As another season of Love Island comes to an end, who better to get the tea from than alumna and prolific TikTok correspondent for the reality TV series, Olivia Attwood?
Since her time on the show, Olivia has forged a career delving into the tricky business of body image, a huge talking point for those who watch the show, from tweakment speculation to a lack of body type diversity on screen. Her first documentary, Price of Perfection, zoomed in on the many parts of our body that we feel pressured to change through surgery, thanks to elevated and unrealistic beauty standards. Most recently, her second docuseries Getting Filthy Rich takes a microscopic look at the sex work industry.
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Hard at work since she left the Villa back in 2017, Olivia also hosts an agony aunt podcast, So Wrong It's Right, has appeared on fellow reality TV darling Sophie Habboo's podcast to talk her own body image issues that she felt on her wedding day, and is also set to co-host a brand new radio show The Sunday Roast with fellow The Only Was Is Essex star Pete Wicks.
GLAMOUR tracked Olivia down to talk the biggest lessons she learned from Love Island, body hair pressures and the biggest problem with a saturated, competitive and extreme OnlyFans market and how it promotes violence against women and girls (VAWG). Spoiler: the problem is not Lily Phillips or Bonnie Blue.
Let’s talk about your first documentary, The Price of Perfection. What did you learn about female body image from doing the series?
Going into Price of Perfection, I felt like I was completely immersed into our aesthetics and cosmetic industry and I was just going to expand that knowledge. Many things shocked me, like the fact that our beauty industry in the UK is completely unregulated and we are seeing dangers like never before. So change is desperately needed. There's that side of it.
And I think the other side is just the sheer lengths that people can go to to alter their image and I think the starting point is what is natural has changed. Everyone has a different opinion of what is natural. Where does natural start? No roots, your hair all grown out and no lashes, no makeup, or is natural doing your highlights, having a bit of Botox?
I do think we have this kind of misogynistic way that we approach people that have had cosmetic surgery. I think we automatically talk down about people that do a lot of work. However we live in society that pressures people into that position where they feel they need to. So it's a very difficult, complicated subject to approach.
Women discuss insecurities about all elements of their bodies in The Price of Perfection. There’s an entire episode about vaginas. What do you think this says about beauty standards and body image?
The vagina episode I felt was really important for me personally. That was the episode where I learned the most because we are not a very nude country in the UK. Our sisters in Germany and other European countries, they have a much more open attitude to nudity. Young women especially get an idea of what the female body looks like a lot younger.
[In the UK] a lot of young people, the first representation they get of a naked body might be through pornography or another kind of image like that. And then they're wondering, is my body normal? Am I meant to look like this? What's wrong with me? That was an interesting realisation I had through meeting these women through these episodes, is that we quite often don't a very healthy starting point of knowing what is normal. And actually the answer is there isn't really a normal and everyone looks completely different – and that is okay.
Why do you think there's so much shame around body hair, especially pubic hair? And what did you learn about it while you were making these series?
It is a societal thing, isn't it? I do think we are seeing a bit of a hair revolution and women reclaiming their right to keep their body hair if they wish to. So I think that is great. I couldn't do it… But we should have the right to be able to do that. It shouldn't feel like something that people are doing just because they don't want to be shamed by someone else.
Do you think it is because of the male gaze and what men have been brought up seeing, that they come to expect it?
I think would lean back into a lot of people unfortunately being educated through pornography. And we know that the Hollywood wax and being completely hairless was a look that was perpetuated in a lot of porn films, especially during the early '90s when that started becoming fashionable. And then that spills into the rest of our culture and young men in particular thinking that's what every woman looks like or should look like, which is not a correct representation.
Your second docuseries Getting Filthy Rich looks at a whole different world for women. In the age of women like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips getting such prominence, what you think about what the sex work industry owes to young women in terms of safety?
I think the way the sex industry has revolutionised the way it now exists on our phone, and anyone can become an adult content creator with the click of a few buttons. Unfortunately, I don't think this is going anywhere. If anything, this industry is going to grow in terms of its accessibility. So I think the best thing we can do is educate as many young men and young women as we can on the dangers. There are dangers in the attractiveness of this job being pushed onto young women in particular being represented as a way to make easy money. And also we need to look at th people that are consuming it.
Pornography, adult content, the effect it has on the brain, development, dopamine, all of that, it's pretty serious. And again, porn addictions can ruin lives. So I think that we have a responsibility to try and educate and have that conversation as much as we possibly can.
I don't think people put enough focus on the people that are buying OnlyFans and the content. Because that is also a big conversation here that no one's really having. And when we talk about Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue, we are not really talking ever about the men that are standing in the queue. And to me that's a bigger problem.
And we know that we are living an epidemic of violence against women and we know that society feels even more divided than ever in its approach to strong, powerful females. And there has to be a connection to why those kinds of exhibitions and stunts are so attractive to some people. You wouldn't see women queueing around the block just to sleep with one dude. You just wouldn't.
Natasha quizzed newcomer Aimee on how well she knew The White Lotus Universe.
As you explored these dynamics further in your documentary series, did you find that sites like this were enforcing harmful stereotypes that may encourage violence against women?
What I did learn through speaking to so many different creators is the kind of content that one is the most popular and money wise. A lot of the girls did explain to me that there is a theme. There is a huge demand for content that reflects or impersonates violence against women or tones of the darker nature. And a lot of the girls find that a challenge, receiving those requests, reading them, emotionally dealing with them, and deciding where their line is and what they will and won't do.
And if you look at the stats of sites like Pornhub, the top-rated categories leave a lot to be concerned about, in my opinion. There's a line in the sand between kink and imagination and where that spills into real life. But I don't think we can ignore the fact that they do bleed into each other. Whether you like it or not, they do… I did a whole episode of BDSM and things can be carried out in a very safe, trusted. It's an agreement. It's a partnership. But there are examples where that doesn't go to plan and those stories are quite harrowing.
Did you find that ultimately sex work was empowering for the women that you met?
With the documentaries I've made, the women and men that I've interviewed, they are individuals who have found their power through sites like OnlyFans, where they can be in control of their content, they can decide what they put out, when they put out. So I think there are a lot of positives to be said for that. And the people that I've met feel that they have power over their own autonomy and monetising that as they wish. And as long as they're happy, I'm happy for them to live their lives the way they want to.
What lessons did you learn from Love Island that you've carried with you to future relationships?
I guess I could credit Love Island for highlighting that it's okay to just breathe before you speak. I think in that area of my life, I felt that confidence was something that was heard and seen. And to be a confident character, I needed to be the loudest one, need to have the strongest opinion. And actually as you get older you realise that confidence often whispers. It doesn't scream and shout and swear. I hope I would've learned that myself as I got older anyway. But Love Island is a great experiment for showing yourself on steroids, so to speak… It can be quite sobering to watch yourself back, sometimes in unflattering situations.
You grew up with both dyslexia and ADHD, and your ADHD was recognised after a bad breakup. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how you feel now in comparison?
Having any type of neurodiversity that isn't diagnosed can be a very isolating feeling because essentially you see people around you navigate daily tasks with ease and then you wonder ‘why is that so difficult for me?’
You have to find a sweet spot when you get diagnosis for something like ADHD. Because it is not a green light to be late, rude, irritable. It might be an explanation, somewhat of why your attention span is not great, but you have to then as an adult, do your best to manage that so you can be a peasant, functioning member of society.
I was meticulously neat as a child… Now we know that I would be your textbook example of a masking. So I was doing things to make my own life easy… Females do that because society will not tolerate us being messy... So we quickly learn the social cues of how to be tolerable.
When do you feel most empowered?
I feel most empowered in front of the camera… narcissist! When I'm making television, when I'm hosting, when I'm shooting my documentaries, that just feels so natural to me now. I feel like I'm in the space that I'm meant to be in. I feel that with each job that I am given, I'm ready for it. When the cameras go on, I feel confident and that I deserve to have that job. And it took a while to get there.
I think I dealt with a bit of imposter syndrome for a while, and now I'm coming into that stage where it's going away and I feel that I deserve to do what I'm doing.
