Victoria Park discovered “Heated Rivalry” innocently enough. TikTok served her a video featuring Calico Critters figurines wearing miniature hockey jerseys and talking about “going to the cottage.” Six episodes later, she found herself spending her entire therapy session discussing the show.
“I can’t get rid of this feeling,” said Ms. Park, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Chicago who tours as Pictoria Vark. “There’s a void that I didn’t know existed. It’s a longing. I long for those deep moments of connection.”
“Heated Rivalry” is a Canadian streaming series about two professional hockey players who start having sex, have more sex, then fall in love, all while denying their feelings to their families, their teammates and themselves. Now audiences are longing for their longing. They’re yearning, pining and bingeing their brains out. It’s now the most watched scripted series ever acquired by HBO.
“Heated Rivalry” has arrived at a time when people are said to be having less sex than ever. We are hanging out less, ordering in more and falling asleep gazing into the blue light of our phones. The drug du jour is Ozempic, which blunts appetites in more ways than one. The “incel,” or involuntary celibate, is such a defining male identity group that it has become the pattern for describing any type of person — the gymcel, the fincel, the wordcel.
And yet: “We’re living in a smut renaissance,” said Caroline Spiegel, the founder of the audio erotica app Quinn. “Romantic media becomes more compelling in times like these. If you’re not having sex, if you’re not partnered, you’re yearning. The desire is heightened.”
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” plays like erotic Brontë fan fiction, with a latex dress for Cathy and some finger-sucking for Heathcliff. “The Hunting Wives,” which topped Netflix’s streaming charts for a time last year, peeked under the covers of a conservative socialite scene to reveal a hotbed of repressed Sapphic desire. During the pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s latest tour, fans packed arenas to watch her simulate sex acts onstage each night.
Our smut is personalized, automated, on demand: An A.I. boyfriend can be trained on ChatGPT, the girlfriend experience ordered on OnlyFans.
Yearning for Male Yearning
At a time when real-world sex seems to be on the decline, but smut is close at hand, erotic material can assume a totemic importance. What turns us on can become more personal and specific.
Ms. Park identifies as bisexual, and she has noticed a depressing trend in her “heterosexual relations with men,” as she put it. “They are so out of touch with their own desires,” she said. “They have no idea what they actually want.”
“Heated Rivalry” hit her so hard because “it’s more than just smut,” she said. The emotional depth of the characters’ connection made her yearn for a kind of male yearning she’s not experiencing firsthand. It’s a feeling many women seem to share.
“It’s interesting that a lot of the things that are sexy right now, for straight women, don’t involve straight men,” said Dorothy Fortenberry, a screenwriter who wrote for the Hulu adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
She mentioned a scene in “All Fours,” the 2024 novel by Miranda July, which follows its bisexual narrator as she steps out on her marriage (to a man) and into a sexual infatuation (with a different man), only to find herself having sex with a woman while “mutually longing for the concept of a hot, absent man,” Ms. Fortenberry said.
In this fantasy life, “we talk about men, we think about men, we maintain men conceptually. But is the man in the room with you right now? No.”
In hockey romance, we queer him. In audio erotica, we disappear him. And in romantasy, the genre which has dominated publishing by injecting romance tropes into wizarding worlds and faerie kingdoms, “we de-species him,” said Ms. Fortenberry of the straight American male.
As Ms. Fortenberry drafts sex scenes in her own scripts, she’s puzzling out how to bring heterosexual men and women together in a way that feels plausible. Forget hopping into bed: “I don’t think those people want to be in the same room as one another,” she said.
Naysayers have long accused romance novels of fueling unrealistic expectations among women, but now the genre’s fantasies are increasingly unreal. “Romance has always been about escapism,” said Leah Koch, the co-owner of the Brooklyn romance bookstore, “The Ripped Bodice. For her readers, “The quaint romance about opening a cupcake shop in a small town is not escapist enough. They want to go to a different planet.”
When smut is so plentiful, and so personalized to one’s tastes, a physical relationship with a real, autonomous person does not necessarily follow.
“I was a little shocked, frankly, by how much fan fiction about Harry Styles and Justin Bieber has shaped young people’s sexual tastes,” said Carter Sherman, the author of “The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future,” which investigates the sex lives of Generation Z. Creating and consuming idealized sexual scenarios from a young age, “it can make you long for things that don’t exist in real life. And then you can seek to fill that longing with depictions of sex, rather than actual sex or connection itself.”
Public Displays
If it seems like smut is everywhere, perhaps that may be partly because our consumption has become so public. The old romance book cover heartthrob, with his oiled chest and windswept hair, has been replaced by a deceptively desexed cartoon figure who can go with you just about anywhere. Quinn, which features audio erotica narrated by amateurs and celebrities, publishes TikTok videos of women playing whimpers and moans in their headphones while shopping in the vegetable aisle or riding in an Uber.
Glance over the shoulder of the woman seated next to you on the airplane, reading a book with a banal cartoon cover, and you just might find the dirtiest sentence you’ve ever read. Borrow her earbud and you could hear a pair of celebrity heartthrobs voice-acting as fae prince lovers. Follow her on TikTok and you can watch her react in real time — sharing her desires with everyone, perhaps, except a real-life partner.
Tyler McCall, a romance author who has written scripts for Quinn, said that in her own youthful days reading erotic “Harry Potter” fanfic, “it was something that you did privately, secretly,” she said. “Now I see people fully embrace the smut they’re reading, with their government-issued name and their full face on the internet.”
Even savvy politicians are now harnessing the power of smut for their messaging. Recently, the “Heated Rivalry” star Hudson Williams presented Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada with a now-famous fleece jacket from the show. “This is soft power,” Mr. Carney said as he slipped it on. When Zohran Mamdani addressed snowbound New Yorkers last month before a storm, he recommended they check out “Heated Rivalry” from the New York Public Library.
Every day it seems our erotic and political lives grow more entwined, as a country’s competing libidinal energies are redirected into the culture war. The state of Utah banned Sarah J. Maas’s best-selling romantasy novels from school libraries because of their sexual content. Earlier this year, protesters in Minnesota held signs with messages like “the only ICE I like is the ice my two gay hockey boyfriends skate around on,” while ICE supporters have circulated A.I.-generated mock romance novel covers that imagine liberal women being wooed by masked agents. One is titled “Detained by Desire.”
Who Is It All For?
By recruiting famous actors to voice its spicy stories — including the “Fleabag” hot priest Andrew Scott and “The Summer I Turned Pretty” yearner Christopher Briney — Quinn positions its erotica as mainstream entertainment. If the romance genre is about bringing two people together, posting a reaction video to an erotic clip feels like casting yourself as the female lead. To wit: Fans of “Wuthering Heights” are filming themselves positioning their faces in front of the film’s poster just so, making it look as if Jacob Elordi is gazing into their eyes instead of Margot Robbie’s.
But the real relationship kindled by such content is between the TikToker and her public. Even as she’s listening to a man getting off or grafting herself into his sights, she’s creating content for the benefit of other women.
“There’s a solidarity that emerges between women who read romance novels,” said Nikki Payne, a romance author and anthropologist.
Clutching a book can prompt a conversation about a topic that was previously private or taboo, she added: “You can say, Hey, that was gaslighting. That happened to me. Do I have a praise kink? You start to learn about yourself.”
A similar dynamic plays out in the Hulu drama “Dying for Sex,” which stars Michelle Williams as Molly, a sexually repressed woman who gets a terminal cancer diagnosis, leaves her husband and vows to have an orgasm with another person before she dies. Though the show finds Molly tangling with novel male partners, her central relationship is with her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), who helps her plot her sexual experiments and cuddles with her afterward. The show is based on a real-life podcast where two friends shared every tender detail with their audience.
Elizabeth Meriwether, the show’s creator, said she challenged herself to write and choreograph intimate scenes that were so sexy, they transformed its characters and drove their plots. “I felt that a lot of comedy sex scenes, recently, were actively running away from real pleasure — letting the characters actually enjoy it, and letting it be genuinely hot,” she said.
Though the incidence of sex scenes in films has dropped since the 1990s, television has picked up the slack, extending HBO’s smutiverse to the whole streaming landscape. After the rape and incest scenes on “Game of Thrones,” the robot sex slavery of “Westworld,” the comic depravities of “Succession” and the power-play punishments of “Industry,” it can feel like some television shows are playing a game of one-upmanship, staging sex less for pleasure than for shocks, laughs or the organic reach supplied by social media debate.
With all the erotica on Kindle, all the porn on Pornhub and all the sex on HBO, some young people say they’ve had enough. In 2023, UCLA published a study of the sexual attitudes of adolescents between the ages of 13 and 24, and found a divide around depictions of sex and romance onscreen. Almost half of participants said that sex scenes were “not needed for the plot” of a film or TV show, and many called for more nonromantic scenarios and asexual characters.
Jourdan, a 32-year-old Christian TikTok creator who posts anti-pornography content under the handle @thatsnotlove and does not use her last name online, went viral in 2023 after she posted a video about how she and her husband strategized to shield their eyes during the sex scenes in “Oppenheimer,” the 2023 film by Christopher Nolan, as if they were the most nuclear event in the film. Jourdan said that while her videos against what she calls “lustful-style content” used to draw accusations that she was a prude, she’s found that in recent years, her following has only grown.
“They’re having much more serious conversations about consent,” she said of her TikTok audience. “They’re aware of being objectified online and put in uncomfortable situations. They’re second-guessing the intent of all this sexual content in all of our media.”
The film critic Jourdain Searles experienced the resistance firsthand when she sat down in front of a movie with her younger sister — then watched her sister fast-forward through the sex scene. “It makes me feel like such a horned-up auntie weirdo,” said Ms. Searles, 33, who has written about working out her own sexual identity as she watched films like “Bound” and “Secretary.”
“It was through watching sex scenes that I was able to figure out what I liked and what I wanted,” she continued. “And it was a movie, so nothing happened to me.”
Now it can feel too much that the movie is happening. After the revelations of #MeToo — including the sexual abuse and harassment of actresses that sometimes played out through the films themselves — sex scenes can feel like a risky bit of screen time, especially as many explicit films and shows have sought to re-enact the degrading and traumatic sexual dynamics that dominate the news. As Ms. Fortenberry put it: “Maybe it’s like eating chicken after watching a video of a factory farm.”
All of this has given rise to a kind of endemic skepticism of sexual media. Are the podcast bros really into the gay hockey romance, or are they swooning for clout? Is the prestige television show reflecting the gritty reality of modern sexual relations, or is it just trying to gross you out? Does Ms. Carpenter’s cartoonish sexual innuendo refer back to any experience of actual human pleasure? Is Hilary Duff’s new single “performative” in its horniness?
So we watch sex, we listen to it, we read it, and then we talk and talk and talk. As Ms. Searles put it: “Somehow the discourse has gotten a bit in the way of the experience.”
Amanda Hess is a writer at large for The Times.
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