Heated Rivalry: It's not the sex, it's the safety

Are women using the gay hockey series to regulate our nervous systems?

I want to talk about Heated Rivalry.

As anyone who has spoken with me in the last month will attest, that’s pretty much all I want to talk about these days, and I have developed a remarkable ability to pivot any conversation to the hockey show—including a recent discussion I had with a fellow book group member about Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

I won’t pretend that my initial attraction to the series wasn’t the pleasure of extended exposure to two beautiful male bodies and, having spent time in the Soviet Union during what were formative years for me, I do love a man with a Russian accent and a dark and broody temperament. In other words, Ilya is catnip for me. But even he wouldn’t be enough to keep my ADHD mind from wandering.

No, what keeps me coming back are the power dynamics between the characters and how refreshingly different they are from those in relationships between men and women. Not only is there a level of equality between the two of them that doesn’t exist in heterosexual couples, but there is an absence of risk. Danger of one sort or another is inherent in most any male-female pairing.

The most obvious type is physical risk—“men are afraid that women will laugh at them while women are afraid men will kill them,” as Margaret Atwood famously said—but there are other, more subtle, forms of jeopardy as well. When watching a male-female couple start up a romance on screen or in literature, we generally do so with the latent fear that the man will leave her, cheat, or fail to communicate what he feels Those same issues don’t exist between Shane and Ilya. They are on equal footing.

That parity changes everything. In the first episode, when they hardly know one another, Ilya asks Shane for the number of his hotel room, and Shane gives it to him. If we had the identical exchange between a man and a woman, we’d either be entering into a pursuer-prey dynamic or one in which the woman appeared impulsive or reckless. What’s more, if a woman invited a man she’d just met into her hotel room, she’d be potentially at physical risk, but Shane and Ilya are similarly matched in terms of strength. Each can hold his own.

Ilya is initially the more assertive of the two, but once they’re in Shane’s hotel room, he is the more tender one, gently kissing Shane, and it’s Shane who goes straight for sex. Because their relationship is devoid of traditionally gendered roles, the power play between them is fluid. It can flip in an instant.

Given that my professional life currently has me spending nearly all day every day thinking about men using women’s bodies as objects of sexual gratification, the romance between Ilya and Shane has felt like an antidote. It is also an effective response to the debate that raged during the Pelicot trial, during which consent became a national conversation. The concept wasn’t explicit in French rape law and when lawmakers suggested it should be (it was eventually added), there was much wringing of hands and fretting that requiring consent would take all the sexiness out of sex. It’s a refrain I still hear.

I think Ilya has put that argument to rest once and for all. Never has a man been better about consent and rarely has a man been sexier. He asks for permission from the moment go and checks in with Shane regularly throughout their encounters to make sure he’s okay with what’s happening between them. Men everywhere should take note.

Heated Rivalry showcases the kind of masculinity that women crave. The men are powerful and assertive but also consistent, communicative, and emotionally intelligent. They express desire without making it about conquest.

Watching Heated Rivalry is the relief that we didn’t know we needed. I liken it to when I lived in Egypt. It was only when I took my kids to Amsterdam during a school break that I realized how on edge I had been in Cairo. I was in a constant but unconscious state of vigilance there that I only recognized in its absence.

Similarly, watching Heated Rivalry and realizing how soothing it felt heightened my awareness of the anxiety that exists just below the surface of relationships between men and women. There’s been a lot of speculation about why straight women are obsessed with the show. While the initial lure for me was most definitely the sex, it is the comfort it provides that makes me want to think about nothing else. I’d bet I’m not alone in that.

I don’t know if the equality that the characters share is possible in a heterosexual coupling. I’m not sure how many men are capable of simultaneously embodying deep masculinity and the level of tenderness and vulnerability that Ilya and Shane exhibit. I know a few heterosexual men who have that kind of confidence and strength—because, make no mistake, that’s what it is—but they are the exceptions.

In that sense, Heated Rivalry is aspirational. We, as women, want parity, we want respect, and we long for men who truly know how to give us that. Shane and Ilya show us what is possible when desire is rooted in equality.