'Heated Rivalry forced me to ask myself a fundamental question. You're thinking it, too.'

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If you are a red-blooded woman and at least half as chronically online as I am, there is one show that has you in an absolute chokehold this month: Heated Rivalry.

Since landing on HBO Max locally, the six-part series based on the cult-classic book by Rachel Reid has shot into the top five scripted debuts on the platform — peaking at a staggering 95 times the demand of the average TV show.

It's effectively out-skating heavyweights such as Schitt's Creek to become the most-watched Canadian original in history.

Watch: Check out the official trailer for Heated Rivalry here. Post continues below.

Following the 'enemies-to-lovers' forbidden romance between two elite hockey legends — the hometown hero, captain Shane Hollander (played by breakout star Hudson Williams) and his bad boy counterpart, Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) — Heated Rivalry is a spicy, spicy romance with the undercurrent of an often-homophobic professional sports landscape.

It's high-stakes emotion and if *gestures widely* the entire internet is any indication, our obsession with the series shows no sign of abating. 

The book — a hit in its own right — captured imaginations, but it is the steamy, pitch-perfect onscreen portrayal that has us all feeling some kind of way. Shane and Ilya's chemistry feels like a physical weight. The tension. The forbidden nature. The INSANE bodies. All of it. 

The series has been embraced, celebrated and debated in the queer community for all kinds of reasons, but speaking as a reluctantly straight woman, I want to focus on why it's such a juggernaut for the female gaze, too. 

It turns out, we're all super into gay sex — whether we're gay or not — though this isn't as much of a surprise as it may seem.

Showrunner Jacob Tierney clearly understood the assignment. He told Toronto Life: "We deserve a queer show that is sexy and horny and fun!"

He had no interest in making a sanitised version of queer love as an educational piece for straight people, nor was he keen on the 'trauma porn' tropes of other queer stories.

Crucially though, he understood something about his baked-in female audience. He understood what they liked. In December, Tierney told the What Chaos! Podcast that there has been a counter-intuitive lack of interest in female pleasure when it comes to depicting sex onscreen, and that, ironically, by removing women from the scene entirely, we're suddenly more free to enjoy it.

The data don't lie.

In its 2023/2024 Year in Review, Pornhub noted that 35 percent of viewers for "Gay" content were women — a number that has been steadily climbing.

Out of the 16.5 million works on fanfic hub Archive of Our Own (AO3), M/M (male on male) remains the most popular category by a landslide — largely driven by female creators and readers.

But to cheapen Heated Rivalry to soft porn is to do it a great disservice — and given its incredible 99 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating — just plain wrong. 

Listen: A hockey drama has become the internet's new obsession...but, why? Post continues below.

So what else is driving the obsession? 

According to Naomi Fry's recent column in The New Yorker, it's what she calls the "plainspoken articulation of desire." She argues that because the attraction between Shane and Ilya is forbidden and played out through "violent physical checks on the ice," the eventual sexual release is more potent. 

In a guest post on the Sh*t You Should Care About Substack, Sacha Judd argues it's because of the absence of misogyny in its depiction.

"I'm tired of seeing women brutalised on screen," Sacha wrote. "I'm tired of shows about infidelity, dreadful husbands, stalkers, rapists, workplace harassers. The real world is exhausting. Give me an escape."

In other words, we're tired of having to see women done dirty in the course of consuming our culture. In Heated Rivalry, there's no Madonna/Whore complex for us to internalise. We can enjoy the sex without the baggage of our own crappy experiences with men. 

The question I'm asking myself.

So the one question all this begs might not be the one you're thinking. 

I'm not asking myself why I enjoy watching two men have sex on screen — as most women literate in their own desires will tell you, we're not often restrained by sexual orientation when it comes to what we enjoy watching.

No, the question is this: why has it taken this long for mainstream media to deliver women what they want — high-stakes, high-spice, equal-footed intimacy? And, erm, when can we expect some more? 

Because now that I've rewatched the series twice, I'm itching for a new fix.

Feature Image: HBO Max.