The TV show everyone is talking about has finally aired in the UK. Heated Rivalry has taken the world by storm, garnering acclaim from critics and the community, whilst keeping its reader base happy — a feat most adaptations struggle to achieve.

Before you read on, some spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.

From the explicit sex scenes to the strong riptide of emotion, Heated Rivalry pulls mainstream TV in a direction it’s never dared to tread before.

From depicting the ‘fucking to feelings pipeline’ over the ‘wooing to love then seduction’ one we’re used to following; the sweet tenderness of the ‘touching toes’ scene over showrunners’ insistence on characters being in constant conflict or fighting for their rights; to the show’s intense, inescapable yearning that would give Brontë a run for her money. All these things, and more, make it easy to see how the adaptation of Rachel Reid’s smut book series has enraptured the masses. It’s hot, heavy, and underpinned by an emotionality that brings a dimension to masculinity, particularly queer masculinity, that is rarely represented in mass media, if ever.

In a recent interview with Slate, Reid explained that “see[ing] explicit sex scenes that are joyful and sweet and romantic and hot and fun” is “really great”, particularly as Reid pointed out: “I feel like sex has largely left media, except for horrific rape scenes.”

To test this theory, I went to IMDb to compare the number of consensual sex scenes versus rape scenes in their database, as there is no central system readily available that tracks these things. According to their tags, there are 7,678 films labelled ‘rape’, and only 79 with the tag ‘consensual sex’. Food for thought.