A week after FBoy Island premiered on Binge, host Abbie Chatfield has opened up about “a pretty cooked and misogynistic question I keep being asked about my role” when it’s come to promoting the show.
See Also: Abbie Chatfield: Binge’s Fboy Island “flips the script” on women in dating
It’s pretty hard to offend me personally in an interview, but there’s a pretty cooked and misogynistic question I keep being asked about my role as host of #FboyIslandAu both privately and in press and I just want to address it once.
— Abbie Chatfield (@abbiechatfield) June 7, 2023
Writing on Twitter, Chatfield speaks about being asked Were you keen on/did you want to fuck any of the contestants?, Were you tempted?, and Did you use the show as your own way to meet guys? – stating that “The answer, clearly, is No.”
“It is my job to host the show. No part of me enters that arena expecting a romantic connection,” Chatfield continued. “I am there to work, to control what is happening on set, and to gain the trust of the contestants and try to make them comfortable, as I have been a contestant myself. Potential love interests isn’t even a thought that crosses my mind for a moment.”
After bringing up the power imbalances between herself and the FBoy Island contestants, Chatfield concluded that “I was not, and will never be so unprofessional to have even an iota of a thought that contestants on a dating show are anything close to a romantic interest. Please. Stop. Asking.”
The question is one that stretches across networks and shows, with Chatfield following up later on Instagram to say that she’d been contacted by Bachelor host Osher Gunsberg, confirming that he’d also been asked similar things in the early days of the Bachelor franchise.
In the 10-episode reality series, FBoy Island follows three Australian women, Molly O’Halloran, Sophie Blackley, and Ziara Rae as they navigate the dating pool together to uncover who are the self-proclaimed “nice guys” looking for love, and who are the self-proclaimed “FBoys” only there to play the game and take home the cash prize.