What’s the Difference Between BL and Pornography? — Part 2: Why ‘It’s Just Fantasy’ Doesn’t Hold for Male-Oriented Pornography

The image of women that pornography produces doesn’t stay on the screen. It’s already been absorbed into the people who design our laws.

In the previous piece, I wrote about how mainstream male-oriented pornography doesn’t end on the screen — about the men who brought, into contact with my actual body, the techniques they had learned from it.

But this isn’t a story that stops at individual relationships.

This time, I want to look at what mainstream male-oriented pornography is doing to society as a whole.

Mainstream male-oriented pornography is a product made by men, for men.

In society, men more easily hold power. Physical strength, professional position, money, the right to be heard. Resources like money and ease of living are distributed, by the system, more heavily toward men. Women, meanwhile, end up with less access to those resources, and on top of that, are more often placed in the position of being looked at, evaluated, sexualized.

On that tilted seesaw — that uneven reality — mainstream male-oriented pornography is built around a particular structure: the side with more power uses the bodies of those with less power for its own pleasure. That’s the problem this kind of pornography carries.

The result is that some men are trained to let the line between fiction and reality go soft. In sexual situations, their behavior toward women defaults to what they’ve seen in pornographic videos.

And these men are not absent from the parts of society that build society itself. They exist, also, among the highly educated.

Let me bring up something specific.

In March 2019, a series of four acquittals in sexual violence cases were handed down in Japan, one after another, and the public response triggered the Flower Demo movement — monthly public gatherings, led by women, demanding judicial reform on sexual assault.

One of those four cases involved a father who had forced sexual intercourse on his nineteen-year-old daughter. The abuse had begun when she was in the second year of middle school. When she resisted, he hit her, kicked her. Even so, the ruling came down: “It cannot be said that there was a relationship of control so strong that she could not have defied her father.” Acquittal.

(For the record: this verdict was overturned on appeal, and the father was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison.)

The people who hand down these verdicts are judges. By and large, men.

“It cannot be said that she was in a state where she could not have resisted.” On what is this judgment based? The law? The judge’s own personal experience? In what proportion?

It’s not that the actual experience the woman lived through wasn’t heard. The question is: when ruling on whether what she described was “not severe enough to count as inability to resist,” what was the standard inside the judge’s head?

What I see is this. Judges who grew up in an era without functioning sex education are using, as their standard for sexuality, the pornography they have encountered in their daily lives — and they have not updated that frame.

There’s another layer underneath this. In Japan, “human rights” is a phrase that appears in textbooks. But operating from that concept in actual judgment is something this society, as a whole, hasn’t quite learned to do. Especially among the older men who currently hold power in this society, human rights often remain a textbook phrase — never quite implemented.

For international readers, some context matters here. In Japan, comprehensive sex education has been structurally suppressed for decades. In the late 1990s, attempts to introduce more substantive curricula were met, in the early 2000s, with a coordinated political backlash that gutted the materials. Even today, junior high school health textbooks are not allowed to describe sexual intercourse directly.

That means generations of Japanese adults — including people now in positions of authority — grew up without a strong institutional framework for understanding sexuality, consent, or the body. In that vacuum, mainstream pornography often becomes the unofficial sex education.

I spent fifteen years working inside Japanese schools. What I saw there was a world where “human rights” existed as text — teachers and students knew the phrase — but where everyone was so focused on following the rules that no one stopped to ask who the rules were for, what they were meant to protect, or where they were trying to lead. Public education in this country operates somewhere far away from democracy, far away from the question of what a civil society actually looks like.

The children raised by teachers like this grow up believing that this is just “how society works.” They become judges. They become politicians. They become the people who write the news. They become teachers themselves.

These judges have internalized a pornographic image of “how a woman behaves” — and from inside that image, they reason: “If she truly didn’t want it, she would have resisted more violently. If she truly didn’t want it, she would have escaped sooner. If she truly didn’t want it, she wouldn’t have gone to see him again afterward.”

That imagined victim is not the actual victim.

On top of that, they appear to lack basic knowledge of how the human nervous system protects the body.

When the brain registers physical danger, a threat to life, we fight or flee — if there’s room to do so. But the moment the brain calculates that fighting or fleeing will make the situation worse, the body is built to freeze in place.

And once a person’s sexual boundaries have been violated — once they’ve had an experience of being overwhelmed in a way they couldn’t control in the moment — the brain doesn’t process that memory the way it processes ordinary memories that fade over time. It stores it as trauma memory, the kind that, when triggered, brings the original terror flooding back at full force.

To return that traumatic memory to the category of ordinary memory, a person needs the help of a mental health professional, over a long timeframe, paying real money.

And the work of recovery — coming back to her own life — running in parallel with the work of getting the perpetrator to acknowledge what happened, of pressing the case publicly — can push a woman’s mind to the very edge of survival.

The people who write the laws, who deliver the verdicts, who write the news, who decide the policies, who teach the children — among all of them, there are men who never received human-rights-grounded sex education, and who have come to understand sexuality through pornographic videos and older sexual norms.

This is not an argument that sexual harm only comes from men, or that women never harm anyone. People of any gender can hurt others.

What I am trying to describe is a pattern shaped by scale and power: in Japan, mainstream male-oriented pornography reaches a large male audience inside a society where men still hold more physical, economic, and institutional power. That combination matters.

This is why the conversation about “men with pornography in their heads” doesn’t stop at individual relationships.

The influence of mainstream male-oriented pornography breaks out of fiction. It threatens the human rights of real women in the real world.

There’s actual harm.

That’s how it looks to me.

So far, I’ve written about how male-oriented pornography travels from individual relationships all the way through society, and what it does to women along the way.

Now: what about BL?

BL also has sexual depictions. Some works are intense. I’ve already said I love them.

So what, exactly, separates mainstream male-oriented pornography from BL?

That’s where the next piece goes.