Early on October 5th, I opened TikTok like any other morning – blurry eyed and probably far too early to be contributing to my already eye watering screen time.

But on this morning a video from a fellow sports content creator caught my attention. Soph (@sophbons on TikTok) and I have been mutuals since I began my account. Both of us focusing on ice hockey content in countries where the sport is still largely on the fringes (Soph is from the UK, I am from Australia), we share a common goal: the growth of the game we love.

“Let’s get ready for a hockey game,” she starts, “whilst we talk about that article.”

That article, was a piece by UK journalist Kitty Drake for the Financial Times, about the surging popularity of the UK’s premier hockey league, the EIHL (Elite Ice Hockey League).

Originally titled “How romance readers rescued British ice hockey” and later changed to “How romance readers found British ice hockey”, the article depicted the author on a journey to discover why the EIHL had so rapidly grown in attendance since 2020. The setting for her article was at the games of the Nottingham Panthers, the aforementioned Soph’s beloved hockey team.

But instead of an objective piece highlighting that while yes, many women discovered their love of hockey through the medium of reading hockey romance novels, what was produced was an astronomically condescending article that painted female fans of ice hockey as children playing with life sized Barbie dolls in the form of real adult men playing a sport.

The thing that struck me most about this article was not the way in which she left out the opinions of women who provided information that was an antithesis to her intention with this piece. Nor the blatant disregard for the hard work of those within the EIHL working to get bums in seats. But the way Drake essentially writes a self insert hockey fan fiction under the guise of investigative journalism.

“Forty hockey players streak on to the ice, drop down on their hands and knees and begin to gyrate. They roll around and make strange thrusting motions with their hips.” Also known as dynamic stretching for a sport that requires speed, strength and flexibility.

She regales the event of her getting nervous to meet up with one of the players for the article, even going so much to brush her teeth behind a bush so that she doesn’t have bad breath for their first meeting.

She then decides to inform this player that there are people online that sexualise hockey players and show him videos of them doing so on TikTok, in what comes across as a way to distinguish herself from the crowd of gawking, giddy teenage girls that inhabit the bodies of adult women watching sport.

The article is positioned by Drake to be a positive depiction of how books like the obscenely popular Icebreaker have helped bring British ice hockey to new audiences, and I’m sure that those who wish to defend the article will use this as an argument against criticism. While it is true that many fans have indeed found themselves deep into hockey fandom thanks to the works of romantic fiction that take up the majority of shelf space at your local bookstore, what it really does is infantilise and condescend to the female fans of the sport. So much to the point where the EIHL themselves made a statement about the article.

This controversy doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however. Within hockey novels, as in real life, female main characters (FMC’s) or women who are interested in hockey players are often referred to as “puck bunnies”. This derogatory term is used to describe women who are exclusively interested in relationships with hockey players, but is also used as an insult towards women who express an interest in the sport (Crawford and Gosling).

There are also a number of hockey romance titles with the term “puck bunny” in the title such as Sincerely, The Puck Bunny by Maren Moore, a book where the FMC gets pregnant after a one night stand with an NHL player and writes about it on a not-so-secret gossip blog on which she refers to herself as “The Puck Bunny”.

The perception of women’s interest in sport being purely sexual with terms like puck bunny is a one that permeates throughout hockey fandom.

However, something that happens within the defending of female fans from these insults in an attempt to separate “real fans” from the puck bunny. This action acknowledges the existence of the puck bunny, but asserts that while not all women are evil vixens in hockey jerseys, waiting for their chance to pounce on the innocent and unsuspecting hockey player, some are.

Within their paper The Myth of the “Puck Bunny”: Female Fans and Men’s Ice Hockey, sociologists Crawford and Gosling note that the participants in their study make a conscious effort to prove their legitimacy as fans through explaining how much they know about the sport or turning their nose up at any suggestion that they might have an attraction to the players.

The distain towards the so-called puck bunny is something that is shared by male and female fans of the sport alike.

Women fight to not be seen as a shallow, sex obsessed succubus lurking beyond the plexiglass in an attempt for a sliver of respect and legitimacy as a fan.

Men fight for their hockey heroes to not fall for the trap, lest they be “falsely accused”, while simultaneously seeing the “puck bunny” as a conquest to be bragged about to his comrades. Nelson writes that the labelling women as puck bunnies makes women both the sexual object and sexual predator preying on hockey players. A dichotomy that is apparently lost on those who use the term freely, and accuse women of being one.

For the female fan, the separation from the puck bunny might be felt as a feminist move. One that rejects the expectations of women to act purely as sexual objects for the pleasure of men in favour of the joy of the sport they love. And while a large majority of women may believe they do not harbour any ill will towards a woman who may only be at the local hockey game to sleep with a player, there is always a want to be seen as a legitimate fan in the eyes of the sports gatekeepers; men.

Kitty Drake does exactly this within the article. She positions the female fans of men’s ice hockey as silly, frivolous things while trying to gain some form of legitimacy with the player she interviews. She does this by showing him all the weird and sexual things that are said on the internet about hockey players, while simultaneously admitting to have formed a para-social relationship with the player just by having watched him play. She writes about how women see these players as characters in their romance novels, while writing a fan fiction about her experiences at the rink.

But the truth is, while I dislike the implications of the article (especially where Drake reduces ice hockey to “a bunch of masked men chase a target through an empty space”) the issue is much deeper than just this one piece.

And this is where Playboy comes in.

On April 9, 1926, the earth beneath Chicago cracked open and from the sulphur filled abyss emerged a creature that would go on to ruin countless women’s lives; Hugh Marston Hefner.

Born to conservative Methodist Christian’s who made a living as an accountant and a teacher, Hef’s parents always hoped he’d grow up to be a missionary but instead he joined the military as an army writer.

In the first and potentially only instance of myself and Hefner having something in common, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing and psychology in 1949 and went on to work at Esquire.

After being refused a $5 raise, Hefner left Esquire and set his sights on creating his own “classy gentleman’s” magazine. With what is the equivalent of just under 100k USD today, he created Playboy — a much more catchy name than the originally proposed “Stag Party”.

For the first edition of Playboy, Hefner acquired the nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe, something she had done under a pseudonym before she had become the mega star that she was, and published them within the magazine. The cover boasts FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ANY MAGAZINE IN FULL COLOR MARILYN MONROE NUDE.

While countless women would clamber for the title that would later be known as the “Playmate of the Month”, Marilyn Monroe did not consent to being the very first “sweetheart” of the month, and never received a cent for her nude body being plastered on the pages of a magazine.

And this would set the tone for the empire that Hugh Hefner would build on the exploitation of women.

The sickening genius of Hugh Hefner is the way he convinced women that it was not only empowering to pose nude for the pleasure of men, but that it became a goal to chase with such hunger it was all consuming.

Hef would time and time again call himself a feminist and a fighter for the sexual revolution. Playboy weaponised choice feminism, stood on the shoulders of the “Girl Power” movement, and convinced women that sexuality was one of their only means of having power – however temporary that might be.

In the wake of feminisms third wave, a canyon opened up between feminists. Those who adhered to the second waves beliefs and values were dismayed with the newer generations reclamation of sexuality. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, author Arial Levy explores the rise of highly sexualised female behaviour of the third wave. Levy believed it to be a manifestation of the conflict between the second wave feminists that embraced the sexual revolution and those who were vehemently anti-pornography.

Each feminist movement has it’s backlash, and the increasing conservatisation (if that is even a word) of Gen Z is part of that.

Gen Z is unsatisfied with the promise of girl boss, lean-in feminism. The raunch culture that Playboy promoted and sold to the previous generation of women as a way to gain power has left them feeling empty, and like Nixon’s election at the height of the second wave, conservatism has slithered into the public consciousness again.

The term “male gaze”, while originally intended as a critique of the depiction of women within film, has become part of the vernacular of todays digital natives. However well intentioned, the idea someone is acting “for the male gaze” has replaced the slut-shaming of decades past. It was anti-feminist to shame a woman for the choices she makes, but it is also anti-feminist to act in a way that is purely for the pleasure of men. Therefore we are at a stalemate.

Like the anti-pornography feminists who found themselves fighting for the same thing as ultra-conservative neo-puritans, the anti-male gaze feminist shames the “puck bunny” for the very thing the antifeminists do. This is not to say that anti-pornography feminists are wrong, or that their intention isn’t noble, but the nuance and delicacy of our intentions intersect more than one would like to think.

A woman’s passion is a prison. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. To be passionate is to put yourself in the firing line of men who, while women were sold the idea that sexuality was their only form of power, were taught that women would use that power against them.

By engaging with the male fan who questions her fandom by naming three players at his request, the female fan finds herself seeking out validation from him. For he could never be a fake fan, he’s a man! To be present in a man’s space is to be transgressive, and the men who find this to be confronting will never see you as “legitimate”. But this does not matter, and fighting to be seen differently will never, ever pay off.

Whether you found yourself rink side thanks to Icebreaker or because you were handed a hockey stick at the age of three and never looked back is irrelevant. Men who question your fandom will never be satisfied with your answer. They will only ask for more proof and your answers will fall on deaf ears.

So I implore women and femmes to decide for themselves that they are fans, and they deserve to take up space in sport. Be passionate, be loud.

I will see you at the rink.

REFERENCES

Crawford, Garry, and Victoria K. Gosling. ‘The Myth of the “Puck Bunny”: Female Fans and Men’s Ice Hockey’. Sociology, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004, pp. 477–93, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038504043214.

Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Free Press, 2005.

Nelson, Jennifer. ‘“Groupies” and “Jersey Chasers”: Male Student‐Athletes’ Sexual Relationships and Perceptions of Women’. New Directions for Student Services, vol. 2018, no. 163, 2018, pp. 55–66, https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20270.

Thorpe, Holly, et al. ‘Sportswomen and Social Media: Bringing Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism, and Neoliberal Feminism Into Conversation’. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 41, no. 5, 2017, pp. 359–83, https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723517730808.