Six Questions I Asked Myself While Watching ‘Too Hot to Handle’
My alternate title: attractive, horny people in paradise wearing fast fashion while not eating.
I stayed up till 2:00 am on a Friday watching season one of Too Hot to Handle in its entirety. I admitted this to my long-distance boyfriend, and he was genuinely surprised. My taste in television rarely includes reality TV, and I think the last time I watched something similar was when I watched MTV on Jersday (or Thursday) to get my dose of Jersey Shore before I went to the bar. Do I need to remind you these are unprecedented times?
If you didn’t watch the show, Too Hot to Handle is a Netflix-born reality show with two seasons so far. If I had to summarize, it’s a bunch of people hand-picked because they are hot (Instagram models abound) and hate commitment. The cast is stuck in a tropical paradise together for a month, and there’s a big cash prize involved, but if they default to any of their usual antics — sex, making out, heavy petting, masturbation — they lose money. The “goal,” and I use that term VERY loosely, is to get them to learn how to create deeper, more meaningful connections. Lana, a talking cone, tells them how much money they lose, makes them do workshops, and, of course, tries to sabotage them when things are going well. However, the whole sex-ban thing is saved as a surprise for all the contestants. They are not there because they want to learn how to be open to love and long-term relationships (if that was the case, they probably could’ve…you know…gone to therapy???) they are there because they love living no-string-attached, and they were promised the best summer of their lives. The show claims it’s all about self-improvement but removed the opt-in part of that process, probably for their own good.
Do I agree with the premise of this show? No. It feels shame-y. Does it make for Entertainment with a capital E? Yup.
Sex —and the forced abstinence from it—sells. So naturally, season three is coming in hot.
Are you ready to question the number of bathing suits you have in your wardrobe and the amount of sex you’ve been having lately?
While I watched season two, I wrote down six questions that I kept asking myself. Maybe they were the same things you wondered.
Question 1: Why are they always in swimwear?
Ok yeah, they’re in tropical places both seasons. I get that. I get that it’s about showing off their bodies and driving the desire for dry humping.
But the practical side of me that has gotten yeast infections from wearing a wet bathing suit for hours upon hours is like?????? Running around half-naked ain’t comfy, in my humble opinion. But then again, I don’t think many of the people on this show have to deal with chafing, so I’ll chalk it up to that.
Here’s my beef:
- They hardly ever get into the water from what we see, which is really such a shame considering how much fucking water (pools, the ocean, showers, general moistness) they have around them.
- Some cast members wear clothes, and others rarely do. So why the fuck is Chase wearing a shirt in his THTH show poster? What about the Jesus-looking dude in the first season? Make it make sense?????
Also, I know this isn’t an original critique of shows like this, but HOLY SHIT, they need to chill it on the fast fashion. I can literally feel the disposable polyblends made by factory workers through the TV.
Question 2: Should I be this horny?
The pandemic suplexed my sex drive, and I know I’m not alone. Global, widespread anxiety isn’t a libido enhancer. It’s about as much of a buzzkill as the talking cone from the show, Lana. Except depression isn’t on a producer-mandated mission to make me less emotionally unavailable.
Watching Too Hot to Handle was like getting motorboated with messaging about how being horny was reserved for happier, hotter people. Then I removed my face from the breasts of this show, took a gulp of fresh air and thought to myself: who is profiting off me feeling not sexy enough? Who is profiting off me thinking I’m not normal or sexual enough?
I answered my own question with a question. Classic.
The reality is that so many of us are experiencing exactly the opposite of hypersexuality right now, which is probably why Netflix made this show. According to Google, and my better judgment, the answer to this one is no.
Question 3: Do I want a boob job?
I don’t blame the people on the show—they are just a reflection of society’s insanely costly and time-consuming demands to be deemed attractive. The beauty standards we see on Instagram are classist (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg), and my higher brain KNOWS this. But the part of me that seriously considered spending my double-digit savings on a boob job in my early twenties sees cleavage and thinks about a happier, bigger boobed life.
I can’t imagine how many people Googled the cost of fillers, lash extensions, implants, teeth whitening, and more while watching this show. You know, just out of curiosity. They’re not just selling sex; they’re selling an image of what you need to look like to be desirable.
Question 4: Would the show still be the same if alcohol wasn’t involved?
Champagne is practically an extra cast member on Too Hot to Handle. As someone who used to get VERY synthetically horny after exactly two shots of Fireball, I know how this works. I also have the luxury of knowing the flip side since I haven’t had a drink in a few years. I feel like a lot of the confidence the cast shows could be attributed to the magic of alcohol, but that could also be me projecting my own experiences onto them (which I learned about in therapy, cheers to that!)
As someone who no longer drinks, I can’t help but notice stuff like this. I feel like many moments of the show that are playful or vulnerable feature a Moscow mule mug or glass of wine nearby. Spoiler alert: in season two, Nathan opens up to Larissa but does so between chugs of red wine. Yeah, they drink water during the day, and nobody seems to go off the rails (sadly, this isn’t Jersey Shore), but no date on the show is complete without alcohol. It’s hard to tell if it’s real or just props, but optically the tie between alcohol and sexuality/dating is there.
Question 5: We’re still making jokes about hot people being inherently dumb? Really?
Can we just…not? The narrator makes a big show of making some of the characters seem stupid, and I know it’s all supposed to be *banter* and in good fun, but that stereotype rubs me the wrong way. I mean, all stereotypes rub me the wrong way, but they make a big show of making Chloe in season one of THTH seem really dumb when in reality, she’s 20 YEARS OLD, Y’ALL. When I was 20, I knew…nothing. I was a fucking uncracked, unscrambled egg, and that had nothing to do with my intelligence or how hot I was. Life just hadn’t hit me against the pan yet.
Question 6: Why don’t we see them eat?!
Not once in the entirety of the show do we see the cast eating. Or discussing things like…oh I don’t know…poop? Despite living together in a communal living situation?
They’ll show us bums and ample underboob, but they draw the line at showing us hot people eating? Is that too close to home in terms of humanizing them? What the fuck?????
The pandemic has made me emotionally numb, so it was nice to feel something and write some sassy commentary. It also reminded me of how much I didn’t enjoy chasing sexy but emotionally stunted men. Thinking about that? Not so nice.
It’s a wildly interesting social experiment that weirdly tries to force people to go against their own deep-seated and self-destructive relationship habits in favour of going home with clout, money and a honey. Too Hot to Handle succeeded in making me question a lot of shit (and use Google a lot) and making me horny, and I’m not sure I can, or should, ask much more of this show.
Did I miss anything? Let me know.
