‘Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away,’ Catherine MacKinnon, feminist legal scholar, laid it bare. Yet, the idea that sexual relations often reproduce structural inequality seems too theoretical, too radical to many. We still do not want to talk about this. Unless it’s in a flippant, titillating manner. Or performed for views and likes on social media. Can we, however, spare a thought for the utter breakdown of equality in desire, often leading to its absence?
And while we are at it, we can collectively thank pornography for the same. Contemporary pornography is pedagogical. It teaches, supplies choreography, tone, and hierarchy. It sets the “mood”. The sexual encounter becomes everything other than communion. In a media biome brimming with pornography, many young (and not so young) men have learnt to associate arousal not with reciprocity but with dominance, spectacle, and humiliation. This is nothing new though.
In his 1912 essay with an in-your-face title, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love”, Sigmund Freud states clearly, “Where they love, they do not desire and where they desire, they cannot love.” A psychic split between tenderness and erotic intensity. This split has moved from the realm of the individual and become a cultural pattern.
Details of not just sexual violence in newspapers but observations from people’s intimate lives also vindicate Freud’s insight into the debasement of the love object. Ali Wong notes in Beef, the crazy dark 2023 series, that most men like to strangulate women during the act. They also like to slap and humiliate. Can we, then, refute Freud’s claim that desire often depends upon “a lowering of the sexual object”? Degradation, of the woman, has become the bestselling genre. Unfortunately, neuroscience seems to be on the side of those who humiliate. Arousal pathways are shaped by repetition. When humiliation is repeatedly affirmed as exciting, the nervous system learns that humiliation is exciting.
{{/usCountry}}Details of not just sexual violence in newspapers but observations from people’s intimate lives also vindicate Freud’s insight into the debasement of the love object. Ali Wong notes in Beef, the crazy dark 2023 series, that most men like to strangulate women during the act. They also like to slap and humiliate. Can we, then, refute Freud’s claim that desire often depends upon “a lowering of the sexual object”? Degradation, of the woman, has become the bestselling genre. Unfortunately, neuroscience seems to be on the side of those who humiliate. Arousal pathways are shaped by repetition. When humiliation is repeatedly affirmed as exciting, the nervous system learns that humiliation is exciting.
{{/usCountry}}However, in 2026, we know that sexual scripts are not written in a vacuum. They are dictated by power relations. If women are socialised to accommodate and men to pursue, pornography amplifies these roles into caricature. Pornography, thus, reflects desire in the mirror of broader hierarchies. The presence of mirrors on the sets is not a coincidence, you see. And it’s mostly for men to observe and admire themselves. Just like in the gym. The woman is the machine available to men for a workout. The woman’s pleasure is irrelevant except when it affirms the man’s conquest.
Just look at the Epstein Files revelations to see how domination trumps desire. Here, humiliation and exploitation are not fringe behaviours. If you have wealth, prestige, and political proximity, you can mould desire into any kind of monstrosity. When influential men evade accountability for sexual exploitation, they send a signal about whose bodies are disposable. Powerful men attack women without consequence and pornography sublimates this attack as a spectacle of desire. Are we then surprised that ordinary consumers shun reciprocity and empathy for dominance?
As sociologist Michael Kimmel says, masculinity is often performed in response to perceived threats to status. In moments of socio-economic flux, some men may cling to exaggerated performances of control. Sexual dominance becomes a compensatory arena to reclaim their waning power.
This writer doesn’t collapse all male desire into a dominance monolith. Desire is plastic, and that’s where hope still glimmers. The prevalence of pornography-inspired intimacy is a window into the darkness of desire. The troubling appeal of humiliating or dominating sex for many men needs to be addressed. If pornography trains the psyche toward debasement, culture can also retrain it toward mutuality. The same stimulus-reward system that allows humiliation to become erotic can allow tenderness to become erotic.
The task before us is not to repress sexuality but to disentangle it from domination. Can we imagine an erotic life in which desire and dignity are not enemies?
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal