Late last year, as Heated Rivalry became the breakout TV hit of the season, the steamy series about closeted gay hockey players managed to escape the glare of conservatives who usually love to decry sex in culture. That is, until conservative YouTuber Brett Cooper decided to watch the series on the recommendation of her “gay best friend”—and she was shocked at what she saw. The title of the show she released about it on Saturday says it all: “Watching Gay P*rn Is the New SJW Fetish.”
“I turned it on and I was like, ‘My eyes, Amir, my eyes! I can’t deal with this,’” said Cooper. For her, though, the real issue wasn’t seeing graphic gay sex—it was the supposed hypocrisy of women who enjoy Heated Rivalry. “Liberal women have built their entire modern identity and their political identity around hating men,” Cooper claimed. “At the end of the day, biology still wins. They are still attracted to these men.”
So far, other major conservative influencers have been curiously silent on the Heated Rivalry phenomenon. Perhaps they’re too busy talking about the coming-out scene in the final season of Stranger Things, which the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said was “very unrealistic because in the ’80s, if you came out as gay, at least one of your buddies would call you a slur, right?” But its graphic sexual content seems like the perfect bait for Cooper’s cohort. Conservatives like Rod Dreher—newly of Bari Weiss’s Free Press—have long called out gay romance novels for being “trashy softcore” products by which elites attempt to “queer America.” The negative effects of online porn are also a constant topic of conversation among right-leaning influencers.
In her commentary, though, Cooper set her sights specifically on women who enjoy romances like Heated Rivalry. “There is an entire, huge subgenre and community on TikTok solely dedicated to sexy, pornographic smut novels and the women who read them,” Cooper said. “Women kind of sit on their high horse and they’re going, ‘Oh, well, no, it’s not porn. This is literature.’ No, I’m sorry, your smut novel is not literature.”
After reading headlines of articles about women’s devotion to Heated Rivalry, she was even more blunt. “Let’s be real here: The women have also lost their damn minds. We complain all day long about men objectifying and sexualizing women thanks to ‘porn brain,’” she said, using a common conservative term to describe the effects of supposed porn addiction. “Women are doing the same thing in their own way.”
Cooper isn’t alone in thinking that a “sexualized” culture is affecting women as well as men. Last month, British conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos stopped by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast; there, they discussed Yiannopoulos’s recent decision to renounce homosexuality. “Gay people are sort of saturated everywhere,” said Yiannopoulos, even though he believes that “nobody is gay.” The provocateur also used the f-slur while claiming that gay men encourage their female friends to engage in “promiscuity culture…to sort of have a nudge-and-a-wink kind of relationship.”
In her Heated Rivalry episode, Cooper promoted Angel Studios, the Christian-owned production company behind hits like Sound of Freedom and The Chosen. “Now, thankfully, Angel Studios makes movies and TV shows without all of this crap,” she said. “Their new movie, David, is a stunning animated musical that brings the story of the shepherd boy who became a king to life like never before.”
