Last Sunday, I opened my Instagram and found myself perplexed at a clip of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani urging residents to spend their snowy evenings inside reading a horny gay hockey romance. “Heated Rivalry” is the only thing everyone seems to want to talk about these days. The critically acclaimed book series turned TV series has taken the internet by storm. Even my 50-year-old Indian mother (to my great embarrassment) fawns over the budding on-screen romance between actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.
At first glance, the obsession is easy to dismiss as another fleeting internet fixation — a glossy enemies-to-lovers fantasy packed with locker room tension and gratuitous sex scenes. But the scale and intensity of its appeal, particularly among straight women, suggests something more revealing is at work. The success of “Heated Rivalry” is not simply about sex or spectacle. It reflects a deeper cultural craving for intimacy without misogyny and romance without hierarchy.
Mainstream depictions of heterosexual romance remain stubbornly tethered to patriarchal power dynamics. Men pursue, women are pursued. Male desire propels the plot while female desire is framed as responsive, conditional or secondary. Sex is frequently depicted through a male-centric lens that privileges performance over pleasure and conquest over connection. These conventions do not just limit female characters — they flatten the emotional and erotic possibilities of romance itself.
Queer romance, especially between men, disrupts this familiar architecture. With no woman positioned as subordinate by default, the relationship can begin on more equal footing. In “Heated Rivalry,” Shane and Ilya are rivals, lovers and emotional equals. Their sexual encounters are marked by consent, negotiation and uncertainty rather than inevitability. Their romance unfolds through mutual yearning instead of dominance. For many women watching, that dynamic feels startlingly new.
There is also the appeal of male vulnerability. Watching two hypermasculine athletes express emotional need unsettles entrenched ideas about what masculinity is allowed to look like. Queer romance becomes one of the few spaces where male softness is not framed as weakness. For women accustomed to carrying the emotional labor of relationships, seeing men articulate longing, fear and dependence is not just compelling — it is deeply satisfying.
At the same time, the absence of women on screen can feel liberating rather than alienating. Without a female character to identify with, compete against or measure themselves by, straight women viewers are freed from self-surveillance. They are not asked to imagine how they would look, behave or perform in the relationship. Desire becomes something to observe rather than manage. Fantasy becomes playful rather than evaluative.
A growing counterargument insists that straight women’s fascination with gay male romance is not progressive but extractive. In this view, gay men become narrative instruments — vessels through which straight women can fantasize about equality without having to confront the structures that deny it to them in real life. The romance may appear radical, but the consumption of it leaves heterosexual power dynamics fundamentally unchanged.
There is also the risk of fetishization. When gay male relationships are framed as purer, safer or more emotionally evolved than heterosexual ones, they are stripped of their complexity. Conflict, harm and inequality do not disappear simply because women are absent. To present queer relationships as inherently egalitarian risks flattening queer lives into aesthetic objects — emotionally rich but politically hollow.
This idealization can produce unintended consequences. When real gay men fail to embody the emotional fluency or relational perfection promised onscreen, disappointment can curdle into discomfort or disillusionment. The fantasy demands a kind of performance. Gay men are expected to be expressive but never needy, vulnerable but never complicated, sexual but never threatening. In that sense, the gaze may shift, but it does not disappear.
There is also a quieter critique lurking beneath the surface. The popularity of gay male romance among straight women may reveal not just dissatisfaction with heterosexual relationships, but an inability to imagine desire outside a male-centric framework altogether. Lesbian narratives often struggle to attract the same mainstream enthusiasm, perhaps because they decenter men entirely. For many straight women socialized to understand love, security and even self-worth in relation to men, stories that exclude men can feel disorienting rather than freeing.
Still, dismissing women’s engagement with “Heated Rivalry” as mere fetishism feels too easy. It ignores the conditions that produced this hunger in the first place. Women are not flocking to gay romance because they wish to consume queer men as objects. They are responding to a media environment that consistently denies them depictions of mutual desire, emotional reciprocity and sex unburdened by dominance.
More importantly, “Heated Rivalry” has arrived during an intense political climate, when collective anxiety and polarization make genuine community feel increasingly difficult to sustain. In that context, the series has become a small but meaningful gathering point. I still think about my friends huddled around a tiny computer screen in the Bell-Young common room, spending their weekends engrossed in each episode, laughing and chatting, and theatrically gagging.
If “Heated Rivalry” functions as escapism, it is escapism with an indictment attached. It exposes the limits of heterosexual romance as it is currently imagined and marketed. The discomfort it generates says less about women’s desire to escape reality and more about how rarely reality offers them narratives of equality, vulnerability and shared power.
The fervent popularity of “Heated Rivalry” suggests that the real fantasy is not hockey players or forbidden love. It is intimacy without gendered hierarchy. And if the only place audiences can consistently find that right now is in stories where women are absent altogether, they will keep watching. They will keep yearning. And they will keep questioning why equality feels easier to imagine when men fall in love with each other.
Contact Samhita Krishnan at krishnan@oxy.edu
