Yearning and Submission in ‘Heated Rivalry’

Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams as Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander in ‘Heated Rivalry’

I saw Hudson Williams say in an interview that he wanted to make Shane a hungry, scrappy, whimpering coyote. And like, okay freak—but also, yeah. Totally.

We often equate bottoming with submission, which is patriarchy and homophobia saying that to be penetrated is to be powerless (see, I didn’t get my degree in think pieces and alliteration for nothing). But there’s a clear power dynamic to Shane crawling naked across the bed murmuring, “I need you,” while Ilya stands there clothed, and to Shane’s head falling onto Ilya’s chest at the awards ceremony, and to Shane falling onto his knees at basically every opportunity. To him standing on the dance floor watching Ilya taunt him by dancing with someone else. To him saying, “Please, fuck me.” What I’m getting at here along with the sex is the yearning, and the power dynamic of the yearning. 

A lot of women who fuck men—and whose interest in men fucking is still, to some, an inscrutable mystery—want to see a man be submissive. And yearning is a kind of submission. It’s an admission of vulnerability: If you yearn for someone, they have power over you. And a lot of women want that power. But a lot of women have also been steeped in so much gender role bullshit that submission in a straight context is fraught. To submit can make a man seem inappropriately feminine, and to elicit that behavior can make women feel and be treated as inappropriately hypersexual (think Yasmin and her loser boyfriend in season one of ‘Industry’), or as masculine. In a culture of strict gender roles and associations and expectations, that creates shame and panic and shutdown. It’s a turn off, or an embarrassment, or that thing where you’re super into him until he’s too into you, and then you get a nauseous feeling that you hastily shove into a box labeled simply, “The Ick.” 

And then, of course, plenty of women want to yearn. Plenty of women want to be submissive. But they don’t want to yearn for or submit to a man—as a woman. I’ve seen this talked about as it relates to safety, which is a very good point. 

But I think it’s also because submission, for women, comes prepackaged with certain aesthetics and ideas. Nicole Kidman being carried around to “Father Figure,” and Sabrina Carpenter being pulled by her hair, and Sydney Sweeney in season two of ‘Euphoria’ begging Jacob Elordi to pick her clothes out for her. Tradwife influencers making cocoa puffs from scratch because their husbands had a craving, and the government pushing cycle tracking while smearing hormonal birth control (seriously, if you feel better off ortho I am so happy for you but please also know that “use social media to spread negative sentiment about the pill” is in Project 2025). 

I’m not saying any of these examples are inherently bad as either media or representations of people (except season two of ‘Euphoria,’ that was bad). But I’m saying that I probably didn’t need to give these examples—I said “certain aesthetics and ideas,” and you already knew what I meant. 

And so many women who aren’t white, thin, and cis enough to fit easily into this standard are pressured to put enormous effort into living up to it in order to be treated with dignity, making it all the more difficult to willingly turn away from. Whatever a woman believes, if she’s gonna get on her knees in front of a man, or say, “Please, fuck me,” this context is right in the background. In the fantasy landscape, it’s an unignorable landmark. It’s not inherent, it’s culturally manufactured—not a natural rock formation but one of those too-tall skyscrapers teetering over midtown Manhattan—but that doesn’t make it less there.

Women who yearn and submit are often main characters—but they are simultaneously seen as frivolous and typical. Their yearning and submission aren’t treated as meaningful, or as specific to them and their relationships. Women are bow emoji just a girl bow emoji. And being trivialized feels like shit. 

So it can feel easier and freer to step back from the equation entirely. Watch two men yearn for one another, which maintains their masculinity because men are supposed to be able to subdue and be subdued by one another without losing their status. Watch a man submit to another man. He isn’t confirming stereotypes but subverting them. His yearning and submission are meaningful and daring, not typical or trivial. They’re specific to him and his relationship with his hot Russian hockey rival. He can fall to his knees, he can be jealous, he can beg. He can type and then delete, in obvious agony, “We didn’t even kiss.”

I’ve seen people say, derisively, that women who fuck men are enjoying ‘Heated Rivalry’ because it gives them the opportunity to project onto gay men instead of reckoning with their own sexuality and gender. I can understand the frustration—there’s a reflexive desire by queer people to clutch “our” things closer, to not let them be co-opted and distorted. 

But I’m happy for these straight women. For the ones having a fun time, and the ones having new conversations with their boyfriends, and especially for the ones who are realizing that they aren’t straight or that they aren’t women. I’m excited by the idea of more people understanding that what makes submission so fraught can also be exciting and erotic. It can be a chance to consider new facets of your gender, or a matter of power exchange that’s unmoored from gender entirely. I genuinely think it’s a step toward neutralizing the type of reflexive shame that’s so readily alchemized into hate. I genuinely think that when gay hockey smut breaks records set by ‘Breaking Bad,” it gets a bit harder for conservatives to claim their weird, niche, fascist beliefs are the norm. 

Like Lucy Dacus said on Las Culturistas, “Why are we gatekeeping a gate that all of us had to walk through at one point?” Like Judith Butler said on TransAdvocate, “All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions—or norms—that help to form us.” Like Shane Hollander said on painkillers, “Beeeetttteerrrr.”