The Cultural Double Standard: Sex, Soft Power, and What We Pretend Not to See

Sex is everywhere, and nowhere at the same time.

It flickers across headlines, album covers, music videos, and glossy magazine spreads. It hums beneath dialogue in television dramas. It’s implied, suggested, stylised, and carefully lit. And yet, when the word pornography appears, the temperature changes. The tone sharpens. Fingers point. Concern is expressed.

This double standard has always fascinated me. Not because it’s shocking, but because it’s so familiar.

We live in a culture that sells desire constantly while insisting it disapproves of desire when it becomes too explicit, too honest, or too difficult to control. And that contradiction tells us far more about power than it does about sex.

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about how societies regulate sexuality not by silencing it, but by talking about it in very specific ways. What we allow to be seen, what we label as dangerous, and what we quietly profit from all sit within an unspoken framework of assumptions. A worldview so normalised that we rarely notice it shaping us.

Sex, in this sense, isn’t just about bodies or acts. It’s about permission.

Soft Sex and Hard Lines

Newspapers have long mastered the art of suggestion. Innuendo-heavy headlines. Page layouts that linger on bodies. Stories framed around scandal, temptation, or moral failure. This is often dismissed as harmless, even playful. “Just the way things are.”

At the same time, those same outlets frequently position pornography as a social threat. A corrosive influence. A danger to youth, relationships, and morality. The framing is rarely neutral. Porn is something other people consume. Something shameful. Something that requires intervention.

What’s striking isn’t that these two positions exist, but that they coexist so comfortably.

This is what Foucault would call a productive tension. By condemning explicit sexuality, institutions can present themselves as guardians of morality, while continuing to benefit from a steady stream of sexualised content that drives attention, clicks, and revenue. Desire is allowed, but only when it behaves.

Desire Without Agency

This becomes even more interesting when we look beyond Western media.

Take the global rise of South Korean pop culture. K-pop idols, BL dramas, and carefully constructed celebrity personas trade heavily in intimacy, longing, and emotional availability. The illusion of closeness is meticulously maintained. Eye contact, vulnerability, affection, and soft romantic cues are central to the appeal.

And yet, overt sexuality is tightly regulated.

Idols are expected to embody desire without acting on it. Romance is suggested but rarely confirmed. Sexual agency, particularly female agency, is constrained by unspoken rules. BL narratives offer space for emotional and romantic exploration between men, but often within sanitised, aestheticised boundaries that feel safe for consumption.

This isn’t accidental. It’s a system that allows desire to circulate while keeping control firmly in place.

Sex, when filtered through fantasy, becomes acceptable. When grounded in real bodies, real choices, and real autonomy, it becomes uncomfortable.

Who Gets to Define “Harm”?

Public conversations about pornography often lean heavily on fear. Harm to children. Harm to relationships. Harm to society at large. These concerns are not trivial, but they are rarely contextualised.

Large-scale studies suggest that sexually explicit material is only one small factor among many that shape sexual attitudes and behaviour. Family dynamics, education, emotional literacy, peer culture, and broader media environments all play significant roles. Yet pornography is frequently singled out as the culprit.

Why?

Because it’s easier to police than the wider cultural ecosystem.

It’s easier to condemn porn than to address the constant sexual semiotics embedded in advertising, celebrity culture, and entertainment. Easier than asking why we teach desire through implication rather than conversation. Easier than admitting that shame is doing more damage than sex ever could.

The Comfort of Silence

Despite living in an era of unprecedented access to information, open and honest conversations about sex remain surprisingly rare. Many adults still struggle to speak plainly about intimacy, consent, pleasure, and boundaries. Schools are constrained. Parents are uncertain. Media fills the gaps with spectacle rather than guidance.

When curiosity is met with silence, people look elsewhere.

Pornography doesn’t step into a vacuum by accident. It fills a space left empty by cultural discomfort. By treating sex as something to be hinted at but never discussed, we create the very conditions we later claim to fear.

What We’re Really Afraid Of

At its core, the discomfort around pornography isn’t about sex. It’s about loss of control.

Explicit sexual material resists easy regulation. It doesn’t rely on implication or plausible deniability. It confronts viewers with bodies, acts, and desires that cannot be neatly reframed as metaphor. And that makes institutions uneasy.

So we draw lines. Soft sex is acceptable. Hard sex is dangerous. Fantasy is fine. Agency is risky.

But these lines are cultural, not moral truths.

Desire doesn’t disappear because we disapprove of it. It simply finds other routes.

Sitting With the Discomfort

I’m not interested in defending pornography as a universal good, nor in dismissing legitimate concerns about exploitation, consent, or harm. Those conversations matter. Deeply.

What I’m interested in is honesty.

Honesty about the ways we already trade in desire. About the stories we tell ourselves to stay comfortable. About the power structures that decide which expressions of sexuality are permitted and which are condemned.

If we’re willing to sit with that discomfort, even briefly, we might start asking better questions. Not “how do we suppress this?” but “why does this unsettle us so much?” Not “who is to blame?” but “what are we refusing to talk about?”

Sex has always been part of culture. The question isn’t whether it belongs there.

It’s whether we’re brave enough to look at how we frame it, who benefits, and what that says about us.

This piece began life as an academic essay I wrote in 2014. It’s been rewritten and expanded here, with the benefit of time, distance, and a very different media landscape.