The TV hit has cracked open a rich seam of misogyny: romance is written off as a weird thing that women like, and the audience is dismissed as 'wine moms'
I've never heard anything more sexist in my life than the (mounting) reasons why women supposedly love the hit TV drama Heated Rivalry. Quick recap: if you're a woman, or even if you're not and don't yet love it: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) are two professional ice hockey players on rival teams. It matters that they're hockey players, beyond the athletic perfection of their "insanely oiled, slick bodies" (as my friend, Eve, who's 21, put it). And it matters that Rozanov is Russian, because the obstacles are real: he cannot be gay - think about the sponsorship, think about the fans, think about the oppressive patriarchal regime. Think about it for two seconds and this can not happen; and it achingly doesn't, and almost does, and does, then doesn't happen, over years.
Heated Rivalry dropped in Canada and the US at the end of November, and the fandom around it is so intense that Hollander and Williams have a compound nickname (HudCon). The actors are all over the late-night US TV shows; the clip of them presenting at the Golden Globes has been viewed more than a million times, and their most throwaway remark on social media blows up.
Although Eve isn't the only young woman to love the show, people don't mention how much gen Z women love it, since it's priced in that they'll watch anything (which in itself is quite sexist). The audience getting all the attention is heterosexual women in middle-to-late middle age - in the US, we're known as wine moms. One minute we love it because the men are "unthreatening"; the next, we prefer a love story without a woman in it so we don't feel jealous. One person - this wasn't on the internet, this was my actual friend - said Heated Rivalry was like porn without the sex (it's true that there's way more yearning than action), so there was nothing really there to detain gay men. Straight middle-aged women were just enjoying playing with our sexy man dolls, a bit like Lego.
Heated Rivalry discourse has cracked open a rich seam of contempt for women. We are simultaneously insatiably horny, yet somehow (at our age!) very frightened of sex; we objectify men - and this is disgusting - yet, at the same time, we don't understand bodies and prefer cake (or wine), which is also disgusting. We can't abide other women because they remind us how shit we look, and can only tap into desire in a fantasy world that doesn't have any of us in it. It's a shame, because I would prefer to enjoy this exquisite love story without a side order of virulent misogyny, but maybe it's refreshing when people say the quiet parts out loud.
If you knew your way around romance as a genre, which I didn't before, you would know that all those ideas were in the ether already. Jennifer Prokop, who hosts Fated Mates, the most-listened-to romance podcast in the US told me that the show is incredibly faithful to the books. "In terms of the beat-for-beat pacing, at every point where a decision had to be made, to me, it was prioritising what a romance would do rather than what a TV show would do." So there are long, aching periods during which Shane and Ilya don't see each other, and their lives outside Their Thing are curiously undrawn, unperformed, empty. "Their love is the world; it's almost like their lives don't exist except when they're with each other," Prokop says.
Romance is a strict formula: there must be obstacles, and it has to end happily ever after. It's written off as something fluffy and unserious, a weird thing that women like, whereas in fact it's often deeply serious and hegemonically challenging, which are the real-life weird things that women like. "The thing that keeps them from being together is the strong arm of the patriarchy," says Prokop. "They can't be together for the same exact reasons that people in Florida that are queer can't get access to the medicine that they need."
If the story kicks against a homophobia that has a new grip on politics, the sex is also radically countercultural. "Hollywood is the tastemaker when it comes to what's out there," says Prokop , "and the kind of sex that Hollywood is comfortable showing is violent misogyny and rape. There's nothing violent about the sex in this show."
Do women love Heated Rivalry because it's hot, because it's original, or because it will smash the patriarchy? Hard to say; we don't all think the same thing. But could we, as a holding position, agree that we love it not because we're worms, but because it's good?