uncontroversially, carefully crafted commercial products.

The dating show FBoy Island, which premiered on HBO Max in 2021, functions as a tongue-in-cheek response to this tension, immediately doing away with the pretense that all its contestants are there for love. The show features three women searching for romance on a tropical island with twenty-four men to choose from. Twelve of the men are so-called “Nice Guys,” who claim they’re participating in the production to find a relationship, while twelve are covert “FBoys” (abbreviated from “fuckboys”), who admit they’re participating primarily for the chance to win a cash prize if they’re selected. In pursuit of this reward, the FBoys attempt to convince the women of their sincerity, posing as Nice Guys through flattery, performative vulnerability, and promises of commitment. Many of the contestants’ listed job titles, like “TikToker,” “Brand Ambassador,” or the amusing amalgamation “Child Care/Influencer,” suggest an additional economic motive for participation: an opportunity for them to increase their social media followings.2 The show makes little attempt to conceal these unromantic commercial intentions, instead using them as a source of comedy. Far from The Bachelor’s typically self-serious attitude toward the search for love it cultivates, FBoy Island treats the endeavor as absurd. Comedian host Nikki Glaser playfully skewers the men for their “manipulative douchebaggery,”3 while the show’s editing pokes fun at unfolding events—for instance, after one man shares he’s never been in a serious relationship, a siren sounds and the text “FBoy Alert” flashes onscreen.4

In this essay, I examine FBoy Island’s first season as an expression of anxieties around intimacy under neoliberalism. Consistent with Foucauldian accounts of neoliberal governmentality, I understand neoliberalism not only as a project of economic policy, but also as a rationality manifested in everyday practices and subjectivities, one that extends market logic to ever-increasing domains of human life.5 In this market framework, the individual is reconfigured in every endeavor as “homo œconomicus,” or an “entrepreneur of himself,” a competitive actor who aims to “produce” personal satisfaction through the labor of self-optimization.6 Scholarship on mediated intimacy has examined these logics in discourses around love and relationships, demonstrating how self-help and lifestyle media treat intimacy as yet another domain for hard work and self-discipline.7 Such media often calls on individuals to become “enterprising sexual subjects” who approach their intimate relations through a lens of scientific management and expertise.8 I argue that FBoy Island satirizes a neoliberal masculinity that approaches heterosexual intimacy as an entrepreneurial pursuit to be managed through strategy and skill. However, even as the FBoys are ridiculed, the show leaves little room for romance beyond their enterprising logic.

FBoy Island creator Elan Gale explains the show’s reference to the slang term “fuckboy” as part of an attempt to capture the culture of dating apps,9 which now mediate everyday experiences of dating and relationships through what is widely understood to be a market framework: daters brand themselves on their profiles and swipe through others as competing products, transforming intimacy into a game of strategy and self-optimization couched in economic terms like “value, capital, investment, worth.”10 It’s largely in this context that the fuckboy archetype has taken hold in popular discourse. While initially popularized in hip-hop as a broad insult for men who, in the words of rapper Killer Mike, “are always doing fuck shit,” the term is now often used to specifically describe insensitive womanizers who lead women on for sex or low-effort relationships.11 A viral Vanity Fair article suggests that dating apps encourage this behavior by transforming dating into an experience akin to online shopping, thus allowing fuckboys to treat women as interchangeable commodities.12

In part because of its exploration of this harmful form of masculinity, FBoy Island has been hailed by some pop culture commentators as “the most feminist dating show on TV.”13 The show parodies masculinity, often presenting its cast of self-proclaimed “alpha males” as domineering, overcompensating buffoons. Challenging reality TV tropes that portray women as “stupid or catty,” it also depicts the women working together in solidarity to evaluate men’s characters.14 At various points, they’re provided with information about their suitors to help them make more informed decisions, as in a segment termed the “Mansplain” in which eliminated men return to tell the women how the remaining contestants behave behind their backs.15 The women are thus allowed an unusually empowered role, while the men’s masculinity is deconstructed and satirized.

And yet, while the show condemns the FBoys for their marketized approach to intimacy, the logic of F-ness pervades the show. The supposedly empowered role granted to the women rests on a similarly enterprising logic: they too are encouraged to optimize their relationships through a marketized framework of personal brands. On FBoy Island, true love is achieved through enterprise, while any anxieties or insecurities that emerge under this neoliberal rationality are attributed to the actions of individual FBoy villains. Ultimately, though, this logic fails to sustain real connection.

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FBoys

In the first episode, contestants Sarah and Garrett share a romantic boat ride date in which they get to know each other over a bottle of champagne. Garrett presents Sarah with a flower bouquet, and she quickly seems smitten, describing him in a confessional interview as “a total gentleman.”16 As the two connect, Garrett opens up about his childhood, his family, and his fear of abandonment, expressing a vulnerability that Sarah explains helps her feel confident he could be a good partner. Then we cut to Garrett, alone in a confessional saying with a laugh, “With girls, when I open up to them, they’re like, ‘Oh, okay, he’s really willing to be, like, open.’ And all I’m really doing is trying to let you really open your legs to me.”17

Garrett is the first season’s primary villain, the self-proclaimed “king of the FBoys,”18 who, over the course of the season, manipulates Sarah through calculated romantic gestures and deceptive displays of emotion. Taking Garrett as the show’s archetypal FBoy can illuminate its construction of the category. With the job title “Bitcoin Investor,” Garrett fashions himself a successful entrepreneur engaged in a project of wealth accumulation.19 He speaks to Sarah about his relentless ambition, saying of the luxury villa at which the season is filmed, “I won’t settle until I have a couple of these houses.”20 His manipulation of Sarah is continuous with his ambitious self-optimization in other endeavors, as he instrumentalizes her for his own strategic advancement.

We could place Garrett within a broader popular fascination with “TV sociopaths,” characters like Don Draper of Mad Men or Tony of The Sopranos who, as Adam Kotsko describes them, “[relate] to social norms as tools.”21 While these characters are antisocial in that they have little interest in helping or relating to others, they rely on an understanding of social norms in order to exploit them—Garrett uses his charm and understanding of interpersonal dynamics not for a true romantic connection, but to win. Kotsko argues that our cultural interest in these archetypal sociopaths is a reaction to the realities of contemporary capitalism at a time when many feel that only the amoral succeed. In this framing, these characters are not so much transgressing social expectations as embodying what it takes to get ahead in an unfair system; even as they engage in immoral acts, they are on some level appealing as figures who manage to assert control over their lives.22 As depicted in FBoy Island, the FBoys are hardly aspirational, with their tendencies towards hypermasculine bravado and manipulative womanizing routinely mocked by host Nikki. Even so, Garrett’s embodiment of the FBoy parallels a media model of masculinity that does construct itself as aspirational: the pickup artist.

Brought to prominence by the self-help book The Game and the reality show The Pickup Artist, pickup artist “gurus” are men who, through media or courses, claim to teach other straight men how to seduce or “pick up” women using calculated social techniques known as “game,” which often involve practices of manipulation and deceit. In manipulating Sarah, Garrett acts as a pickup artist, treating their relationship as a site for strategic maneuvering. Several other FBoys use terminology popularized by pickup artist media, such as when one FBoy criticizes a Nice Guy because he “has no game.”23 Rachel O’Neill positions the logic of pickup as continuous with the neoliberal attitudes expressed in mainstream self-help and lifestyle media that treat intimacy as an entrepreneurial project to be managed through technique and expertise.24 By drawing on this logic, pickup offers adherents a meritocratic narrative that, using game, they “can achieve greater choice and control over their intimate and sexual lives.”25

Theorizing the relationship between masculinity and neoliberalism, Steve Garlick understands contemporary masculinities as technologies of management through which men deal with the insecurities produced by capitalist markets, providing a promise of control amidst precarity and uncertainty.26 Garrett’s motivations can be understood in this way as an attempt to assert confidence and security, to achieve a sense of “masculine self-worth” in which his pursuit of intimacy is used “as a means of testing skills, measuring improvement.”27 In casting footage revealed throughout the season, he boasts about his past sexual experiences—“I love threesomes, I love foursomes, fivesomes, multiple girls”28—presenting them through a logic of accumulation in which each serves as proof of his intimate abilities and bolsters his masculine worth. FBoy Island formalizes such efforts to assert skill and self-discipline within a competitive structure. Garrett’s motivation for pursuing Sarah is clearly not romance or intimacy, and he insists that it’s also not primarily money—instead, he’s motivated by a desire to demonstrate his ability to succeed in a competitive environment. As he explains, “I came here to win, and at the end of the day, I’m gonna do whatever it takes to win.”29

Of course, this project of masculine self-creation heavily depends on others. Garrett’s manipulative tactics rely on him adopting what some have identified as an “antisocial sociability” towards Sarah, treating her and their relationship as social capital to enhance his own masculine value, a processes that instrumentalizes and objectifies her.30 The FBoys’ relationships with women are often less about the women themselves than about homosocial rivalries with other men, exemplified when Garrett says in his casting footage, “There’s no way some dorky guy can fuck a girl as good as I can fuck a girl.”31 Using intimacy with women to signal “skill,” he asserts himself as a competitive player in a game between men.

Even within the show, though, the distinction between FBoys and Nice Guys is tenuous. Not every FBoy is as outright manipulative as Garrett, with many of their narratives showing them developing sincere romantic interests in the women. Moreover, many Nice Guys share a swaggering, competitive masculinity; they too have strong entrepreneurial ambitions, and they too instrumentalize and objectify women for homosocial competition—one supposed Nice Guy boasts about his sexual relationship with one of the women, asking another man she’s been dating, “How’s my dick taste?”32 As defined by the mechanics of the show, the distinction between FBoy and Nice Guy has little to do with masculinity or misogyny, but is instead based primarily on their motivations for participating in the production: Nice Guys are looking for love, while FBoys are there for the cash prize. Given that Nice Guys also have the opportunity to win a cash prize, the difference is little more than stated intent.

Even so, this classification of FBoys based on their prioritization of money over love brings a class dimension to the show’s taxonomy of men—on some level, financial need is cause for suspicion. We see this dynamic at play between two men competing for the same woman. The first, Nice Guy Fernando, is a chiropractor who asserts himself as a paragon of masculine success: “I’m a 6 foot, 225 pound man, I’m a doctor with two offices, and I’m about to be an Olympian.”33 The second, FBoy Jared, is a fitness influencer pursuing a kind of freelance social media career that for many is unstable and precarious.34 In one scene, Fernando uses this contrast to claim he would make a better partner than Jared, remarking, “He needs the money, and that’s the difference between him and I.”35 The comparison positions Jared’s financial need as a personal failing and an issue of character, echoing prosperity theologies within capitalist ideology that treat wealth as indicating virtue and poverty as indicating sin. Jared’s financial need apparently renders him suspicious, a man who is likely manipulative and self-interested, while Fernando’s financial security allows him the unquestioned status of “Nice Guy.” Not all FBoys are characterized by financial need, however: Garrett elevates himself above his competitors by insisting, “I don’t need the money like you guys.”36 The prize in this logic is treated as largely symbolic, a game piece without material consequence. An enterprising subject must pursue it but cannot want it. To be in a position in which it holds real meaning is already an indication of failure.

Despite these ambiguities in the distinction between FBoy and Nice Guy, the show’s comedic embellishments imbue the categories with an almost religious quality: upon elimination, the men face their judgment, revealed as either Nice Guy or FBoy, after which Nice Guys go to the Nice Guy Grotto, a heavenly paradise filled with fruit and piña coladas, while FBoys are sent to repent in Limbro, supposedly a miserable open-air camp where they sleep on cots and persist only off of coconuts.37 In casting the FBoys as villains, the show suggests that the anxieties they represent of a cold, instrumentalizing approach to intimacy are merely the sins of these individual men. However, the neoliberal rationalities FBoys draw on are more pervasive: in fact, they structure the show as a whole. Garrett’s use of “game,” the marker of his F-ness, is mirrored by the show’s own format: FBoy Island is quite literally a game—it’s a competition with a cash prize on the line, and everyone is trying to win.

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F-ness

In the third episode, an eliminated Nice Guy warns Sarah that FBoy Garrett has a girlfriend back home. Grappling with the possibility that Garrett has been deceiving Sarah, another woman, CJ, becomes frustrated with her primary love interest FBoy Casey, who is close friends with Garrett and continues to defend him. At one level, CJ’s frustration with Casey is an expression of solidarity with Sarah, as she criticizes him for his willingness to overlook a friend’s manipulative behavior. Curiously, though, CJ frames the conflict through a gamified logic of strategy, explaining in a confessional, “If he wants to be taken seriously in this competition, Casey should distance himself from people who are not doing well at the competition. Winners win.”38 With this characterization, CJ depersonalizes the conflict, transforming it from a personal betrayal to a competitive error. CJ asks Casey to apply a detached, strategic rationality to his friendship. She implores him, in a way, to be an F-Friend—to instrumentalize his friend for strategic gain. Of course, we don’t have access to CJ’s full feelings about the matter, but by design, FBoy Island treats the development of its relationships as a horse race. The contestants are playing a game, and the progression of their relationships is framed to the audience as such: relationship turmoil means the men are falling behind competitively, while romantic connection reflects competitive advancement. Far from exclusive to the FBoys, this competitive, individualistic attitude is fostered and rewarded by the mechanics of the show.

The “right reasons” to search for love, those free of market influence, are scarcely to be found on FBoy Island. Like many of the FBoys, the women themselves likely hope to build online followings by appearing on the show, with job titles including “Content Creator” and “Social Media Manager”—as Sarah explains in the first episode, she dreams to one day “have [her] own brand.”39 As with the other contestants, her appearance on a reality TV show is continuous with that labor of self-branding.

In an analysis of The Bachelorette, Rachel Dubrofsky demonstrates how the series expresses a postfeminist ideology, characterizing the production as a “redemptive therapeutic space” in which women learn to prioritize romantic love over their careers.40 Romance and work are placed in tension, as the series demands that women overcome their professional ambitions in order to fully open themselves up to intimacy. To some extent, FBoy Island challenges those genre tropes. The women talk freely about their entrepreneurial ambitions with no expectation that they change for love—instead, it is the men who are called on to change their FBoy ways. Importantly, though, the show’s encouragement of the women’s professional pursuits takes a particular form: FBoy Island resolves the tension between love and career not by deprioritizing romance, nor by suggesting that the women “have it all,” but rather by rendering the women’s search for love and their entrepreneurial self-branding one and the same, allowing them to incorporate their relationships into their brand strategy.

The main activity in one episode is a photoshoot segment in which men and women pair up to be photographed together on the beach. In the process, according to host Nikki, the couples will be “exploring [their] relationships and [their] chemistry.”41 Of course, with a cast largely composed of aspiring influencers, the photoshoot also serves as an opportunity for the couples to explore their brand potential. The pictures are positioned less as personal mementos than as media products: Nikki refers to the men collectively as “models,” while the contestants discuss their intentions to create “a Sports Illustrated look on the beach” or a photograph that “could be on the cover of a romance novel.”42 Simultaneously, the contestants share Nikki’s trust in photography as a tool of relationship exploration, with one woman saying, “I’m really excited to see who I have the most chemistry with and who I would look really good with.”43 Romantic compatibility, then, is defined by the couples’ ability to package themselves together as a product.

While FBoy Garrett pursues an enterprising intimacy through dishonesty and deceit, the intimacy modeled in the photoshoot positions enterprise as a tool for authenticity. This is consistent with the “labor of authenticity” widespread in social media work, which typically revolves around “capitalizing on social interaction and making it a domain of profit.”44 In this framework, self-branding is not opposed to authenticity, but is precisely the means through which authenticity is accessed.45 In her analysis of this dynamic, Sarah Banet-Weiser defines brands as being about relationships: “building a brand is about building an affective, authentic relationship with a consumer—on the accumulation of memories, emotions, personal narratives, and expectations.”46 FBoy Island reflects an extension of that logic in which brands build relationships not only between products and consumers but interpersonally between people, whose romantic connections are configured as an affective “accumulation” of experiences and images.

Halfway through the season, each man is required to reveal to the women whether they came to the show as a Nice Guy or an FBoy. Immediately after this twist, the women have an opportunity to look at the men’s Instagram profiles to sleuth for more information about their true characters. Again, the segment mediates their relationships through images of the contestants as brands. As the women remark on the men’s follower counts, we see them scroll through various career-oriented Instagram posts: fitness content, pictures from photoshoots, and a brand partnership with an energy drink.47 Narratively, this scene represents the women discovering the men’s “true selves” following the reveal of their statuses; their sleuthing is intercut with an FBoy remarking on how freeing it feels that he can finally be honest. In that narrative context, the men’s entrepreneurial brands become tools for revealing the self, their mediated content allowing an authenticity they lack in the flesh. There’s a voyeuristic intimacy as the women scroll through photos, seeing shirtless selfies and workout pics; the men, not present, are made vulnerable to their scrutinous gaze. For the contestants to see each other truly, they must see each other as products.

Late in the season, CJ learns that FBoy Casey had disparagingly referred to her as a “glorified escort.”48 In addition to misogynistically shaming CJ for her sexuality, Casey’s remark is essentially an accusation of bringing relations he feels should be private and intimate into the market, suggesting a kind of inauthenticity in the willingness to perform intimacy for enterprising ends. CJ points out the hypocrisy of an FBoy attempting to denigrate her in this way, remarking, “So there’s something wrong with being an escort, but you guys can eff us to get money?”49 Indeed, in the context of FBoy Island, the insult is almost incoherent: with all social relations configured through a market framework, intimacy can only be achieved through enterprise.

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The F-Choice

In the finale, the mechanics of the cash prize are finally revealed. If the women choose a Nice Guy, they’ll split the money fifty-fifty. If they choose an FBoy, the FBoy can decide to either continue the relationship and split the money or end the relationship to keep it all for himself. This game mechanic calls on the women to factor financial considerations into their final decision, potentially to choose a man they feel less strongly for in order to guarantee a financial reward. Two of the choices go smoothly: one woman chooses a Nice Guy, the other a “reformed” FBoy who opts to split the prize. Sarah, however, chooses FBoy Garrett, who dumps her and takes the prize for himself. In a final twist, host Nikki reveals that Garrett won’t actually receive the prize, explaining, “I don’t really think FBoys should be rewarded in the end.”50 Instead, the money goes to a charity of Sarah’s choice.

While Garrett is punished for his insincerity, it’s notable that Sarah doesn’t receive the prize either. As a viewer, it’s easy to blame her for her misfortune. We see Garrett’s manipulations throughout the season, made obvious through editing and confessionals, while Nice Guy Josh, who Sarah turns down, is reliably kind and compassionate. The final choice positions Sarah as empowered, afforded autonomy to decide between FBoy and Nice Guy. In choosing “wrong,” she is thus a “self-created victim,” freely making the decision that results in her suffering.51 Host Nikki takes some pity on her, allowing her a charitable donation, but her “irrational” choice cannot be rewarded: she is held responsible for her susceptibility to manipulation, receiving no prize for herself. This understanding of Sarah’s decision as a personal failure essentially asks her to be an FGirl, suggesting she ought to have continued a relationship with Nice Guy Josh for financial gain rather than sincere romantic intent.

Sarah’s choice ruptures the illusion of entrepreneurial intimacy. While FBoy Island’s emphasis on branding suggests a version of “true love” that treats enterprise and authenticity as one and the same, for Sarah, the two are incompatible—she cannot make both an optimal decision and an authentic one. Curiously, by the game’s reward system, Garrett and Sarah are both losers, but seemingly for opposite reasons: Garrett loses because of his selfish enterprising, while Sarah loses because she followed her heart. Neither can win under the game’s logic, as the show fosters an enterprising attitude towards intimacy while villainizing the FBoys who make it visible. Both must be punished for failing to make love and enterprise align.

During the season, FBoys Garrett and Casey remained close friends. Their bromance is perhaps the most developed relationship in the show—the two gush over each other in confessionals, with Garrett eventually asking Casey to move in with him in Los Angeles in a scene scored by soaring, romantic pop music.52 In the final moments of the show, though, an end card informs us, “Without the $100,000, Garrett was unable to sponsor Casey’s move to Los Angeles. Sadly, the two FBoys haven’t seen each other since.”53 On one level, this provides a final note of punishment, allowing viewers some pleasure in seeing the villainous duo separated and puncturing Garrett’s presentation of himself as free from financial need. But the coda is also something of a tragedy, as the show’s most meaningful connection, a friendship that had appeared resistant to strategic or market pressures, is ended by financial limitations. The promises of mediated intimacy—that labor, strategy, and self-discipline can allow one control over their interpersonal relationships—fall flat. Even the FBoys, optimizing for their own self-interest, fail to achieve the relationship they want.

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Endnotes

  1. Jane Feuer, “The Making of the Bachelor Nation: Reality TV and Layered Identification,” Critical Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2018): 59.
  2. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 1, “FBoys Rush In,” directed by Michael Shea, aired July 29, 2021, The CW, 05:06; FBoy Island, season 1, episode 2, “You’ve Got Male,” directed by Michael Shea, aired July 29, 2021, 05:46; “FBoys Rush In,” 03:35.
  3. “FBoys Rush In,” 00:14.
  4. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 3, “Sex, Lies, and Selfies,” directed by Michael Shea, aired July 29, 2021, The CW, 17:35.
  5. See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 10.
  6. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226.
  7. See Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey, Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).
  8. Laura Harvey and Rosalind Gill, “The Sex Inspectors: Self-Help, Makeover, and Mediated Sex,” in The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, ed. Karen Ross (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012): 488.
  9. Kylie Cheung, “How Does a Show Called ‘FBoy Island’ Get Made? The Show’s Creator Spills the Tea,” Salon, August 3, 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/08/03/fboy-island-hbo-max-elan-gale.
  10. Barker, Gill, and Harvey, Mediated Intimacy, 9.
  11. Jacob Brogan, “What is the F–kboy?,” Slate, August 18, 2015, https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/what-does-fuckboy-mean.html.
  12. Nancy Jo Sales, “Tinder Is the Night,” Vanity Fair, September 2015, 245.
  13. Samantha Bergeson, “Why FBoy Island Just Might be the Most Feminist Dating Show on TV,” E! News, August 13, 2021, https://eonline.com/news/1298106.
  14. Judy Berman and Eliana Dockterman, “Two Feminists Who Love Reality TV Wrap Their Minds Around the FBoy Island Finale,” TIME, August 13, 2021, https://time.com/6090129/fboy-island-finale.
  15. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 9, “50 Shades of Nice,” directed by Michael Shea, aired August 12, 2021, The CW.
  16. “FBoys Rush In,” 34:24.
  17. “FBoys Rush In,” 35:40.
  18. “FBoys Rush In,” 04:01.
  19. “FBoys Rush In,” 03:59.
  20. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 5, “There’s Something About Nakia,” directed by Michael Shea, aired August 5, 2021, The CW, 29:22.
  21. Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television (Alresford: Zero Books, 2012), 15.
  22. Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths, 7.
  23. “FBoys Rush In,” 26:22.
  24. Rachel O’Neill, “The Work of Seduction: Intimacy and Subjectivity in the London ‘Seduction Community,’” Sociological Research Online20, no. 4 (2015): para. 2.1, https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.3744
  25. O’Neill, “The Work of Seduction,” para. 4.1.
  26. Steve Garlick, “The Nature of Markets: On the Affinity Between Masculinity and (Neo)liberalism,” Journal of Cultural Economy 13, no. 5: 554.
  27. Rachel O’Neill, Seduction: Men, Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 154.
  28. “There’s Something About Nakia,” 46:02.
  29. “You’ve Got Male,” 30:57.
  30. Jack Bratich and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism,” International Journal of Communication 13 (2019), 5012.
  31. “There’s Something About Nakia,” 46:06.
  32. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 10, “FBoy, FBye?,” directed by Michael Shea, aired August 12, 2021, The CW, 28:07.
  33. “50 Shades of Nice,” 15:53.
  34. Sarah Felbin, “Meet HBO Max’s ‘FBoy Island’ Season 1 Cast—and Follow Them on Instagram Before the Premiere,” Women’s Health, August 9, 2021, https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/g37047734/fboy-island-cast-season-1-2021.
  35. “50 Shades of Nice,” 38:33.
  36. “50 Shades of Nice,” 03:44.
  37. This religious iconography invoking heaven and hell resonates with Kotsko’s account of neoliberalism as “demonizing” in how it directs blame for social problems onto individuals. See Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
  38. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 4, “Sleepless in the Villa,” directed by Michael Shea, aired August 5, 2021, The CW, 10:56.
  39. “FBoys Rush In,” 07:14, 06:34, 33:24.
  40. Rachel Dubrofsky, “The Bachelorette’s Postfeminist Therapy: Transforming Women for Love,” in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 193.
  41. “Sex, Lies, and Selfies,” 04:22.
  42.  “Sex, Lies, and Selfies,” 04:38, 10:35, 11:05.
  43. “Sex, Lies, and Selfies,” 04:31.
  44. Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Gender, Social Media, and the Labor of Authenticity,” American Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2021): 143.
  45. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University, 2012), 59.
  46. Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, 8.
  47. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 6, “How Sarah Got Her Groove Back,” directed by Michael Shea, aired August 5, 2021, The CW, 06:50.
  48. “50 Shades of Nice,” 6:28.
  49. “50 Shades of Nice,” 07:56.
  50. “FBoy, FBye?,” 58:44.
  51. See Laurie Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself’: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray (New York: New York University, 2009), 235.
  52. FBoy Island, season 1, episode 8, “True Bromance,” directed by Michael Shea, aired August 12, 2021, The CW, 28:44.
  53. “FBoy, FBye?,” 1:03:00.

  • Théo Evans

    Théo Evans is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. His current research interests focus on logics of experimentation and surveillance in reality media. He also creates video essays analyzing contemporary culture for his YouTube channel.