Who Teaches Us Desire? Porn, Power, and the Stories We’re Allowed to Tell

There’s a strange contradiction at the heart of how we talk about sex.

We live in a world saturated with desire. It’s in advertising, pop music, film, celebrity culture, social media, and the carefully managed personas of idols and influencers. Romance is teased, intimacy is implied, bodies are curated, and longing is endlessly monetised. And yet, when the subject turns to pornography, the tone hardens. The shutters come down. Shame enters the room.

Porn, we’re told, is dangerous. Corrupting. Morally suspect. A social ill that needs managing, restricting, or banning altogether.

This contradiction has always fascinated me. Not because pornography is uncomplicated or harmless, but because it’s rarely discussed honestly or in isolation from the wider media ecosystem that shapes how we understand sex, love, and intimacy in the first place.

Following Michel Foucault’s thinking, sexuality isn’t simply a private instinct or biological drive. It’s something produced through discourse. Through institutions, knowledge systems, cultural norms, and power structures that decide what can be said, shown, or acknowledged. Pornography sits inside this web, not outside it.

The Illusion of Innocence

One of the most persistent myths around pornography is that it is uniquely explicit, while everything else is somehow benign.

But much of our mainstream media trades in sexual suggestion without ever naming it as such. Pop idols are styled to appear emotionally available but sexually inaccessible. BL dramas offer intimacy without consummation. Reality TV flirts relentlessly while maintaining plausible deniability. Newspapers sell sex through innuendo, scandal, and titillation, while loudly condemning porn on their opinion pages.

This is not an absence of sexual messaging. It’s a carefully curated version of it.

Foucault would argue that power doesn’t operate by silencing sex, but by endlessly managing how it appears. Which desires are legitimised. Which are hidden. Which are framed as dangerous. Pornography becomes a convenient scapegoat because it is visible, explicit, and easy to point at. Meanwhile, the subtler forms of sexual scripting pass unnoticed.

Learning Desire by Osmosis

When formal, open conversations about sex are restricted, people learn by absorption.

They learn from what they see repeated. From narratives that reward certain behaviours and punish others. From whose desires are framed as romantic and whose are framed as deviant.

Pornography is often blamed for shaping unrealistic expectations of sex, bodies, and relationships. Sometimes that criticism is valid. But it rarely acknowledges that pornography is not operating in a vacuum.

A young person growing up today absorbs lessons about desire from everywhere. From influencers who sell intimacy through relatability. From idol industries that encourage emotional investment without reciprocity. From media that equates love with persistence, jealousy, or emotional labour. From gendered scripts about who initiates, who consents, who performs, and who pleases.

If pornography teaches anything, it does so alongside all of this.

Power, Gender, and Who Gets to Want

A recurring anxiety in discussions about porn is control. Who produces it. Who profits from it. Who is being objectified. These are real questions, particularly given the industry’s history of male dominance and exploitation.

But again, pornography is not unique here.

Idol industries are heavily gendered. Emotional labour is feminised. Male desire is normalised. Female desire is either commodified or moralised. Queer desire is permitted when it is aesthetic, palatable, or safely contained within fantasy.

BL, for example, often exists in a strange space where queerness is celebrated but carefully contained. It can offer intimacy, longing, and emotional connection while still avoiding explicit conversations about sex, agency, or power.

That said, BL isn’t a monolith. While South Korean BL tends to remain tightly constrained, often stopping short of explicit sexual expression, Thai and some Japanese BL push those boundaries enthusiastically -sometimes joyfully, sometimes chaotically, and occasionally in ways that feel entirely unhinged.

The problem isn’t that desire exists. It’s that only certain forms of desire are allowed to be visible without punishment.

Shame as Social Control

One of the most enduring effects of this landscape is shame.

Pornography is treated as forbidden speech. People rarely admit to consuming it openly, even when surveys consistently show that large portions of the population do. This gap between public morality and private behaviour creates guilt, silence, and dissonance.

Shame becomes a regulating force. It keeps conversations fragmented. It prevents meaningful education. It allows institutions to retain authority while absolving themselves of responsibility.

And it doesn’t just affect pornography. It affects how people talk about pleasure, boundaries, consent, and intimacy in all contexts.

Beyond Bans and Panic

Calls to ban pornography often come wrapped in concern for children, morality, or social cohesion. But history shows us that repression doesn’t eliminate desire. It simply pushes it underground, where it becomes harder to discuss, regulate, or contextualise.

What’s missing from most debates is nuance.

Pornography can be exploitative. It can also be ethical. It can distort expectations. It can also offer exploration. It can harm. It can also coexist with healthy relationships when framed honestly and consumed consciously.

The real issue is not pornography alone, but a culture that refuses to talk openly about sex while constantly selling versions of it.

Until we address that contradiction, we’ll keep circling the same moral panic, blaming one visible outlet while ignoring the wider system that shapes desire in the first place.

This essay is an updated and expanded reflection based on academic work I first wrote in 2014, revisited through the lens of contemporary media, fandom, and digital culture.