Escapism, Safety, and Sexual Performance

Straight women are going absolutely feral over Heated Rivalry — the steamy gay hockey romance series that nobody saw coming. From TikTok edits to viral thirst posts, this Canadian show (now on HBO) has become a global obsession, even trending in places where it’s banned.

In this episode, Simone & Malcolm Collins dive deep into why women can’t get enough of male-on-male romance — from Yuri on Ice to Boys’ Love manga, slash fiction since the 1970s, and the surprising evolutionary & psychological reasons behind it.

We cover:

* The “women can’t love” red-pill theory (Simone’s most based take ever)

* Why go woke go broke has one massive exception

* The difference between real gay relationships and the fantasy versions women crave

* Power dynamics, objectification, escape from gender politics, and much more

Is this just harmless escapism… or proof of something deeper about female desire?

Simone outlined this episode, so the informal notes are below, and the transcript follows. :)

Episode Notes: Why do straight women lust after gay men?

The Gist

* Gay Men on Ice are Trending!

* Before 6am this morning alone, I heard about the show Heated Rivalry, which features steamy sex scenes between two hockey rivals, four times: Two from friends who listen to the podcast, two from YouTubers I listen to in the mornings

* One of our Patrons encouraged us to do an episode on the trending topic, writing:

* “Why do straight women love to lust after gay men?

* There seems to be a current cultural infatuation with these gay hockey players and the video I shared by Brett Cooper delves into the current craze. This has always baffled me because of the obvious incompatibility, but this has long been a cultural stereotype, it doesn’t seem to be a new cultural phenomenon but I don’t know how timeless it is either but it’s definitely intercultural.

* I’m also personally invested into this topic given that a lot of girls growing up told me things along the lines of “ I wish you were gay” or “ you have to be gay. ” I even had a group of about 4 female friends I had, make a plan to try to convince their parents I was gay so we could all go together to a vacation house. ( though nothing happened)

* I’m just wondering and would love Malcolm’s input on the subject.”

So let’s dive in.

Heated Rivalry

* It’s a Canadian sports romance series that exploded into a massive cultural phenomenon since its premiere on November 28, 2025.

* It’s an adaptation of Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” book series (specifically drawing from the novel Heated Rivalry), created, written, and directed by Jacob Tierney for a Canadian streaming service called Crave

* HBO Max acquired rights for a day-and-date release in the US and other territories, turning it into a global breakout.

The show follows two elite, closeted professional hockey players—Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—who are fierce on-ice rivals but develop an intense, secret romantic and sexual relationship. It features explicit, steamy scenes.

It’s been called one of the biggest surprises in TV, a “word-of-mouth sensation” (even HBO execs were shocked), and a rare hit centered on gay characters that didn’t get canceled after one season.

Why is it trending?

* The first season wrapped up in December and a second season was approved

* Its popularity is snowballing after the series started with little promotion but exploded via word-of-mouth, especially on social media (TikTok fan edits, thirst posts, etc.), becoming a “social phenomenon.”

* Viewership on HBO Max surged dramatically—starting low but growing over 10x by the finale (from ~30 million to 324 million streaming minutes weekly, per Luminate data).

* It’s Crave’s most-watched original ever and HBO Max’s top debut for an acquired non-animated title since 2019.

Key factors driving the hype:

* The show has high ratings: 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, praise for directing, writing, chemistry between leads, and handling of queer themes in a macho sport like hockey.

* The show has a massive online community (”HudCon” ship for the stars), viral clips, and fan events (even internation al ones like in the Philippines)

* The show resonated widely, including in places like Russia (even though it’s banned there), and sparked discussions on queer representation in sports.

But it should not be surprising that women see man-on-man romance and eat it right up.

* Think of the Sherlock shipping

* Think of how women can’t even watch The Lorax without creating Oncest (once-ler shipping)

Yaoi & Boys Love

I was first introduced to fangirling over male-male relationships in high school when my friends loaned me yaoi manga. Turns out Yaoi has a long history which could arguably go back to:

* (Arguably) History’s first novel, the Tale of Genji

* Which was written by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century

* And has an episode involving Genji and a beautiful boy named Kogimi, the younger brother of the lady Utsusemi.

* Involving Genji and a beautiful boy named Kogimi, the younger brother of the lady Utsusemi.

* After Genji fails to win over Utsusemi, the text notes almost in passing that he “consoles himself” in bed with Kogimi, and later remarks that Genji finds the boy in some ways more attractive than his distant sister, which many scholars read as an allusion to male–male eroticism.

But yaoi as a genre didn’t emerge until girls’ manga got big in the 1970s and as Japanese fanfiction culture (dōjinshi) rose with it

* Boy-boy romance wasn’t pioneered by fan fiction:

* Mari Mori’s 1961 book A Lovers’ Forest is often cited as the first modern Japanese novel focused on male homosexual passion written by a woman for women. It influenced later BL/yaoi tropes (age gaps, aesthetic beauty, tragedy).

* In the early 1970s, the Year 24 Group (女性漫画家グループ, a collective of influential female manga artists born around 1949, the 24th year of the Shōwa era) pioneered shōnen-ai (”boy love”)

* Key figures created romantic, often tragic stories featuring beautiful, androgynous young men (bishōnen) in male-male relationships. These were original works published in mainstream shōjo magazines, influenced by European literature and art

* The launch of the magazine June (originally Comic Jun) in 1978 was pivotal—it specialized in shōnen-ai/tanbi content, helping formalize and spread the genre commercially (though it focused more on aesthetic romance than explicit sex).

* HOWEVER yaoi is about fan fiction

* The rise of Comiket (Comic Market, first held in 1975) and dōjinshi culture gave female fans a space to create and share parody works outside mainstream publishing constraints.

* The term “yaoi” itself is a portmanteau coming from from “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi” (山[場]なし、落ちなし、意味なし), which translates to “no climax, no point, no meaning” (or sometimes “no peak, no punchline, no meaning”).

* It was originally used in a self-deprecating, ironic way to describe male-male smutty shipping (often of boys’ manga or anime characters)

* By the 1980s, yaoi dōjinshi exploded in popularity at fan events. In the 1990s, the genre went more mainstream/commercial under the term “boys’ love” (BL / bōizu rabu), as publishers recruited dōjinshi creators and launched dedicated magazines.

Not Limited to Japan

* The 1960s-70s brought first major wave of organized slash fiction

* It emerged among mostly female fans writing fan fiction

* Examples of early shipping were Kirk-Spock fanfiction arcs. Private circulation of stories imagining romantic/sexual relationships between male characters. This marks the start of modern, community-driven female interest.

The Gay Ice Skater Bridge?

One of the more popular male-on-male anime romances in the 2010s was Yuri on Ice

* The series premiered on October 6, 2016, and ended on December 22, 2016

* It revolves around the relationships between Japanese figure skater Yuri Katsuki; his idol, Russian figure-skating champion Victor Nikiforov; and up-and-coming Russian skater Yuri Plisetsky; as the two Yuris compete in the Figure Skating Grand Prix

* It did really well

* It won three awards at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival, a Japan Character Award, seven awards in the Crunchyroll’s inaugural Anime Awards, and in 2019 was named by the website’s editorial team as one of the top 25 anime of the 2010s.

So… Why Are Women Into Boy’s Love?

* Safe exploration of desire and/or escapism: Takes the female audience member (and her insecurities) out of the picture

* Both women and men feel pressure to perform in sex and when their entire sex is absent, that pressure lifts

* Ability to avoid gender politics or gender wars

* It’s porn without the porn discourse because women aren’t involved

* Emotional depth: Some argue that male friendships in media often carry intense bonds that women readers/ writers “romanticize” or eroticize.

* Reminds me of red pillars asserting women are incapable of real love

* So maybe do women also think that men feel love more powerfully?

* Aesthetic appeal: Women like looking at male bodies, duh

* Similar to men wanting lesbian porn

* Power dynamics: In heterosexual stories, gender roles can feel restrictive; male-male pairings provide more flexibility.

And Why are Women Into Gay Men?

* Safety from sexual pressure and competition

* Experiments show straight women rate mating-related advice from gay men as more trustworthy than advice from straight men or other women, because they do not suspect hidden sexual motives or rivalry.

* Studies also suggest women feel that gay male friends value them beyond their bodies, which can boost self-esteem and body image compared to interactions with straight men.

* Researchers have argued that attractive women in particular may seek out gay male friends because they expect both: (a) safety from sexual exploitation, and (b) high-quality, “unbiased” advice on dating and self-presentation to men

* Mutual support in a heterosexist, patriarchal context

* Qualitative work on women and gay men suggests women may feel that gay men understand harassment, stigma, and gender policing better than straight men do, creating a sense of “we’re on the same side.”

* Some theorists argue that the bond is partly about shared resistance to traditional masculinity: both groups may reject or parody “macho” norms and instead celebrate emotional expressiveness, camp, and nontraditional gender roles.

* Attraction to campy, aesthetically intense performances of gender

* Symbolic identification with marginalized, resilient figures—plus a parallel critique that all this can slip into stereotype and commodification

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Maybe the red pillars are right. Maybe women love, well, maybe women are incapable of love. And also women know it too, and that’s why they like to watch men love each other, because they love to observe these strange creatures who are capable of love.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. That is the most based Simone. Simone that’s going at the front of the video. I That is. That is, I had never considered this before. Right. Right. And I think you might be right.

Simone Collins: go woke, go broke has one massive exception and it’s when , the wokeness is for a leering, non woke audience that just wants to thirst over when you are objectifying

Malcolm Collins: the person.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When you we, yes. When, when you are objectifying.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello Malcolm.

I’m excited to be speaking with you today because gay men on ice are trending and before

Malcolm Collins: Gary, Gary, Gary on ice, that anime, we, we watched like two episodes of it or something about gay men on ice.

Simone Collins: It’s, yeah, but they’re figure skaters. And today we’re talking about hockey [00:01:00] skaters because literally what, before 6:00 AM this morning alone, I heard about the show heated rivalry, which features steamy sex scenes between two hockey rivals.

Four times two were from like YouTubers and then. Two or from friends.

Malcolm Collins: Why was everybody talking about this seems like a normal thing in media these days. Why is, why are people talking about this?

Simone Collins: No, no. This is different. This is different. And okay. Also, one of our, one of our patrons encouraged me to do an episode on this because it’s trending that much.

And they’re like, what is going on? So they wrote, why do straight women love to Lust after Gay Men? Because that’s the thing people are talking about. They’re not talking about the show per se. They’re talking about the women posting TikTok reactions to it and edits of it. And like, this is women fangirling over it.

So this person wrote, there seems to be current cultural fascination with these gay hockey players. And the video I shared by Brett Cooper delves into the current craze ‘cause she did this whole thing on it. This has always baffled me because the obvious. [00:02:00] Incompatibility, but this is long-winded cultural stereotype.

It doesn’t seem to be a new cultural phenomenon, but I don’t know how timeless it is either because it’s definitely intercultural. I’m also personally interested in this topic, given that a lot of girls growing up told me things like, I wish you were gay, or You have to be gay. I even had a group of four female friends, I had make a plan to try to convince their parents I was gay so we could all go together to a vacation house.

Though nothing happened. My condolences by the way, I’m just wondering and would love Malcolm’s input on the subject. So we need your analysis, Malcolm. Okay, so let’s, let’s dive in. I’m, I’m gonna tell you about heated rivalry ‘cause that’s kind of, hold, hold on. I need to for,

Malcolm Collins: for context for people. So if you’re a guy.

Okay. There is a major problem in sites like PornHub with DEI just flooding everything. I swear about a third of the women on there are lesbians are bi and that just cannot be true of the general population. And I’m, of course, I’m joking [00:03:00] here. The joke is that, of course men have a, a preference for many men do for watching erotic content with lesbians in it or with multiple women in it, with one guy.

That’s to why so many guys have this preference. It should be fairly obvious from an evolutionary perspective. There is no context in which you are watching another man. Sleep was a woman. Unless something really bad is happening and you are not being cupped, right? Like this is not something that you should genetically like to see.

All right? This should be one of the most mortifying sites to you, a man, unless we’re able to just totally dissociate or somewhat gay. Actually, I remember when I was in high school my roommate. We’re talking about porn at one point, and he was like you know, describing what he liked.

And I was like, oh, I, I never watch anything. Was any men in it ever? And he was very surprised by this. And he’s like, [00:04:00] really? And I was like, yeah, it’s a, it’s a massive turnoff to me to see a man, to literally see myself being cut somewhere in this world. Mm-hmm. Because that’s, you’re watching a video of you not having sex with someone.

That is, that is what that is. And he just couldn’t understand it. Anyway, turned out he was super gay. He just, did he know it

Simone Collins: at the time? He just didn’t know it.

Malcolm Collins: He didn’t fully know it at the time. No. But yeah, he was, he was gay. So, what I’m pointing out is that I, I, that, that is why men have that preference, right?

But with men it’s di with, with women, it’s different. Okay.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: With women, we’re dealing with a scenario where where

Simone Collins: women aren’t really as oriented to male or female, primary and secondary sexual characteristics so much as they’re oriented around. Power dynamics.

Malcolm Collins: Like, like, like genetically, historically, it’s not that bad for them, right?

Like a lot of women were you know, there were certain periods of human history where 17 women bred for only one man that bred, that meant on average people had 17 what on [00:05:00] average, 17 wives, right? Mm-hmm. So women being okay with you know, the husband sleeping with one girl and then sleeping with them they were gonna have more kids than the ones who were like grossed out or itched out by that or whatever.

So it is weirder that women seem to have a pretty strong, now, we pointed out in the Pragmatic Guide to Sexuality, when we did a big study on this, it was the, the first really big study ever done on this in this way. And what we showed is that if you count erotic novels as the same as porn that women consume.

Exactly as much pornography as men do. Mm-hmm. And there’s this assumption that women consume a lot less pornography than men do because these studies were all created by men originally and they did not consider something like 50 Shades of Gray or Twilight pornography market.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or, or you know, I think that I’d also put in there things like a Handmaid’s Tale.

But you please, please don’t force breed me in front of a bunch of high status [00:06:00] women. But anyway I mean, from a genetic perspective, that’s exactly what a woman would want. Right. Like, a, a scenario like that where basically they are cing this high status woman.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They are actually technically speaking with them

Malcolm Collins: and then raising them as high status kids.

Yeah. Right. Like that is. Mortifying that than, sorry. That is, that is exactly what genetically they’re, you’re coded to want to happen to you. It’s like an a, a, perfect. And we’ve done an episode on a go see if you wanna say, but the point I’m making here is. If you know girls, like if you hang out with like, gerd, girl nerd culture which is something that, you know, I have done a lot.

Growing up I was a very nerdy guy. And one thing you will learn about girl nerd, nerd culture is that things like yi are really, really common. These are, and we’re gonna talk

Simone Collins: about that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, but what I’m saying is like, this isn’t new, right? Like, this has been around since [00:07:00] forever.

We’re gonna talk

Simone Collins: about the history and, but it, it goes beyond that because there is this trope of the ma the, the gay best friend for women. There’s not the lesbian guest best friend for men, you know, not enough

Malcolm Collins: lesbians.

Simone Collins: I don’t think there would be best friend if I could have a lesbian best

Malcolm Collins: friend. I probably would.

No, you wouldn’t. Women are pretty

Simone Collins: terrible. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t. No, no. Don’t lie. But yeah, like, so it’s, anyway, a lot of people are talking about it now though, because of heated rivalry. And you, you hadn’t even heard of it before. So I need to bring you up to speed on this, this whirlwind hit of a show, because it is the thing these days.

So, oh, gimme a moment. Are we good?

Gimme a moment. Ms. Fussy is your un fuss. Okay. So Heated Rivalry is a Canadian sports [00:08:00] romance series that completely exploded out unexpectedly into a massive cultural phenomenon since its premier, premier in November of last year. So it’s just three months old. Basically, in terms of American audiences, it is an adaptation of Rachel Reed’s Game Changers book series, which was drawing from the novel Heated Romance, that’s why it’s called Heated Romance.

So this like with 50 Shades of Gray, this is a book to. You know, show jump. And it was originally created for a Canadian streaming service called Crave, which makes sense. ‘cause I mean, Canadians in hockey, like, okay, checks out fine, but it’s like made for some small streaming service in Canada about gay hockey players.

You, you wouldn’t think it was going to become big and the HBO execs who licensed it for basically streaming in in the US and elsewhere, totally didn’t expect this to become a thing. They didn’t really promote it, they just [00:09:00] put it up and we’re like, yeah, fine. This, you know, we, we gotta diversify our portfolio or whatever.

And it just somehow. Went out of control into, I mean, it, it shouldn’t be surprising, we’re gonna go into that, but it became a global breakout. The show follows two elite closeted professional hockey players, Shane Hollander and Ilya ov, who are fierce on the ice rivals, but develop an intense secret, romantic and sexual relationship.

It features explicit steamy scenes. I have not watched any of them. I, I don’t really want to. But it, it has been called one of the biggest surprises on tv. It, even HBO execs who really vouch for it to be brought on are surprised it did so well. And people think that it. Would’ve gotten canceled in its first season, like they were sure it wasn’t gonna get renewed or anything.

But as of December, it has gotten a second season. That’s one of the reasons why it’s trending right now, is people are excited. It’s getting a second [00:10:00] season filming is gonna begin in the summer of this year. But specifically the reason this went crazy is because of just intense word of mouth fangirling, primarily from women who are making all of these TikTok cuts of it who are talking about on social media, how it’s changed their lives and how they just can’t get over it.

And there are all these thirst posts about it, and it’s really become a social phenomenon, even in Russia where it’s banned because as we’ve discussed in other episodes, you can’t have same sex. Content. And now you can’t have antinatalists content or dink content in Russia. So the fact that this is trending even in Russia that people can’t get enough of, it, shows how hard it is, especially for women to resist male on male romance.

And in general, apparently the show is actually really good. It has a 98% un rotten tomatoes. And apparently it’s really well cast and written and [00:11:00] the, the chemistry is really strong between the, the male leads who have this romance. And then there’s just this massive online community with people making viral clips.

And there are even fan events, like there was even a fan event in the Philippines. So this isn’t just Russia. Okay, this isn’t just the United States or Canada. This is literally a global phenomenon. Well, no,

Malcolm Collins: but what’s interesting about this is. People found out the secret, right? Yeah. When you, they kept putting gay people in everything and nobody wanted to watch it uhhuh because they put gay people in stuff.

Mm-hmm. But the audience for it was gay people. Yeah. If you wanna put hot lesbians and stuff, guys aren’t gonna complain about that. We can. No, no. That’s the thing is, is

Simone Collins: go woke, go broke has one massive exception and it’s when , the wokeness is for a leering, non woke audience that just wants to thirst over when you are objectifying

Malcolm Collins: the person.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When you we, yes. When, when you are objectifying. Yeah. Like you have to me too. The woke people. [00:12:00] And then, and then it’s great when they’re being exploited, when they’re being layered at, when people are fing over, you know them, then, then it’s, then it’s gonna totally make money. The thing

Malcolm Collins: that, it’s not even about fing.

Like, I don’t think that many women are like, fing over this. And there’s a lot of stuff that guys alike where you have sexy women and people aren’t actually fing over it. Right? Sure. They aren’t. Malcolm, they, the, the, the, you didn’t need to be able to fap to like the original Laura Croft to prefer looking at an attractive woman as your avatar over a man, as your avatar.

And this is the thing today, everyone is all like, oh, all the main characters are women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Mm-hmm. I, I think that we, you know, broadly on the right. We need to recategorize how we’re saying this. No one had a problem with stellar blade’s. Main character being a woman. In fact, we loved it until they decided to start censoring it.

You know? The, the, the, the problem is, is that they are ugly women that are meant to be non-threatening to the studio people who are putting these in. We need to not, [00:13:00] it’s not that we are against, women being, being in our video games or in our, they just need

Simone Collins: to be hot.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: We just want them. We’re not against same, same sex relationships.

We, they just need to be hot. Actually, you know what a really good point though about it’s not a lot of the same sex couples, no hold on. The same sex couples that are in the goo Go broke like Disney movies and stuff is that they one, aren’t hot. And two, it’s all about like interpersonal conflict and my feelings and our struggles.

And no one wants to watch that. They like

Malcolm Collins: kids. No, but there’s, the point I’m making is they don’t need to be. Hot. They need to be objectified. That is even more important than being hot, right? Like the oh, my struggles and stuff. That’s not objectifying them, right? Mm-hmm. They’re humanizing. Oh, so you need to dehumanize them.

That’s not accurate though, because No, I didn’t say you need to dehumanize them. You need to objectify them. So if you look at something like, let’s take Tomb Raider, Laura Croft, by the way. Right?

Simone Collins: Okay. [00:14:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If you watch the way Laura Croft runs or jumps at a ledge, or,

Malcolm Collins: oh, so basically

Simone Collins: you need fan service.

Malcolm Collins: It’s no, but she does it in a way that is objectified. Right? If you look at the new Laura Croft games, which did pretty well, and I quite liked the Laura Croft reboots what is the number one thing that we are doing to Laura Croft in those games? We are putting her in horrible situations where she is getting horrifyingly injured or beaten.

That is, that is what is constantly happening to her, and she is never whining about it. Okay?

Malcolm Collins: The, the jazz animation dying are over the top, and I have never seen death animations like that. They’re, they’re literally like above Mortal Kombat level [00:15:00] death animation. Are you serious? Because the Mortal Kombat ones just look over the top and gruesome, and these look very realistic.

Oh, no. God, like, you know, like getting caught in a river. And then a stake go through her, her chin and up through the side of her head. Oh, gosh. Wow. A fast river while hitting a bunch of B Rock. Okay. So stuff, it’s over the top, but what I’m saying is that, is objectifying the individual, right?

Like, well, I can’t, I haven’t watched,

Simone Collins: I haven’t watched the show. Okay, hold on. Let’s go back. The,

Malcolm Collins: the character who everyone always says is like, oh, men, like strong female leads, blah, blah, blah. Strong female leads are, okay. Is Ridley from aliens, right? Ripley, Ripley, rip Ripley, Ripley Ripley from, so Ripley is actually a fairly objectified character throughout the Alien series.

So, okay. What, what is it that has happened to her? What, what happened to her? She was forcibly impregnated with an alien [00:16:00] that was put inside her without her consent. No,

Simone Collins: she wasn’t. One of her crew mates was,

Malcolm Collins: she was in number two, the one that did really well. She was, yeah, that’s her whole thing. And then she be, takes on like a mother role in like number three or four or something to one of the areas.

No, I remember that. That was created from her DNA, so not only is is she in, in most of them, she’s either taking on a, a motherly role. Like there’s the one that had like the ghostly version. It was the last like decent one made.

Simone Collins: I remember one with a little girl hiding in the ventilation and I won’t remember the first one.

Yeah, that was the

Malcolm Collins: first one and she wasn’t forcibly. But even in that one, if you look at the role that she takes on, it is very much an objectified girl, boss wrote role. Very much like if you’re gonna say like, what’s an example of a guy taking on an objectified masculine role? I’d say blade is a very good example of a guy taking on an objectified masculine role.

It’s not a realistic masculine role. [00:17:00] It’s a role that is over the top to the point of being fetishized.

Simone Collins: Okay. I think I may follow you, but I’m not, I don’t actually think that this show does that. I mean, it’s really known for having. Just amazing direction and character development you’re forgetting, you’re looking at this totally through the male gaze, and you’re not thinking about the female gaze on the male gaze, AKA, the men who love each other.

You are thinking about this as a man looking at women. You are not thinking about this as the way that women look at men and totally the thing that women like isn’t, I mean, yeah, the bodies look good, but they’re there for the romantic tension. That’s what yi’s all about. That’s what heated rivalry is all about.

And so I I, I, I appreciate your explanation of how men look at this when they’re looking at female [00:18:00] characters. But the thing that drives female interest in male romance is, is different. It’s a different dynamic that you do not understand.

Malcolm Collins: No. Hold on. Actually, I’m gonna, I’m gonna push back. You’re gonna mansplain on this.

I you’re gonna explain to me how women

Simone Collins: consume gay content.

Malcolm Collins: I watch enough anime that there have been seasons when I run out of anime that is not Yi. And so I say, okay, I’ll try whatever the, the, it has an interesting premise. Okay. You

Simone Collins: only watched two episodes of Yuri on Ice.

Malcolm Collins: I’ve watched other ones to the end.

Okay. That were like sci-fi and I was more interested in I’m, I’m not like reflexively against it because first of all, you gotta keep in mind if, if you’re like watching this and you’re like, what, what does he mean? Like, does this stuff have sex in it usually? Actually never have I seen it have sex in it.

Yeah. This is, this is just like for girls with a lot of ywe stuff. It’s just like suggestive stuff. And then you’ve got some sci-fi story happening in the background anyway. The point I’m making is they do [00:19:00] not form relationships that are like real relationships the relationships that they form.

Think about you, you say you’ve read Yahweh before. Does, does the type of relationship that the two men form, does it look like the type of romance you see between a man and a woman in a mango?

Simone Collins: No. Not at all. No,

Malcolm Collins: it doesn’t. It’s completely objectified. It is. What? And, and actually there’s a, even like a thing online, like a trend of this where gay men watch or, or read ywe and then react to laughingly at the, at the way that women portray gay male relationship.

Oh, just how,

Simone Collins: like, this is not how it works at all. Yeah, yeah. Like this

Malcolm Collins: is not how it works at all.

Simone Collins: And it’s not, it’s really not. Because I when, when I have sleepless nights and I. Get curious and I just don’t, I’m too stressed and I wanna like forget who I am. I go to all the NSFW subreddits, so I know, I know all the fetishes, I know all the weird stuff that people consume, and therefore I [00:20:00] also have seen a lot of gay porn.

And I, I’ve, and I like, you know, we, we’ve all like, we we also have gay friends too. No, like, it, because like y Yahweh is very, it’s typically about like crushes turning into romantic tension, turning into like these encounters, whereas like out out gay relationships as we know them, are a lot more based and effective and pragmatic.

I think the biggest differentiation that I see between the typical male romance as depicted in Ywe and I think probably also in heated rivalry is that there are a lot more closeted and there’s a lot more tension and crushes and dancing around things, whereas in, in real life. You’re just getting basically men being much more optimal partners for each other than women could ever be for men.

I don’t know how else to put it. So like, I mean, I, I’d point

Malcolm Collins: out to people that that [00:21:00] this is very similar to if, if you like, showed a lesbian, lesbian like porn, mint for men, lesbian porn, mint for men. They say this is nothing like what actual lesbian sex is like. Well, yeah, I mean

Simone Collins: also like, just look at how morphologically different erotic material online lesbians look from.

Lesbians at Trader Joe’s, you know what I mean? They’re very, it’s a different look. It’s a very different look,

Malcolm Collins: but it’s, it’s both

Simone Collins: lovely. But

Malcolm Collins: I, I think you’re getting a better example of what men would want to do to women, or what women want men to do to them when they’re in the opposite role. When you’re watching same gender stuff.

This is why in, for example, in real lesbian relationships, using strap-on is incredibly rare. That’s just not used much in real lesbian sex

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Point. But in lesbian porn, it’s incredibly common because you want one of them to take on the, the male role. It’s the same with the Yi, which you’re actually seeing is one of the men taking on a woman’s role.

But we’ll get into why as you go further.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So [00:22:00] let’s, yeah. But anyway, I think it’s really funny. It’s humorous to me that everyone’s shocked that heated rivalry is doing so well, and that women are going crazy for it. When like, literally we couldn’t even have shows like Sherlock without people.

Completely. And, and, and, and psychopath Shipping people You mean women? Yeah. Sorry. Without women obsessively pairing Watson and Sherlock in, in fan fiction that we, we can’t even have kids movies like the Lorax without people literally shipping the winsler against himself. For, for what, what, what do they call it?

Ancest one est. They, they, they, like, this is, this is how psychopathic women are in their need for, for boys love. There’s only one character they’re kind of into, it’s okay, we’ll just double him and have him have him. I don’t know. Come on to himself. It’s, it’s, it’s intense, this, this female instinct.

And so, [00:23:00] yeah, I, I, I want to, I want to go into Yi and Boys love and the history and the dynamics behind it because I think it’s, it’s interesting and, and

Malcolm Collins: I also wanna know one thing about it and, and you can tell me if you think this is wrong. Yeah. It is, it seems to be an instinct that is stronger in younger women than older women.

I

Simone Collins: could see that maybe, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I’ll, I’ll go into why I think that is at the end, but continue, Simone.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. Perfect. So Ywe, I, I dunno. When you first learned about Ywe, I learned about it when I was. In high school, and my friends who let me, all their manga gave me Ywe manga, and we all nerded out about it.

But it, it actually turns out I didn’t know this. Ywe has a really long history and it can argue, arguably go back to the first novel. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the, the Tale of Gen Genji. It, it’s, it’s argued that that was history’s first novel ‘cause it was a, a story written in narrative form.

Are you familiar with it at all?

Malcolm Collins: No. Tell me more. Well, we talked about it. I remember I read a bit of it and it just wasn’t that [00:24:00] impressive to me. But it’s not, but

Simone Collins: I mean, what, what are you gonna do? You know? But like, it’s also so funny though that like the world’s first bromance is also one of the earliest stories now that I come to think of it.

That, you know, the tale of Gilgamesh we had Anky do and was, it was his name Giles? It was Giles. It was a total bromance. Boys. Boys love. But anyway, the first novel for sure had at least a little bit. It was, it was, it was by the Japanese noble women, mur Kashi Shiku in the early 11th century. And while it’s not okay, a dedicated boys love novel.

There is one episode in which Genji and a beautiful boy named Kmi, the younger brother of Lady U oh, Tsui kind of get together. Okay. Like he, he first tries to come on to Lady Zumi, but then she isn’t that into him. So he, comforts himself in, [00:25:00] in bed or consoles himself in bed with, with Kmi. So that implies that he’s, he’s bi, but I mean the, the, the, the rest of the tales focus on his romances with women.

But there’s still a moment I, I feel like the author here, maybe a fan girl a little bit with some boys love, but Yi is a genre didn’t emerge until Girls Monga got big in the 1970s and this Japanese fan fiction culture emerged. And I think Fanfic Can Fiction culture correlates really highly with the prevalence of boys love romance.

And I think this has to do with the fact that women are really into it. But mainstream society doesn’t want to condone it, so you’re only gonna see it when women are unleashed and allowed to write things. And as soon as they’re allowed to, or as soon as, as, as their secret writings become more public through weird market dynamics like the rise of Doji Q, which is just basically.

Fan fiction, but Naked Manga and in Japan then, then you get it. [00:26:00] But boy, boy Romance was not necessarily pioneered by fan fiction. There’s this 1961 book by Mari Maury called A Lovers Forest, which is often cited as the first modern Japanese novel focused on male homosexual passion. And it was written by a woman for women.

So this really falls well into the category, and it did influence later boys love in Ywe tropes like age gaps and aesthetic Beauty and tragedy. And then later, about a decade later, in the early 1970s, the year 24 group, which was a collective of influential manga artists that were born in the 24th year of the Shoah era, pioneered sh and I, which is.

Translated to boys love the key figures, created romantic and often very tragic stories featuring very beautiful and very androgynous young men. Which you’ve probably heard of as bi in male male relationships, which were often influenced by [00:27:00] European art and sort of made to be very foreign maybe kind of to, to get you out of Japanese culture and morays.

But then the launch of a magazine called June in 1978 was really something that skyrocketed the genre because it’s specialized in this kind of content and formalize the genre. But really the, the fan fiction explosion in Japan is what made Yi big. There was this comic market called Comic Cat, which was first held in 1975.

Where Dochy fans were able to come together and kind of just all realize that they had these secret fantasies and stories that they wrote that were boys love focused. And this is where you start to see the, the word yi bandied about. Because, you know, before it’s, and even after, like it’s really been called boys love mostly, but I didn’t know.

Yi is a port mento coming from three, three words really. So the YAI and [00:28:00] ii and this translates to no climax, no point, no meaning, or sometimes no peak, no punchline and no meaning, which gets to your point that there often really isn’t like much going on in these plots. You know, it’s just sort of all like tension and vibes.

So I think you really zero in on something meaningful there. And it was. I think people who created Ywe as fan fiction have always been very self-deprecating and joking and ironic. Like they understand that what they create is, is s muddy fluff. And they, they, they don’t take themselves very seriously and they have fun with it.

But you also totally see this in the heated rivalry posts that people are making now online. They understand that they’re, they’re being kind of tery and funny and that this is utterly unserious, but they also just love it and can’t help themselves. And I think that’s really interesting. And I mean basically after the 1980s, YWE was here to stay, but [00:29:00] it kind of evolved more just broadly into boys love.

And it went from being something that was primarily fan fiction or in really niche publications to stuff that was just mainstream. So by the time you get to like the 2010s, you get to show like the one we mentioned, Yuri on Ice, which. Involves, we didn’t really explain what it was. It, it’s basically about this relationship between the Japanese figure skater, Yuri Kazuki and his idol, who’s this Russian figure skater champion named Victor Nikki for of, or I can’t remember his last name.

I think it’s Nikki for of, or something like that. And then this other, other skater also called Yuri like Yuri, Yuri Ky. And basically the two Yuri’s compete in this grand figure skating Grand Prix. And Victor is the coach to the Japanese Yuri, who is a crush on him and is like the, just the idol.

And it’s just really sweet and it’s really cute. And it was, it was award-winning. It did really well. It [00:30:00] only had, I think, 12 episodes or something. And it ran maybe from like 20, 20 16 or something. We didn’t see it until the. Like 2018 or something, I think. But

yeah.

Yeah, it was made a long time ago, but it was by that point mainstream, which is why I thought it was a major, it was a major enemy, and of course it made it to like American streaming platforms.

So, yeah. But then, I mean that’s, it’s just so funny though that some, there’s something about male love on ice that we just can’t get enough of. In fact, I tried to see if the, the writer of the original heated rivalry book was inspired by Yuri on Ice because the timeline kind of worked for me.

And the author and all the people also associated with the original creation of the show cite tons of real world hockey rivalries and all sorts of other inspirations. So it’s not like they don’t talk about their inspiration, but apparently this is just truly convergently evolved fetishization of men on ice [00:31:00] skates being into each other because they do not cite Uri on ice at all.

And it appears that they really have no, they have no hat nods to each other. Like, heated rivalry has, doesn’t do anything to kind of hint at the fact that it was inspired by Yuri on Ice.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, Yuri on Ice is not about rivalry, it’s about like, mentorship and, and close. It appears to be a different dynamic that they’re playing.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They like the, the characters are made to look very vulnerable in Yuri on Ice.

Simone Collins: Well, the characters are, are, are somewhat vulnerable and, and heated rivalry too. But yeah, I mean, it’s, it would be as if well I guess we didn’t watch all of Yuri on Ice. I don’t know if the two Yuri also kind of get into each other, but I think, I mean, at least as far as we saw Intuit, it was only about, the, yeah, this was like trainer student dynamic or I idol and fan dynamic instead. I’m, I’m just not sure though, so who knows? But we should point out that there was also this really, the big first major wave of slash fiction did [00:32:00] also emerge around the 16 and seventies at the same time in the United States.

So it’s not like this is just a Japanese thing. And as our, our paid subscriber pointed out this, this is kind of a, a cross-cultural thing. This is not limited to any particular subgroup. Do you know what the first really big popular pairing in a fictional and universe in. Zines in nerdy zines in the 1960s and 74.

Yeah, of course

Malcolm Collins: it was Spock and Kirk, that’s, Colin knows their, the history of porn knows this one back and forth, Simone,

Simone Collins: the OTP, you gotta, you gotta, they must kiss, they must be together forever. Yes, you were absolutely right. So, yes, I, this is, this is something again, and I, I really don’t, I don’t think it’s that this is a new instinct.

I just think that this was the era in which fans were finally able to converge and share their dirty little secrets. And that’s how it all came to be. So anyway, I think that that’s, that’s interesting. But let’s answer the question, [00:33:00] why are women into boys love? And there’s first, I think, the really obvious answer that everyone gives, which is that for women especially, this is a, a way to very safely explore their desires and kind of es escape.

The things that hold them back sexually while still really indulging. So when they’re watching these romances and even when they get pretty steamy and explicit, they can do so in a way that really feels escapist and fun because they, all of their insecurities are out of the picture. They’re not thinking about, well, how do my boobs compare?

Or like, my thighs, or like, they, they also, I think women feel a lot of pressure to perform Oh, and men do too sexually. And I think for both men and women, same sex erotic material, it can be comforting or at least less disjointed because they don’t feel the need or as much prompting to think personally about their own performance.

[00:34:00] They’re just. Completely enjoying the I guess eroticism or sexuality. I’m gonna,

Malcolm Collins: I’m gonna argue that this is what women often say.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: they actually mean something else. When they say this,

Simone Collins: tell me what you think they mean.

Malcolm Collins: So. If you watch or read like, ywe books, right. Uhhuh you will see that if it was a real relationship, as we have said already, you would find the situation quite comical often.

Yeah. So like, this is ridiculous. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The reality is, is that women, if they saw a woman being objectified in the way that one of the male partners typically is, because one of the things that’s very common in Yahweh tropes is one of the males needs to be saved. He needs to be rescued. He’s incredibly vulnerable.

He’s incredibly unsure of himself, and a lot of modern women, if they saw a woman acting like that, the one who is [00:35:00] in the, the female role, often they’d be like, this is objectifying. This makes me uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. Like, why is she, why does she need to be saved? Why is she acting so vulnerable? That was the next thing on

Simone Collins: my list actually.

I was like, you know, it really helps. That when it’s male, male romance, you get to avoid gender politics. Politics and gender wars. And in an era, especially now when there’s this increasing animosity and political divide between men and women, when it’s just two men that is just totally removed from the picture.

Men, you don’t have to think about all, but men are the enemy, men are the aggressor. Men are the, like, where was there consent? Like that just has been removed from the lexicon of this scenario and people could just have fun again. And I really do think that’s majorly underrated. That’s a really good point.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. Continue.

Simone Collins: So some also argue that there’s an emotional depth thing going on that that male friendships and media often carry really intense bonds that women in just like to romanticize or eroticize. And I [00:36:00] find this theory really interesting because a common theme that came up when I was really into red pill forums, like around, we’ll say like 20 between 2017 and 2019.

It was often discussed that women are incapable of love. This was a really common statement and I didn’t get it because I am a, an autistic refrigerator mom who of course is incapable of love and also is incapable of imagining and all the other things. So I was like, well, I don’t know. Maybe they, maybe they can’t, maybe they can.

It just seems odd to say that one that, that all females can’t love. But then I hear, I hear this theory and I’m like, wait a second. Maybe the red pillars are right. Maybe women love, well, maybe women are incapable of love. And also women know it too, and that’s why they like to watch men love each other, because they love to observe these strange creatures who are capable of love.

Oh my God. That is the most

Malcolm Collins: based Simone. Simone that’s going at the front of the video. I That is. That is, I had never [00:37:00] considered this before. Right. Right. And I think you might be right. I think, I think I’m on, women are aware of how sociopathic women act in relationships.

Simone Collins: Alts, and then this proves, this proves it.

We finally found the proof to the Red pill theory that women aren’t capable of love, which is the fact that when women want True romance, they watch two men loving each other.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They’re like, they’re like, one of the, when they see a woman in it, they’re like, one of these women has to be, you know? Yeah.

They’re like, it’s fake. She’s in it for money.

Simone Collins: She’s in it for money that this is Yeah. I, I, I want real love. She didn’t just to screw him. I want, I want something that’s true. Like I want true love. I wanna watch true love between two people. It can only happen between two men. Yeah. It’s, yeah. That’s, so there’s that.

There’s of course the aesthetic appeal, but you know, like women like looking at male bodies, and it’s the same with men wanting to watch lesbian porn. You just wanna look at the, you wanna look at the body type you’re attracted to. You don’t wanna look at your own body. Well, I mean, I

Malcolm Collins: don’t, again, I don’t think that that’s the, the, the reason why men, like lesbian, lesbian porn is more like a, [00:38:00] a deeper biological instinct because you don’t want any other men in your, like, you really don’t want any other men anywhere near a woman who you want carrying your child.

Right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: I, I’ve, well, here’s the thing actually though, I, I have to say, like, having seen a lot of drawn and real, just, I’ve seen all the porn in, in male female porn, even when it’s made for women, the men are disgusting. And their penises are disgusting. I don’t know what to tell you. Like they aren’t gross.

I dunno who is

Malcolm Collins: watching that stuff because like,

Simone Collins: I, I dunno who, I dunno who is either because it’s gross and, but also even in hentai male bodies. Ooh. Like in, in, in hentai oriented around men.

Malcolm Collins: It de depends. I mean I’ve, I’ve definitely seen that in some, and I always find it really weird when that’s the case.

It’s,

Simone Collins: yeah. Why, why are the men so

Malcolm Collins: disgusting? No, but there’s, there’s a type of like fetish that I guess is not that uncommon for like older or ugly or fat men to be the, it’s, well that shows

Simone Collins: up [00:39:00] a lot in he tide, but in but I don’t know what it is. I think in live, in live action corn. For women, the men are gross.

They, they are not attractive. Maybe, maybe they’re attractive to someone, but they’re not attractive to me. And they also don’t look like the, the men that women thirst after in fan fiction communities, or like the men on the covers of romances books or like the Men Who star. Okay. Movies for women. They don’t look like any of those.

They don’t look like the, I have,

Malcolm Collins: I have a thesis on why this is the case, Simone,

Simone Collins: because women like high value, smart, and capable men, and those men don’t go to become porn stars.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. I, I have a thesis on this. Okay, fine. Here is the thesis. It goes like this. So you, you’ve got somebody like me who’s just so averse to the idea of watching another guy have sex with a woman that I’m like, what?

Why? That is the worst thing in the world. Right? Okay. But there’s other guys who might be able to watch this happening, but just completely blot out from their minds. The, the man in the, in the act. [00:40:00] Mm-hmm. It’s just them. And because they’re blotting out the man in their mind, they’re not focusing on the man at all.

Simone Collins: Malcolm, I am talking about erotic material that was filmed and shot for female audiences what I’m saying is that in, in stuff for women, the men don’t look like the men cast in movies that women watch, they don’t look like the men that women fantasize about in fan fiction.

They don’t look like any of those and they also don’t look like popular men. Among women in, in real life. They look gross. And so I guess I have not seen, but when you look at gay erotic material, the men look fantastic. So what’s up with that? And of course, you don’t look at, first, you don’t even look at live action erotic material.

‘cause it’s gross. And I get it because it is gross. And you keep thinking of like, this is someone’s son, this is someone’s daughter, this is someone, you know, it’s blah, there’s too much baggage. But like, even if you did, you wouldn’t look at the stuff that’s made for female audiences. But I’m telling you [00:41:00] it, the men are, no, I’m pulling it up right now.

I’m pulling up

Malcolm Collins: the porn for women in Chick-fil-A subreddit. I wanna, I wanna see what you’re talking about.

Simone Collins: You’ll see exactly what I mean. And I’m like, what is going on? But anyway, if you actually, if you, if you thing, if your source of arousal as a woman is gorgeous male bodies, you’re gonna watch gay men.

Malcolm Collins: Period. You’re, you are right. This

Simone Collins: is told you, I’m told. I know. What is that? So anyway, I do actually think that that is, that is a thing. It’s not that, oh well, like evolutionarily, I, I get what point And that’s real. And women aren’t, they, they don’t really need. They don’t need to see like the, the presence of a woman isn’t defensive, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that the men arely in straight live action porn for women. Anyway, there’s also a theory among some that there’s a power dynamic element to this too, that in heterosexual couplings, the power dynamics are more restrictive. I mean, at the very least, you have the same phenomenon you have [00:42:00] in sports where there’s just one party that’s much stronger than the other.

So that just kind of changes the way that any sort of scenario would play out. And with two men, it’s, it’s different or things just feel more like there’s more flexibility in how things can play out. And so allegedly that’s something that’s, that’s less weak. To me, the most interesting thing of all these theories for me was the men are capable of real love.

That’s,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I, I, I think I think that’s a big one. And I think the other big one is that the, the characters in it are so objectified that if they saw a woman being treated this way, yeah, they would feel uncomfortable due to feminist brainwashing.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, the politics element of that is, is huge.

And I do think now more than ever, there’s so much baggage, cultural baggage around me too, and, and consent and all these, ah, and it’s just so annoying, especially given that we know, statistically speaking, many women are reading into non-consent and it’s really hard. There’s a lot [00:43:00] of cognitive dissonance that would come to a woman who’s into non-consent, who’s into power dynamics, but who also sees herself as all about consent.

That’s and all about female empowerment.

Malcolm Collins: That’s a good point actually. And this is

Simone Collins: the one way where she can get non-consent and she can get one power party being disempowered without feeling any cognitive dissonance or, you know, oh, I’m failing my kind, I’m failing my in, you know, my internal model. You know, they’re, they’re not

Malcolm Collins: because it’s just guys.

There was a a, a scene that’s really common in Ywe which is when one of the, the guys sort of forces himself to kiss the other guy, you know, like, know it’s so hot. It’s so hot. The other guy’s like not really into it. And yeah, you saw this happening to a girl, you’d freak out. Yeah. You’d be

Simone Collins: like, or, or, or it would be hot for you, but you’d be like, Hmm.

But I feel guilty about feeling good about it. You know what I mean? Like, it’s, it’s, they don’t, and, and then it ruins the vibe because you, you wanna just, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: There’s another so I read a lot of people who watch the podcast regularly know this, a lot of romance books, [00:44:00] not romance books, romance mangas made in South Korea for women about the like regency era, right?

Like, I just really love, like villain is sent to the pastor. Yeah. Like literally it’s,

Simone Collins: it’s dinner and he’s surrounded by kids who are literally climbing on him, but he’s still reading this.

Malcolm Collins: I am, I’ve got to see her do her thing at the vault. He needs to know, he needs to know what happens next. So I got, I get so addicted to these, love these.

And what I love about them now is so many good ones are being made into anime now. Oh really? Well, I recently saw one of the ones that I read that I really liked which was Dr. Elise is being made into an anime that’s coming out soon. And there’s a great, I’m actually rewatching one right now like, on trying to be the best villainist, I, I forget what it’s called, like I’m gonna be a villainist remembered for all time.

And I like it ‘cause it reminds me of myself. You know, you, you go back in time and instead of trying to be the hero, she’s like, I’m gonna be the greatest villainist ever. ‘cause reincarnated as a, as an a tome villainist. But anyway, so I really like these, which means I get a lot of ads for other [00:45:00] things in this sort of category and on Web tens.

Yeah. The ad that I get the most, so much so that I actually clicked through once.

An ad. I get so much that I actually got it in between filming this episode .

Last night and then immediately going to edit it and go to bed. So within like an hour and a half of filming this episode, that’s how I have a picture of the ad.

Malcolm Collins: It was like, I, this is such a weird setting. I’m gonna see what this is like. Okay. I’m only able to read one chapter of it and I,

I just, it didn’t grab me

The reason I thought it might is it’s world seemed reminiscent of Beast stars, which is one of my favorite animes, .

Because it took the idea of something like Zootopia in saying like. And I think Zootopia, , I hate the way it subverts the actual interesting question that could be asked, which is to say, what if you had a society of a bunch of hominid like creatures that were genetically different and had different needs and capabilities and psychological profiles.

And then Zootopia says, but they aren’t actually different [00:46:00] and none of them are actually a threat to any of the other one. And, it is a conspiracy that any of them could be a threat to any of the other ones. Whereas in B Stars, they say no, , they’re a prey species and they’re a predator species.

And the predator species want to kill and eat the prey species, but they hold that in and they have systemic differences in the way that they see the world and the way they engage with the world. And we will try to stitch together a simulacrum of an equal society in spite of that.

Which thank God isn’t a question that we need to grapple with in our modern society. That different groups may have genetic differences from each other, and saying that our society is equal in spite of that and pretending that it’s equal in spite of that can cause systemic issues.

To get an understanding of just how based and interesting this world is. There’s this scene at the beginning of it where you see a rabbit girl who is clearly one of the protagonists being teased for being a slut, and of course, in any other [00:47:00] anime you’d be like, oh, this is horrible. She’s being teased for being a slut.

But then it’s revealed that the reason why this other subspecies of bunny is so angry at her is because she is. Hitting on one of the males of her subspecies, and they’re an endangered subspecies, and if they keep outbreeding, they’re going to go extinct.

Malcolm Collins: because I was like, this is, I don’t know, it’s gonna be boring and weird, but I’ll, I’ll give you the plot and you’ll immediately understand why you couldn’t do this with women.

Okay. Okay. So it’s a world where, a, it is an answer world, like a furry world. Okay. Okay. And society is divided into praise omnivores and predators where predators sort of hold most positions of power and bully. The other classes omnivores are sort of middling and prey species are seen as like the lower class and are very much forced to take on sort of submissive roles in society.

Okay. Okay. And so, an omnivore dog boy goes to school, but pretends that he’s a wolf so that [00:48:00] he won’t get, like you say, that he can have the higher status and everything like that behind course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He’s, he, he’s the nerd

Simone Collins: pretending to be the jock.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. A a, a, a, a fox boy who’s clearly the, the, like male coded one in this male, male relationship.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. He finds out. That this boy is actually an omnivore. So he has this black male information on him. Oh, no. It’s clear that this black male information on that he’s actually submissive and he actually wants to be submissive because he’s just an omnivore you know, obviously taking from like omegaverse strokes.

Right. But the point being is that, you know, in a woman’s story, if it was a woman who was hiding her status and the guy knew the real truth, right. Like, I think a lot of women would feel very uncomfortable about that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah. There’s, there’s too much baggage there for sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

But somebody who’s trying to hook up with her, like, I don’t wanna mm-hmm. But when men are victimizing men, that’s totally okay. Hot even.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. [00:49:00] No, because I, well, that’s, it’s the dynamic that women find arousing. They just culturally have been programmed to feel immense amounts of guilt and cognitive dissonance if they.

Condone or abide by those things. But we should also touch on, on, again, the, the nails. Actually,

Malcolm Collins: another thing I wanna touch on in this category. Okay. Because I read a lot of these books and a lot of these con I I see the, the types of sort of media that’s really targeted at women. Right.

Okay. Because I’m reading just tons of it. Yeah. When they have a woman as the, the, the lead character, right. Like, because a lot of mine involve romances, right. The woman is almost never objectified. I, you know, I, I will not say almost ever. I would say categorically never. Not one in like the 45 I have read.

Well, and this also shows up so much

Simone Collins: in, in romantic novels, and it’s really annoying because the women and oh, and even, even even novels like the Outlander series, I can’t read them because the women are so. [00:50:00] Can I say Cty? Are you gonna allow me to say cty? Because they’re so cty, they’re so rude and they’re so entitled and they’re so like, I’m not gonna like you.

You’ll just go down on me. And we’re we’ll never have sex ever. And like it, they’re just really rude and mean and dismissive towards them. Yeah. I and I, and I real love interest,

Malcolm Collins: all of the ones I’ve read, the 45 that I have read there has not been a single sexy, it’s so

Simone Collins: annoying. Like, what’s the point?

Malcolm Collins: I don’t know.

I would actually really hate a sex scene. I, I’d be like, I wanna get back to the story. I’m reading this for the well, but

Simone Collins: what’s worse is, I mean, as you know, I have like a very strong aversion to men going down on women. And that’s, that is, that is the sex scene. That hasn’t happened.

Malcolm Collins: Any of the Korean ones, lemme tell you, the Korean women are board with you on this.

You know, they’re like, I guess I have that gene. Yeah. They’re like, I, I do not want, it has not, it has not happened. It has not been suggested to, it has not been talked about. It’s pervasive

Simone Collins: in romantic. I don’t know [00:51:00] what’s up with that. But it’s also pretty pervasive in female oriented. And NSFW stuff online at least in Western audiences.

If you watch our video on how parasites affect human sexuality, and we point out that liking to have guys go down on you is more common in women with specific parasites that can be transmitted by this. All of a sudden this makes sense if Korean women are actually not sleeping around a lot, which they are not.

Korean women barely have any sex, , especially casual sex. , And women in America, especially the white women who are pushing this, are sleeping around a lot. It means that they may have caught these parasites and that’s why they’re reading these books and they are promoting this idea that it’s really normal for guys to go down on girls.

Simone Collins: Yeah. The,

Malcolm Collins: the one scene that you see occasionally, and I’d say that this is the most sexual scene you will see in these. Okay. And it’s in, I’d say like one out of four of them is the scene where the woman has fallen on her back and the man has [00:52:00] fallen on top of her for whatever reason. And Oh, that’s classic anime.

Her skirt is like to hear,

right? Like, it’s fall because she’s wearing one of those big Victorian skirts and you could see of course, part of her leg finally. And you’re like, oh, the, the legacy scene.

Simone Collins: Well, the man accidentally on top of the woman’s scene or vice versa in, in the courtyard, of course.

Mm-hmm. Well let’s, let’s also get back to what this this patron mentioned about why are women so into just having gay friends that, because I’ve seen this happen too, where. Girls, especially as you said, young girls, even to just guy friends in school wish they were gay or say things like, I wish you were gay.

Malcolm Collins: So okay, let’s talk about why women want gay friends and why guys who aren’t stupid want gay friends.

Simone Collins: And like, you do want, no, not not stupid guys who aren’t insecure. I think it has to do with sexual [00:53:00] insecurity

Malcolm Collins: maybe, but, okay. So, first from a guy’s perspective, ‘cause it’s just really easy from a guy’s perspective.

Mm-hmm. My best friends have almost always been gay except for like right now in life. And that’s because my best friend is my wife and I don’t leave my house much. But like throughout high school, your your male best

Simone Collins: friends if, if not family have been.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this was during the period where, you know, people who know, back in the day I used to sleep around constantly.

Right. And with women, I should probably say with women, yes. Yes. Just sleep around constantly was women. And one of the reasons I was able to do that is because I had. Gay friends, so okay, consider this. You walk up to a group of girls and you’re hanging out with two gay friends. Okay? Now you, a group of three men walked up to three women, except there’s really only one choice for those three women in that group.

Or it works this way. Your gay friends and you go out to a bar or a club and a woman starts to hit on them. They don’t like that, so [00:54:00] they say, Hey, I am ex, but my friend over there is into girls. Is he your type? And then you get handed the girl. Right? That’s

Simone Collins: so funny because experiments also show that’s straight women rate.

Mating related advice from gay men is more trustworthy than advice from straight men or other women because they do not suspect hidden sexual motives or rivalry. And they also suggest women feel that gay male friends value them more beyond their bodies, which boost their self-esteem. And also they feel like gay men are more trustworthy because they’re not sexual competition.

Like there’s all these, you know, I mean we’ve had all these other episodes where we kind of hinted the fact that a lot of female behavior that is, is very crab in the bucket ish, where they’re kind of pulling other women down or encouraging other women to indulge in being overweight or ugly or to just make themselves worse comes from a place of sexual rivalry.

So I had only thought about it from the female perspective, but you’re right from a male [00:55:00] perspective, gay might ga may, sorry. Gay male friends are great for guys too, ‘cause they’re also not sexual rivals. Yes, but, but unicorn friends,

Malcolm Collins: it gets better than that too. So another thing is people say, oh Malcolm, you know, you look gay or you look whatever, right?

Like this is a thing that people say all the time. And I’m like, that makes it even better to have a gay best friend. Because that means that the girl who went to hit on the guy who often looked kind of gay and he says, Hey, are you into guys like that? It’s another guy who looks kind of gay. Yeah.

Sometimes probably is into it. That actually,

Simone Collins: yeah, that that is an underrated. That’s an underrated tactic. Gay guys will occasionally gay because women, like gay men.

Malcolm Collins: Gay guys will occasionally hit on me and then I can pass them to my friend. Right? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. So you have that, but then you have the secondary dynamic, which is really cool too.

Yeah. Which is to say that, what did I say? Gays? It’s gays. Yes. Gays and women. So, the problem with other women is one, the [00:56:00] thing that you said, it’s been well shown that women are constantly trying to sabotage each other. Mm-hmm. And you even see this as a stereotype of the gay male friend.

The stereotype of a group of female friends is one woman goes out and she goes do I look fat? And all of the women who don’t want her to lose weight and want her to lose in sexual competitions mm-hmm. All go, oh no, you look great. And the gay male’s best friend is like, it’s like now you look fat girl, you look ridiculous right now.

Yeah, yeah. You need to lose a few pounds because, but you actually even see this in the stereotypes, right? Mm-hmm. They, yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re less likely to act in a crab in the bucket dynamic, but it’s more than that. The second point is that women are just generically terrible.

Simone Collins: So not only are they not capable of fluff, not only will they intentionally sabotage you in an act of sexual competition, but there’s more.

There’s more.

Malcolm Collins: No, but if you’re a woman and you can be friends with the guy, but he is not going to have a, a hidden interest in eventually getting you to sleep [00:57:00] with him, Uhhuh that can be a really positive thing like that, that, that has value to you, right? Like Yeah. In terms of gaining access to specific spaces and ideologies you wouldn’t otherwise get access to.

Like this is in part how gays, especially gay men, garner a disproportionate amount of value in society than straight men, which, which you actually see, like gay men often move into an area like right before it gentrifies, for example, right? Like, they, they are a, a look at like top performers in many fields that require networking.

You will often find a disproportionate number of gay men, and that is because gay men have this hidden advantage in networking that straight men do not have. Gosh,

Simone Collins: wow. The power of the gay man.

Malcolm Collins: And, and here I should say, when I say gay men here, I’m talking about same sex attracted men who choose to live a gay lifestyle.

Like I don’t believe there is. I mean, inherently gay thing, it is just some people are born same sex attractive, and there’s many ways you can choose to live in relation,

Simone Collins: right? Yeah. I mean, a closeted gay man [00:58:00] is not gonna have this utility.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes, exactly. The, the, the second thing, and I think that you hit on this really well, is, that the, yeah, no, I, I think those are the main reasons. That’s, that’s why women like to, to hang out with them. They do not like to do it because they like to talk about gays hooking up or anything like that. I, I’ve been, because you know, I hung out with gays so much. I’ve been in plenty of the conversations.

Women do not talk with their gay friends about what the gay friends are doing. Not at

Simone Collins: all. And that’s, yeah. So what we’re really talking about, and I think it’s important to highlight this, is these are two very different things. The gay best friend is very different from boys love fictional interest.

They are totally independent. So that’s, I think, quite interesting too that there’s this double interest in gay men from different angles. One, one is a fantasy angle that doesn’t really reflect reality. And one is the very interesting market dynamics that make men valuable to both men and women as friends.

And I’d never really thought through [00:59:00] those logistics and aligned incentives. But they’re there, which is, which is great. Very interesting. It’s funny because when leftist circles discuss the trope of the gay best friends, they talk about it from an exploitative angle that like the, the, the gay best friend is, is tokenized and marginalized and kind of just used as like, oh, just be sassy and tell me things how they are, and I’m gonna just complain to you and, and not listen to you about your inner life at all.

And I, I don’t think that’s how it plays out. Like I don’t, I don’t think these are unit directional relationships, but that that’s how they’re portrayed and they’re not really discussed beyond that. And, and you just presented to me the most compelling and interesting discussion of the gay best friend t trope that I’ve, I’ve ever heard.

So I appreciate that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I love you. And yeah. Did you ever, did you ever have your gay friend, token gay friend,

Or just gay friends?

Simone Collins: I had gay colleagues that I still [01:00:00] follow on social media, but I don’t think they liked me very much. And they’re very progressive now, so I’m sure if they see me in the media, they hate me.

I still like them. Yeah. That’s sad. Oh, well. But yeah, no, yeah, no, I, I, yeah. Yeah. In, in high school and in college, there were certainly gay guys that I hung out with and talked with a lot and really liked, I don’t know if they liked me, but I also kind of assume that everyone hates me ‘cause I hate myself.

Well,

Malcolm Collins: and we’ll see what, what my gay friend, so I’m actually about to go to high school reunion. And I need to recheck oh, sorry. I cut out his name. I’ll cut out his name. Recheck with my friend to see what he’s doing, but we had talked about driving up together.

It’s a like four hour drive or whatever, and catching up which will be a lot of fun. Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Lovely.

Malcolm Collins: Hearing voice trip. Yeah. [01:01:00] Well, I mean, if, I can’t imagine what if, if he’s bringing his partner with him or something. I, I mean, I know he’s cool with like my politics, but I don’t know about, you know, other people.

So no.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Hopefully it’s okay.

We’ll see. Anyway.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We, this is, this is a lot of fun. Yeah. And that we’ll see. We’ll see. I love you Simone. Good. I love,

Simone Collins: yeah. Enjoyed it. Okay, next we’re gonna do emotional support scooters. Yeah. Yes. Okay.

Do.

Malcolm Collins: by the way. Question. Somebody reached out and said they think I’ve, I’ve not been as nice to you in episodes. I think it’s like when we disagree or talk over each other that they think that I’m being,

Simone Collins: what’s the, what’s the point if there’s not a little debate? A little No.

Malcolm Collins: Isn’t that like normal in marriages? I don’t know.

Simone Collins: What if we, but I think being mean is when there’s like an ad [01:02:00] hominin attack. You haven’t. I don’t think you’ve ever made one on a podcast ever, so why would you? Like we talk over each other, but that’s ‘cause we get excited, we, we ideas. But like there’s also

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. We have a lot of, a lot of, as as really annoying child psychologists say, we have a lot of big feelings. We have

Malcolm Collins: a lot of big feelings right now, Simone.

Simone Collins: Big feelings.

Malcolm Collins: And my big feeling is, is I have some theories. And you have some theories. Yeah. And we both wanna tell each other the theories.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

And would our conversations be, be interesting if we agreed on everything? I mean, what are they looking for? I guess a lot of the podcasts, no, I mean blocked and reported, for example, which is a very popular podcast. They disagree. But then a lot of leftist podcasts I listen to, they only agree and tell about them.

Memetically, ganging up on, on the enemy, talking about how perfect or disgusting someone is. Love you. Yeah. I don’t know. [01:03:00] You’re perfect and I love you.

Maybe turn it up a tiny bit.

Malcolm Collins: How am I gonna look dark and mysterious and like a sexy vampire?

Simone Collins: That’s true. Well, this, this highlights the paleness and the fact that you never go outside during the day, which I think is more vampiric.

So for people who don’t

Malcolm Collins: know, Joe Rogan’s show called me a Vampire. That that was the conspiracy. So I am, they didn’t exactly, they said, well, like, like vampires or something like that. But I’m going with it. I’m going with it. That’s the, the, the, that I’m, that I’m from a, a family of vampires is what they said.

Simone Collins: The guest said that what Barnabas Collins from the Dark Shadow Series was based on The Collins family is in York Collins family.

Malcolm Collins: So based on me, vampires are based on me not the other way around. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Somebody looked at my family and was like, vampires.

Simone Collins: Vampires. Definitely.

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: Did you see a trending topic that I sent you on X by the way, that anti-ice protest turned inspiring.

More romance [01:04:00] meme book covers and like ai, the girls

Malcolm Collins: are thirsting after ice agents and they’re, yeah.

Simone Collins: And the, the book covers that people are making on X are hilarious. You, you’ve got to click through to the link that I sent. Okay. Okay. There’s, the books have covers like a song of fire and ice, and there’s a, a woman with blue hair kissing an ice agent and she’s wearing a bright red dress.

There’s another book cover that reads Detained by Desire, and there’s a woman staring in an i, a masked ice agent from the window of her crappy looking car. It

Malcolm Collins: is. Utterly delightful. Hold on. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll open this. I’ll see, I’ll see if these are accurate.

Simone Collins: There’s another, another book with the title Victimized at the protest.

There’s a, an ice agent detaining, A woman holding an abolished ice sign. Except,

Malcolm Collins: wait, wait, so he’s an ice au Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, there

Simone Collins: the other, there are ice mitas. In some ways, yeah. And people are going all that with [01:05:00] mean desire. But what good, and these are delightful and I would read them, but what actually was trending?

Kind of, I think maybe the book covers were being made in response to this, but people noticed on some chat sites that Women’s Ice agent role play was trending. You know, women fantasizing about,

Malcolm Collins: oh, I like this quote here. A Handmaid’s Tale is fetish material, by the way. See our episode on that If you don’t believe that it is.

Yeah. Pretending it’s a political critique is like pretending 50 shades of gray is about the excess influence of the billionaire class.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, oh, I, I love this. Christians, we should stop abortion feminists. I want you to grate me Christians. What feminists. You want to imprison me and put me in a costume and I have high status men f me and impregnate me Christians.

What Feminist panting they’re wives will hold my wrist while he dries themselves [01:06:00] deep into my fertile God.

Simone Collins: But really now there’s this rising conspiracy theory at the back of my mind that all female dominant, pro dominated protests are just women playing out fetishes. Now they’re going to these ice.

Ice protests, antagonizing men saying, arrest me. Do it. I just saw some footage when I was watching another Aspen Gold stream on, on that was posted on YouTube later, where at one point it seemed like ice agents were pouring water on men. Women who were protesting may be blocking their way, like water bottle, emptying water bottles onto their faces, and the women were saying more water as this kind of resistance protest or something.

But now that I look at it from like a, a fetish perspective, I don’t know, man. What if women are just, what if women are using this as a way to exercise their resistance? [01:07:00] Fetishes and they’re, I’m being dominated by strong man in a uniform and a mask. It’s kind of sexy. I I get it. You know, like I could see it.

No, I,

Malcolm Collins: I I Ice role play. You need to, that’s, that’s gonna be the next thing. Yeah.

Simone Collins: You gotta, I,

Malcolm Collins: it’s, if I look on Amazon, am I

Simone Collins: gonna find ice costumes and that they have need to ice one star days? We need

Malcolm Collins: ai. Well,

Simone Collins: yeah. Today I made I made one where you’re Candace Owens, but all the conspiracy theories are true.

I made you wake up as Kaya right before the Kaya Please shock incident. And you have to figure out what you’re gonna do with your life. I made one where you are Charlie and you have to navigate the dystopian UK government. Perhaps saving Amelia. I don’t know. We’ll find out. I’m doing it. I’m having fun with them.

You know, we should, we should do an ice. I protest romance and NSFW. [01:08:00] It’s, it’s gonna be perfect. But yeah, I, it, it’s fun building out the, the scenarios and making them like that. I, I hope people enjoy the, the Candace Owens conspiracy theories a real one. I just started playing that after making it. I was like, whoa.

Because I put in in, in, in reality fabricator, when you make a scenario, you’re able to make the public summary and starting point for a game or an AI scenario or like narrative, but you’re also able to put in stuff that only the AI can see. And so it’s really helpful when you wanna do things like Candace Owens, but all the conspiracy theories are real.

You just put in a detailed profile of Candace Owens and then a detailed summary of all of her conspiracy theories so that they thread into the narrative of. The game itself. And I find that actually really interesting because when I listen to Candace Owens talk, I find myself thinking, [01:09:00] how, how does she, how does this work?

How does it work with the Egyptian planes and the Jews and all these things? How do they fit together? How can this world be cohesive? And, and, and yeah, some people like her, I’m like, her brain is just cooked.

Malcolm Collins: It’s like

Simone Collins: she, well, no, but with reality fabricator, you can, through her eyes, play out the scenario and try to understand how things feel from her perspective.

And, and I, I didn’t realize that reality faab, reality fabricator would be so useful for me. Help

Malcolm Collins: me empathize with Candace Owen. Yeah. To be like, okay,

Simone Collins: let’s just, let’s just take her word for it. Okay. All of the conspiracy theories are real. And, and I can see what she says. She has. What am I seeing? What am I looking at?

What do I do? And so I didn’t realize that AI chatbots could also really help you build empathy or at least try to see something from someone’s perspective. But I’m very excited to create the NSFW Ice Agent Romance and a [01:10:00] scenario. It, it will hopefully rank well, but nothing will ever come close to, and I still have to play it through.

There’s this one NSFW scenario that someone created on our fab called all the check boxes because Malcolm created this giant help you create your own narrative tool where you can check all the boxes or that you want for either an a, a safer work adventure scenario or a character that you chat with or a, a raunchy scenario. And so it includes all, like any fetish you could possibly imagine dominance versus submission roles tropes, et cetera. And someone just checked every single box just to see what would happen. I really wanna figure out. It’s dominant and it’s submissive. It’s, it’s BDSM and it’s, it’s, it’s gentle.

It’s, I don’t know. I, I wanna, I need to, I need to see what it’s like. Anyway we will, we will get to the show ‘cause I’m sorry, but we just, we have to talk [01:11:00] sometimes. And this is our time. All right.

Okay. You good? Oh, oh, we had a situation. Sorry. There is, there’s, wow. What, what did you do? You good buddy? Let’s see what’s going. The double chin’s kinda okay. Okay.

Okay.

Alright.

Sorry. He woke up at three 30 and was like, let’s do it. We didn’t go back to sleep after that.

Speaker 3: Come down here to get people dressed. What is happening over here? What are you doing? Andy taught me, so his funny, his birthday party. How did Indy get out of her bed? Tim did it. Octavian? Yeah. Did you help Indy get out of her bed? Be nice.[01:12:00]

Speaker 4: They are so cute.

Drove us marching around. Had Indy gotten out of her, her cage? Yeah, they got her out in, got your, so they were marching around and doing what? They were just marching around yelling.

Speaker 6: Toasty. Andy wants to play toasty. Come on. Alright girl. Are you being silly, but I just having, what are you doing, Titan?

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