I went in for the brain-rot. I came out with a thesis.
That’s the honest version of how I spent last weekend. A Sebby’s Scroll, the phone face-down and actually hoping nobody would call, not even clients, and eight episodes of a college hockey show I had no business being obsessed with at my age. By Sunday I was sending WhatsApp audios to three friends. Two of them had already finished it. The third caved and started episode one after my fifth reel.
If you’ve been anywhere near a screen, you know what I’m talking about. Off Campus. Prime Video. The hockey players and the women who love them, based on Elle Kennedy‘s books. It dropped on the thirteenth of May and detonated. Thirty-six million viewers on the debut season. Renewed for a second run before a single episode aired. Crazy numbers.
But men are still not getting it. They think it’s the bodies. The tousled hair, the shower scenes, the back tattoo, the Aussie musician who smiles and makes everyone forget their own names. Sure. Fine. Hot. But that’s not why a forty-eight-year-old woman is in the comments admitting she’s hooked. That’s not why my friend who runs a law firm watched it twice.
Women aren’t obsessed with these men because they’re hot. Women are obsessed because these men make the women in the show feel safe. And we have apparently been so starved of that on screen that watching it feels radical. Almost like a sci-fi.
I’ve built my entire business on this exact idea. So you can imagine how it felt to watch a glossy streaming hit accidentally make my life’s thesis go viral.
There’s a scene that should be taught in schools. Yes, in schools.
Garrett, the captain, the cocky one, asks one of his teammates how to be good in bed. How to make it good for a woman. And the answer isn’t a technique. It isn’t some move you’d read in a men’s magazine in 1998. It isn’t anything the modern dating-coach grifters are flogging to lonely young men online. The answer is simple. You make her feel safe. You make her feel comfortable. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. That’s the ultimate ‘Bro advice’.
I nearly dropped my scroll. God forbid.
Because for years I’ve been saying one sentence to anyone who’ll listen, and quite a few people who won’t. Safety is not a feature of what we do at Her Confidant. Safety is the product. When a woman feels safe, everything else arrives on its own. Trust. Openness. Desire. The good stuff. You cannot bolt pleasure onto fear. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. The whole architecture has to start with her feeling held.
The show knows this. Every swoon-worthy moment is built on it. The intimacy between Hannah and Garrett doesn’t catch fire because of some grand passionate collision. It catches fire because she gets to a point where she trusts him enough to tell him the truth about herself. The wanting comes after the safety. Not the other way around.
I’ve watched the dating world tell women the opposite for forty years. Be cool. Don’t be needy. Don’t ask for too much. Make yourself small and available and grateful. And then we wonder why so many women arrive at fifty feeling like strangers in their own bodies.
Safety is the new sexy. I’ll keep saying it until I’m hoarse.
Let’s talk about that first shower scene.
The very first time Hannah lays eyes on Garrett, he’s naked in the shower. And the actor playing him has been refreshingly open about why. The whole show was made through what they call the female gaze. Every time the clothes come off, there’s a reason, and the reason is her. The camera isn’t serving some imaginary bloke on the couch. It’s serving the woman in the story, and the women watching at home.
This is not a small thing. For most of cinema history, women on screen have been arranged. Lit, posed, framed for a viewer everyone assumed was a man. We learned to watch ourselves being watched. We got very good at it. Most of us still do it without noticing, sucking the stomach in, checking the angle, performing desirability instead of feeling desire.
Off Campus flips the whole apparatus. The man is the one being looked at. The woman holds the gaze. Her pleasure is the subject of the scene, not the decoration around it.
This is the exact thing we sell. I say that plainly. Her Confidant has never been about selling sex. It’s about selling the female gaze made real. A space where a woman is the one doing the choosing, the wanting, the receiving. Where she is the centre of the room rather than the prop in someone else’s evening. Women don’t get to be that very often. When they do, even on a television, the relief is so enormous it looks like obsession.
Now here’s where it gets juicy, because the show went somewhere most rom-coms wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.
Hannah is a survivor of sexual assault. And the show handles it with a grace I genuinely did not expect. She tells Garrett she hasn’t been able to orgasm with a man since it happened. She’s clear with him. She doesn’t want pity. She doesn’t want him to play therapist. She wants to ease her way back into her own pleasure, on her own terms.
What he does in response is the most quietly revolutionary thing I’ve seen on screen in years. He doesn’t push. He notices she’s not quite comfortable, and instead of sex, he suggests they sit across from each other and pleasure themselves. Together. At her pace. A soft landing back into intimacy with the dial entirely in her hands. Consent is EVERYTHING.
And then, after, they go and eat cold pasta in the kitchen and have a laugh about it. No violins. No big trauma speech. Just two people, and a small brave thing that mattered.
Here is the statistic we’ve been shouting from rooftops. Ninety-five per cent of men reach orgasm during sex. For women, it’s about sixty-five. His pleasure is expected. Hers is negotiated. We fought for the vote and equal pay and a seat at every table, and somehow we still treat a woman’s pleasure as an optional extra she should feel lucky to receive.
A mainstream hit just put that gap on screen and treated closing it as the romantic climax of the season. Women noticed. Of course they noticed. So many of us have spent years quietly wondering if the problem was us. Watching Hannah find her way back to her own body, gently and without shame, lands like permission. You’re allowed to want this. You’re allowed to take your time. You’re allowed to come back to yourself.
That work is half of what we actually do. Women arrive at Her Confidant after divorce, after grief, after years of feeling switched off. Some have never had an experience that put them first. We don’t rush them. We build the soft landing. The show just dramatised our Thursday afternoons.
One more thing, and maybe the one men should pay more attention to.
These hockey players have a lot of sex with a lot of people, and yet there is not one moment of nasty locker-room talk. No bragging. No cruelty. No treating women as a scoreboard. The men do away with the entire jock stereotype. They’re emotionally available. They talk about feelings. They care for each other. They treat a woman’s comfort as the point of the exercise.
Women are watching this and feeling something close to grief, because it’s so far from the noise they’re drowning in everywhere else. The manosphere is busy telling a generation of young men that vulnerability is weakness and dominance is worth. Meanwhile millions of women are weeping over a fictional hockey player whose entire appeal is that he listens.
I’ll say the controversial bit. Some of what these men do is genuinely the bare minimum. Respecting a boundary. Asking what she likes. Making her feel safe. The fact that it reads as fantasy, as something almost too good to be true, tells you everything about how low the bar has been set and how long women have been quietly stepping over it.
This is precisely why I built Her Confidant the way I did. Every companion is a man who has never done this work before he came to us. Successful, worldly men from other lives who choose this because they actually like making a woman feel extraordinary. We don’t select for swagger. We select for empathy. For the kind of man who understands that her ease is the whole job. The men women are crying over on screen are, more or less, the brief I’ve been hiring to for years.
So here’s my real take. Women of every age, from twenty to sixty-five, will happily pay for a streaming subscription to watch a man make a woman feel safe and seen and properly satisfied. They’ll fan-edit it. They’ll send it to the group chat. They’ll call it their guilty pleasure.
And then a great many of those same women will feel a flush of shame at the idea of seeking the real version. A man whose whole purpose, for one evening, is her. Her comfort, her pleasure, her story.
Why is the fantasy celebrated and the appointment whispered about? Men have had access to companionship, to being centred and tended to, for the whole of human history. Nobody made them feel grubby about it. The double standard is so old it’s practically furniture.
You don’t have to wait for season two. That’s the thing I keep wanting to say to every woman swooning over Garrett. The longing you’re feeling isn’t silly and it isn’t unreachable. It’s data. It’s your own body telling you what it’s been missing.
The show is the fantasy. We’re the real thing.
So watch it. Love it. Cry into your sauvignon blanc when the song plays and they finally get back together. Then ask yourself why a fictional man gets to make you feel that way and a real evening built entirely around you feels off limits.
You don’t need permission to want more. You never did.
If you’re curious, the line’s open and the conversation is always judgement-free. Make the call.
x Anna
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Anna Grosman is the founder of Her Confidant, Australia’s only female-led companionship agency specialising in elite male escorts for women. Her Confidant offers intentional intimate experiences across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and the Gold Coast.
