I cannot imagine having sex on a pool floatie.
I think it’s the vinyl of it all: the squeaking, the unevenness, the way that the plastic forcibly fuses to your skin. In my estimation, banging on a pool lounger is sandwiched between a water bed and gravel in my ranking of worst places to engage in coitus. And yet, on this season of Big Brother, two houseguests have done just that: they made sweet, sweet love on a pool floatie. And in a wilder twist, they’re hoping no one noticed.
I have long been a Big Brother viewer, though I fell off somewhere around 2013 during that one season where the houseguests got super racist (one contestant’s name was quite literally an anagram for Aryan). Then I picked the long-running reality show up again last season, when The Cookout–an alliance of six Black houseguests–banded together, made the final six, and crowned the series’ first ever Black winner. It was a poignant moment for the series, especially considering how few poignant moments come out of Big Brother.
But this year, we’ve meandered our way back to the middle. The season kicked off with a group of houseguests bullying one dark-skinned Black woman and then course corrected when this season’s outsiders formed an alliance against the house, which takes us to today: the era of pool-floatie sex.
The participants, Kyle Capener and Alyssa Snider, are 20-somethings who seem to have no wherewithal that they’re on a show that streams 24/7. He looks like he’s in real estate. She looks like she probably owns an Etsy shop. I refuse to look into it because, at some point, you have to draw boundaries with this show. The short of it is that after some light kissing, the couple decided to consummate their summer romance in the punishment room, of all places. Each season, the room has different themes. This year, players who are sentenced to sleep there must do so on pool floaties using towels as blankets.
Sleep, screw, what have you–Kyle and Alyssa made do with what they had. Obviously, Big Brother cut the feeds because ViacomCBS isn’t (yet) in the market of distributing found-footage porn. But Alyssa relayed the information to audiences when she immediately went and told another houseguest, asking him not to say anything—as if viewers didn’t just watch the confession in real time.
That’s what I can’t stop thinking about: not the towel-laden vinyl sex, per se, but rather the decision making involved and this desire for privacy.
To be clear, this isn’t the first time that a pair has had some kind of sexual intercourse in the Big Brother house. I’m also not trying to sex-shame anyone because; if two consenting adults want to have sex in a windowless room on a vibrantly colored inflatable butterfly, have at it. But I am curious what the deliberation process was like, especially considering that Alyssa and Kyle both seemed to want it kept secret.
Is this an issue that incredibly hot people have? When you can bounce a quarter off your own ass, do the rules of polite society simply feel beneath you? Does judgment fade when two 10s consider becoming one 20? Does only my skin stick to vinyl in that unpleasant way? Should I have eaten that entire pizza while watching Big Brother? My questions are endless.
But the most bananas question that I have is, “What were they expecting?” Because, in a recurring theme for this show, the sentiment from Kyle and Alyssa is as such: I hope there are no repercussions for what I just did on one of summer’s most popular television shows.
More seriously, Kyle has started literally voicing that concern to the cameras. The timing is convenient, considering that it’s also just a few days after he’s been skewered on social media for targeting players of color, consulting fellow white players because he’s worried that the people of color might band together to take them out (despite little evidence supporting that theory). That is a much more serious conversation for a different day.
Pool-floatie sex, however, is a perfect example for this conundrum of people doing egregious things on camera despite wanting privacy. Every summer, there’s a new kind of fuckery that emerges from Big Brother houseguests, despite seasons of cautionary tales that have come before them.
There are players who seem intent on playing the game, and then there are hardbodies who have a different agenda. Dare I say, these people look for ways to outdo houseguests of years’ passed. They see an inflatable watermelon in the corner, covered in an old beach towel, and they say, “This is my Camelot. There will never be another Camelot,” and they–I believe this is the medical term–take it to pound town.
Maybe the move here is just to own it. I don’t fault these people for finding pleasure in the confines of a reality show, but let’s not pretend like we didn’t know the consequences. I wouldn’t go to Olive Garden looking for a quesadilla, and I wouldn’t go on Big Brother looking for a moment to myself.
Much like God or Santa Claus, Big Brother is always watching. So why are people shocked when they end up on the naughty list?
