Netflix’s newest reality dating show Too Hot to Handle has a premise that can best be described as “what if a chastity belt was also an ATM?” It’s a question that precious few of us have asked but, thankfully, a deranged visionary at the streaming service decided to live out loud. A group of avowedly horny singles from some of the corners of the world get treated to a month in an island paradise which they plan to colonize as Pound Town. In a dystopian twist, however, they discover they are not the first to arrive—Lana, an omniscient robot, has lured them there under false pretenses. The contestants stand to win $100,000 if they can spend a month working on themselves instead of putting in work on each other. But an infraction—kissing, sex, even masturbation—will cost the group money. It plays like an activity designed by a civics teacher who suddenly has to cover sex ed because of budget cuts or an episode of Glee where Santana and Quinn teach the gang about socialism. All of that seems very much up my alley, but I have one quibble: The prices the show attaches to various forms of hooking up are completely deranged and we need congressional oversight.
Here’s the current values on Pound Town Stock Exchange:
- Kissing: $3,000
- Oral sex: $6,000
- Intercourse: $20,000
First of all, $3,000 for kissing? In this economy! Who is regulating the kiss market, Hershey’s? To quote the great economists The Killers, “it was only a kiss, it was only a kiss!” Getting your bill from Lana like, “I just can’t look; it’s killing me!”
That’s just the price you pay! But should it be? The first question we have to ask is, is $3,000 the right price for a kiss? Too high? Too low? All of my kisses go by The Price Is Right rules and cost $1.00. It’s hard to quantify the kisses on Too Hot to Handle because the show does not seem to care about whether you enjoy the kiss or not or whether there’s tongue or not, both of which seem like very important details.
And what budget are we talking about here? It’s $3,000 of the total pot, even though the pot will be split evenly. So ::pulls out abacus:: if you’re splitting the original $100,000 and all penalties ten ways, each kiss only costs an individual $300. Is $300 a reasonable amount for a kiss? I don’t know; tell Kelz to swing by my place and I’ll do some research.
Jumping straight from kissing to oral sex, however, is absolute chaos. Chloe and David do a “Lady and the Tramp” on a chocolate-covered strawberry and they’re in the clear? I object. Finger-sucking is okay? In this climate?! That kind of behavior would definitely earn you a stern talking-to from a cool but actually pretty puritanical youth minister. The problem on this show is a crisis of scale.
Is oral sex twice as intense (or twice as naughty) as kissing? Can you just go around putting fingers in your mouth willy-nilly? I’d like to speak to the sex manager, actually. These acts of affection aren’t being priced out as an exchange of services between a client and a supplier. Instead the cost is determined and exacted by an unseen, all-knowing force. The result is the show seems to have less to say about the value of sex acts and instead is focusing on the cost. This isn’t TV’s first sex work reality show; it’s aspiring to be another in a long line of soul-work shows like Bad Girls Club, Catfish, and Iyanla Fix My Life. But it’s Iyanla Fix My Life with economic anxiety brought on by blowjobs.
Somehow, this makes it more relatable. First of all, anyone who has ever spent a hot summer pining after a friend at church camp can definitely understand the risk/reward debate the contestants go through every time they want to get some. But when you take out the actual money part, the situation the contestants find themselves in seems pretty common across the board. How many times do we have to do a quick bit of mental calculation before diving into something ill-advised? It’s the equation embedded in so many rom-coms—if I kiss my friend will it cost me our friendship?—but it’s widely applicable. If I let this random artist from steerage paint me like one of his French girls, will it cost me a spot on the lifeboats when they’re seated according to class? If I sleep with Becky with the Good Hair, will my extraordinarily talented wife make a career-defining album about it?
Of course, those terms are mostly about consequences, which on Too Hot to Handle seem a bit malleable. After losing the group $32,000, Harry and Francesca are able to win it back by spending one hands-free night together. Who is the Chief Financial Officer on this show, a sentient purity ring?! Is not doing anything worth $32,000? If that was the case, then college should have made me a millionaire. In the end, the show’s big idea seems to be that personal growth is more valuable than both sex and money. Which…sure. Sounds great. But tune into my new Netflix show next season, What If You Were a Rich Person Who Got to Make Out a Lot?