Why do women love gay romance media so much?

We are born alone and we die alone as the saying goes, but within each of us is an intrinsic desperate desire for connection, deep and heart-wrenching and often willing to cross a thousand boundaries for it.

When Heated Rivalry, released in late November 2025, the show made a much bigger splash than what anyone was expecting. The show, based on Rachel Reid’s novels of the Game Changer series speaks about two hockey players (on opposing teams, of course), who fall in love.

In the show, there is Ilya Rozanov, played by Connnor Storrie, a child of the Soviet regime raised by his father who urges him to bag the trophy for Russia, whose brother leeches of him whilst being awfully homophobic, and there is Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), who has been raised oozing in a bath of love, his upbringing a stark contrast to Rozanov’s.

Reid has said that she started writing the series with no prior experience when she had just become a mother, to have a creative outlet. The fan following, it has been said (almost derogatorily) is mostly ‘wine-moms’, although of course, massive online communities with younger women watching have been formed all across Tumblr, Reddit and other platforms as well.

One must wonder, why, exactly are women so into this show about ice hockey and gay men? It feels so terribly far removed from them.

The reasons come in multitudes. For some ladies just watching two men on screen is a scenario so far away from their current partner or ex, that it can feel somewhat like a fantasy. For others, victims of sexual assault, or those who have darker memories with men, it provides exactly the right sort of escape without triggering them.

Industry data helps explain why these dynamics persist. Pornhub’s own analytics — among the most detailed publicly available datasets on porn consumption — consistently show that male-male content is one of the most watched categories among women. It somewhat makes sense, men tend to enjoy lesbian porn as well.

For nearly a decade, it has ranked second in popularity with female viewers, with platform figures indicating that women make up close to half of the audience for man-on-man scenes. Media scholars and sex-research publications have often cited this data to argue that women’s engagement with male intimacy on screen is both sustained and structurally significant, rather than niche or incidental.

The backlash, however, has been just as visible. A widely circulated critique in The Guardian argues that the show trades in gay aesthetics without engaging seriously with gay interiority, flattening queer male sexuality into something curated for straight female comfort. The review describes a form of fetishisation that strips gay men of sexual agency just enough to make them feel safe, ornamental, and easily consumable. Elsewhere, cultural commentary has compared the phenomenon to the way bachelorette parties routinely overtake gay bars — a dynamic often described in sociological writing as tolerated intrusion, where queer spaces are repurposed for heterosexual leisure while the communities that built them are sidelined.

No matter how the discussions flow, it is undeniable that gay romance shows and books are becoming more mainstream. Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo about a Glasweigan boy dealing with an absolute bully for a brother an alcoholic parent, Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series also reproduced for Netflix, and widely popular and heartwarming, Red, White and Royal Blue, written by Casey McQuiston and made into a film on Amazon, a story about the American President’s son and a British royal descendent, all make for fuzzy art and heartbreaking literature. If we really think about it, why wouldn’t we want to know more?