I was the only person in the room — or any room this past holiday season — who hadn’t seen the show yet and was trying to understand why everyone was losing their goddamn minds.
“Rebecca! How have you, of all people, not watched this show?”
As the slutty friend who has written at length about secret sex, female desire, and casual fucking, this is what usually happens when something culturally horny drops. It is one of the hazards of my professional life — similar to political correspondents who must prepare statements for every major news story. And while I knew that eventually I would watch the show and likely write about it, I felt annoyed by the hysteria in a way that made me not want to watch at all.
It didn’t occur to me until later that the sexual hunger emanating from the party was directly related to the starvation that had preceded it. These women — 40 and over, single, married, queer, straight, hot, interesting, perfect-no-notes — had all but given up on men. Women who had standards and / or expectations were sick of the whiplash of wanting something, attempting to get it, and then feeling disappointed. “I don’t even know if I’m attracted to men anymore,” one friend recently explained. “It’s been so long since a man could show up both physically and emotionally for me.”
Personally, I hadn’t so much “given up on men” as I had given up having expectations all together. Perhaps as a result, my low-key dating was also often on the down-low: while there were a few outliers, the majority of my experiences with men had been illicit. I preferred to keep my lovers secret, treating them as an escape from my life instead of a part of it. I wasn’t looking to fall in love and didn’t expect love in return. So much easier not to be disappointed when your bar is on the floor. To keep men on the sidelines. To say, that was fun, have a nice life, and mean it.
Now, though, my formerly man-averse friends were very into men again — fictional men, at least. One friend described Heated Rivalry as “watching hope in chiseled-man form delivered on a platter.” Which is what ultimately convinced me to hunker down and binge watch the first five episodes.
✦
One thing I need to make clear here is that I have always been turned on by man-on-man porn. I am a huge fan of dicks and the more of them involved in a sex scene, the merrier. My sexual fantasies usually involve me and a dozen men. At least. Which is honestly so embarrassing to admit because I mostly hate men. I mean, some of them are great. But finding a dozen great men at once is not possible, therefore by default I am admitting that my greatest fantasy is to be in a gang bang with mainly assholes.
Perhaps this is why Heated Rivalry did very little for me at first. The sex scenes were too vanilla. The men, too perfect. I am notoriously attracted to funny men who look like they’ve been through the ringer, which may explain why I didn’t particularly notice the slow emotional build of the two most handsome men who have ever lived. Like staring at one of those Magic Eye images and refusing to let my eyes relax in order to see the bigger picture.
In the group chat, I was the lone Heated Rivalry dissenter. An unapologetic hater. I was so nonplussed by the show I had an entire counterpoint essay formulating in my brain drafts.
And then…
I watched Episode 5.
For those who haven’t seen the show — and I assume if you’re reading this, you have — Episode 5 is not only the penultimate episode of the season but also the episode where whatever annoyance I felt towards the rabid fandom disappeared and I went running full speed into the mob.
I watched Scott Hunter win the Stanley Cup, realize he had no one to celebrate with on the ice, scan the crowd for his secret lover, Kip, and then motion for Kip to come down from there and join him.
I watched them kiss, music swelling in the background, and felt tears spring to my eyes. I wasn’t the only one feeling the power of the moment: Ilya, watching Scott and Kip kiss on live TV, instantly calls Shane and agrees to meet him for a previously-unimaginable weekend of romance.
Seeing their forbidden love represented publicly had clearly shifted something in the Hollanovs. And dammit, it had shifted something in me, too.
I’d been so busy feeling bored by the no-dicks-shown sex that I hadn’t even clocked the slow thaw of my frozen heart. Could it be that I was more interested in the love story than the illicit humping? When did that happen? And what did that mean about what I actually yearned for?
By Episode 6, I admitted to myself that if I was going to date again, it was going to be about more than just fucking. And so, after almost a year of taking a break from dating apps, I reinstalled two of them, matched with someone immediately, and projected my newly realized need for capital-L Love onto a person who was looking for “something casual.”
Spoiler alert: it ended as fast as it started. But it also solidified my new outlook on dating. Heated Rivalry had rewired something in my brain. I had spent the better part of the last handful of years telling myself more was too much but all of a sudden less felt like too little. The risk of falling in love no longer seemed as mortifying as cool-girling myself into believing that doomed situationships wouldn’t eventually make me feel numb and dumb.
True, I couldn’t exactly relate to being a closeted queer man forced to hide my whole self because of the blatant homophobia in men’s professional sports. I also couldn’t relate to referring to a mansion as a “cottage,” or to having a killer 6-pack. But I related to realizing that casual, sporadic, “secret” sex was no longer enough. Perhaps it was even okay to want equity, tenderness, care, and wanton sex from the same person. I had never allowed myself to acknowledge that I wanted those things, as opposed to the bare minimum — not even in fantasy.
And therein lies the power of Heated Rivalry. It is the antidote to modern dating malaise. To gendered inequity and settling for secrecy, situationships, and half-assed relationships that inevitably fall apart because of their lopsidedness. It is a show about the power not of sex, but of intimacy.
It suggests that love, in the end, is not something to be afraid of but the thing that makes us most brave. Horny, yes, but also brave.
And couldn’t we all use a little more bravery right now? I know I could.
Even if it’s from two fictional characters.
If Rebecca’s essay has you all 🥵 for 🏒, we’ve got you covered — or rather, you’ve got each other covered, based on the sheer quantity of HR fanfic proliferating online. Overwhelmed? Here’s a lil Reddit thread with some recs (including one where Shane and Ilya are…bodyswapping?? Human creativity knows no bounds!). And if you’re still aching for more, Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid offers up these scenes that didn’t make it into the show.
If you’re more interested in the 🍆 than the 🏒, check out Noel Alejandro, an independent filmmaker and alternative adult films director who aims to satisfy your emotional and erotic desires. In an interview with At Home, Alejandro says:
My films have a storyline, elaborated characters, and also bring together certain aesthetic and artistic values that, in general, adult cinema does not have. In my films, the actors have a reason to exist and coexist, and the sex scenes are natural and explicit. In short, I make pornographic films with a particular sensitiveness.
Hot tip: you can watch the trailers for free.
And if you’re more turned on by the look of that “cottage,” we recommend a different kind of porn. Who knows — maybe you’ll find a setting for your fanfic.
