It's Time For A Break Up With #HockeyRomance

Hockey romance is one of the most popular genres out there, but anything that romanticizes hockey culture of sexual conquests, needs to get dumped.

I got a text message from another author. It read, “Hockey romances are hot right now, so I might have hockey-related questions.”

They weren’t wrong, so I replied. My reply however, wasn’t in favour of the genre. The next day a follow up came.

“What are some inaccurate stereotypes of professional hockey players that you’d like to see overcome?”

This time I replied in depth. Here are snippets of what I texted this author. And as a warning, there are mentions to assault, sexual violence, and suicide.

“Well hockey is ripe with rape culture, men being forced to conform and sacrifice for their team, that women are “puck bunnies” and that hockey players are these desirable people….But hockey culture is a problem, and I hate romanticizing it.

From the time hockey players make their first travel team… soon they’re taught that women are just another item a hockey player must conquer. And then they are taught that if you do not conquer women, you will be outcast, and you are not normal, and must be gay.

When I was 14, my coach gave our entire team a lesson on oral sex. When I was 15 I watched a different coach suck tequila off the chest of a 16-year-old girl. Sometime in there a third coach drew a picture of a net on a board, then drew pubic hair curls around the posts and told us to picture the girls in the stands when we pictured the net, and that we should jam home and crash the net and never stop no matter what. Probably when I was 17 I saw my first orgy where a young player was being forced to lose his virginity, he killed himself when he was 27. These are the tame stories. I could tell you dozens more. And these are not abnormal. Look at Hockey Canada’s group sexual assault cases. I could send you thousands of pages of affidavits where you’d hear about sodomy, abuse, rape, and the dangerous objectification of women.

So anything that romanticizes men in hockey as the typical characters we see in romantic comedies, I despise. Yes, there are many many many wonderful people who play hockey. Most however, suffer. They suffer mentally, they suffer physically, they suffer with substance abuse to cope, they suffer with identity, and eventually they leave hockey. There is a reason I can’t even play old-timers hockey, because I was tired of hearing them talk about trading wives and whose wife’s breasts were the nicest. It’s pervasive.

All this to say, hockey romances generally suck and are dangerous.

I went on, and on, but you get the idea.

As the CBC wrote, much of the popularity for hockey romance novels revolves around “broadly appealing alpha male characters."

When you hear that phrase, it’s often attached to problematic figures who veil misogyny and the oppression of women by self identifying themselves as “alpha males.” It’s a list that includes men like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong, at all, with the spiciest of romance novels. I believe people are free to explore those realms of being human how they want with who they want. The problem here is, an entire genre is built around a culture that celebrates rape, that celebrates misogyny, and that has actively worked to oppress women and exclude them from hockey spaces, unless it’s related to sex. It’s not a chicken or the egg situation, the game needs to change first. No amount of fictional redemption stories, or romanticizing the abuser who sees the light, can change hockey. It can only make it more dangerous.

As Taking Shots writes, the main character has to give up “The girls, the money blowing, the drinking, everything had to stop,” when he met his true love. In The Mistake it’s a hockey player who “can get any girl he wants. For this hockey star, life is a parade of parties and hookups…” and his love interest cannot be expected “to roll over and beg like all his other puck bunnies.” Or in The Score it’s a player who “always gets what he wants. Girls, grades, girls, recognition, girls…he’s a ladies man…”

There are hockey romances out there that find a way to balance the issues in their stories. There are books that challenge hockey’s heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity. There are books that are classic romance novels involving people who just happen to be involved in hockey. It’s the celebration of hockey’s culture of exploiting and abusing women, that should not be romanticized.

It’s not that these books can’t or shouldn’t exist. Trust me, I’m not for banning books. But the genre itself is a problem because people are capitalizing off real problems that face women and girls in hockey, by proliferating the misplaced lore of the sexual conquests men in hockey seek.

The game needs to continue to change, and continue to face hard truths. But normalizing and romanticizing the men in this game who take advantage of women, and posing them as men who can easily be redeemed seems like a recipe to place more people in vulnerable positions. Of course people can read these books understanding this context, but just as with any social issue, this is often a pipe dream.

Hopefully more of these books address the issues, include prefaces discussing the issues, or that create heroes that are bucking against hockey’s culture, and because of their intent to approach relationships consensually, they end up finding love…and spicy love at that.

Until then, it’s time to break up with hockey romances.