Unlearning Patriarchy and Desire
Here’s what nobody tells you: your desire was never meant to be yours.
From the moment we’re conscious enough to understand the world around us, we’re handed scripts about what desire should look like. Who should want whom. When. How much. In what ways. These scripts arrive wrapped in Disney fairy tales and porn hub thumbnails, in church pews and biology textbooks, in every rom-com that insists love and lust are a matched set—though most of us know they rarely show up that way in real life.
The body has always belonged to either God or science. There has never been a time in Western history that the body truly belonged to the person who inhabits it. And desire? Desire has been perhaps the most tightly controlled territory of all.
Under patriarchy, women’s desire exists only as a response—something activated by the right touch, the right partner, the right circumstances. Never as its own entity. Never as a force originating from within. We’re taught that our eroticism requires permission, that pleasure is a prize we earn through beauty, compliance, or performance. Meanwhile, men are handed a desire script equally limiting: insatiable, uncomplicated, always ready, requiring no cultivation or tenderness.
Both scripts are lies. Both leave us struggling.
When we talk about unlearning patriarchy in the context of desire, we’re not just talking about equality in the bedroom—though that matters. We’re talking about reclaiming sovereignty over our own erotic selves. We’re talking about the radical act of discovering what we actually want, not what we’ve been told we should want.
This unlearning asks uncomfortable questions: What if your lack of desire isn’t a dysfunction but a refusal to perform someone else’s script? What if the “low libido” you’ve been diagnosed with is actually your body’s wisdom saying no to sex that doesn’t serve you? What if desire isn’t something that happens to you but something you cultivate, tend, and discover?
Patriarchy taught us that sex is natural—that it should just flow effortlessly from love or attraction. But here’s the truth: desire is learned. It’s developed. It requires curiosity, safety, permission, and the radical courage to show ourselves to ourselves. To be in our bodies rather than performing our bodies.
Unlearning means recognizing that there’s no “right” way your desire should look. No prescribed frequency, no mandated fantasies, no predetermined map of what should turn you on. Your erotic template is as unique as your fingerprint, shaped by your history, your values, your nervous system, your imagination.
It means understanding that cultivating desire requires us to stop treating sex as a means to an end—orgasm, connection, validation—and instead approach it as an experience worthy of our full presence and curiosity.
It means knowing that power is central to sex and pleasure, and that we’ve been collectively distracted by focusing only on “what’s going wrong” rather than how to do it right. In a culture still deeply uncomfortable with women’s ownership of eroticism, we need a nuanced examination of what makes sex hot for us—not for the patriarchy’s performance standards, but for the actual people having it.
Here’s what I want you to know: There is nothing wrong with you. The system is flawed. The scripts we inherited were never designed to help us flourish erotically—they were designed to control and contain desire, particularly women’s desire, within narrow, manageable channels.
Unlearning patriarchy means reclaiming your body for yourself. It means approaching your desire with the same curiosity and dedication you’d bring to learning any art form. It means giving yourself permission to want what you want—and equally, permission not to want what you don’t.
It means recognizing that building a rich, sustainable erotic life is learnable, doable, and absolutely within your reach. Not through performance or compliance, but through the courageous work of showing up for yourself with compassion and curiosity.
Your desire belongs to you. It always has. Now it’s time to claim it.
