My WhatsApp groups have always been a safe haven for things you are not supposed to admit out loud. My girlfriends and I trade screenshots of ill-advised late-night texts and dissect dates in forensic detail.
But when Heated Rivalry first aired on TV last week, things shifted up a level.
It wasn’t just the fact that everyone was watching the show, it was the tone of the messages – the urgency, the slightly hysterical energy that comes when something presses on a nerve you did not even know was exposed.
‘Have you started it yet?’ ‘You need to get to episode three.’ ‘I am not OK.’
If you haven’t seen Heated Rivalry, it is about two elite male ice hockey players who loathe each other on the rink but are forced into constant close proximity and fall into a secret relationship which plays out in locker rooms, hotel corridors and long, slow moments of almost-touching.
It is not just about sex – although that is shown in gloriously unfiltered detail – it is also about longing. The kind which builds over years. And women have gone mad for it.
Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov and Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander in Heated Rivalry
One of my online followers, a married woman with a perfectly normal life, messaged me to confess that the show had stirred something she thought had gone quiet. ‘It’s the yearning,’ she wrote. ‘The glances, the slow build. It’s like a different side of me woke up.’
She’s not alone. Across the UK, bars and bookshops are hosting watch parties to allow women to collectively worship at this new altar.
But Heated Rivalry is not the only show where homoerotic scenes are stirring something in the female population.
On Sunday night, I was watching the new series of The Night Manager and noticed something curious. What should have been a straightforward love triangle between Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), Roxana Bolanos (Camila Morrone) and Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) felt strangely charged. There were flickers between the men that went beyond rivalry. Tension that had everything to do with something unspoken.
Wait, did Pine just grab Calva’s butt? Spoiler alert: he did. That was when it clicked. This was not just about one horny hockey show. This was about what women are quietly craving right now.
And it’s not the go-to storylines featuring heterosexual men that we have been seeing play out ad nauseam. The ones we’ve been told for years are what women want. You know how it goes: man pushes woman up against the wall for a heavy make-out session, then dramatically throws her onto the bed, where he ravishes her for a whole 30 seconds before she climaxes and looks at him as though he is a god.
Snore… boring… predictable.
While the likes of sex-heavy Game Of Thrones proved hugely popular for men, the violent overtones hardly proved titillating for women.
But it turns out that in male-on-male romance, the element of threat – that you are watching the kind of sex that you’ll be expected to replicate in your own bedroom – is removed. And so, only the fantasy remains.
When I later mentioned to my partner that I had started fantasising about two men, he looked genuinely unsettled, as if something he had assumed was stable had quietly shifted.
Yet, given that through the centuries it’s been accepted that men fantasise about lesbian sex, why the surprise that women are turned on by gay men, too?
Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), Roxana Bolanos (Camila Morrone) and Teddy Dos Santos) in The Night Manager
Men’s discomfort around this is part of why this cultural moment feels so loaded.
Because what women are gravitating towards now doesn’t look like their marriages, their dating lives – or the depictions of sex they were told was for them. It looks like men who ache; men who wait; men who risk emotional exposure; men who want.
So unusual is this on screen that we don’t care if these men are not straight. In Heated Rivalry, nobody is slammed against a wall and magically satisfied in 30 seconds. You see the under-current in the charged glances between Pine and Dos Santos in The Night Manager and the male-male romance being rhapsodised about by women on BookTok.
Such was the hype surrounding Casey McQuiston’s novel Red, White & Royal Blue, about a romance that develops between a British prince and a US President’s son, it was turned into a 2023 film.
Women are escaping into these stories not because they want something strange or transgressive, but because they want something emotionally alive.
Straight romance, as it is usually packaged, often mirrors women’s real lives a little too closely: emotionally unavailable men, uneven effort, sex that happens without much conversation, desire that feels rushed, transactional or vaguely disappointing.
It is no wonder the fantasy has moved somewhere else and is proving addictive.
Dare I say it, the taboo is becoming the turn-on.
This makes the success of shows like Heated Rivalry and the shifting tone of something as mainstream as The Night Manager feel less surprising and more inevitable.
If two fictional gay hockey players can display more emotional availability, foreplay and commitment than most men on dating apps, maybe women are not ‘confused’ about their desire. Maybe they are simply responding to a dating culture that has quietly failed them.
This shift makes some men uneasy. But it is not women rejecting heterosexual men. It is women rejecting emotional drought.
And until the real world catches up, they will keep finding their fantasies in hockey locker rooms. Bring on series two.
