The White Lotus, Brown Fetish: India's Love-Hate Obsession with Incest

Incest is ostensibly taboo in India but 'bhabhi' or 'bhai-behen' porn thrives in the shadows of digital desire.

HBO’s The White Lotus season three throws a wrench into incest fantasies with one of its most disturbing scenes.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Indian porn searches have long been dominated by incest-related keywords. Aunty, bhabhi, bhai-behen, father-in-law, daughter, bahu—no equation is spared. Yet, Ranveer Allahabadia gets mauled in the public court of opinion and riles up the authorities over a tangentially incestuous, recycled joke that has been circulating on the incel corners of the internet for ages. But what happens when the taboo leaves Pornhub and enters a prestige TV show as horror, not titillation?

As the dust settles on the third season of The White Lotus, two things are clear: Mike White has delivered another nail-biting finale to a story where everything and nothing happened all at once and Patrick Schwarzenegger is indubitably the breakout nepo kid of the year. Even as we sift through some of the obvious loopholes and predictable plotlines, there is no denying that TWL pulled off yet another successful storytelling heist. The cherry on top of everything else this season? One of the most layered, unsexy, and unsettling portrayals of incest on-screen in recent memory.

Desire, Fetish and Taboo

One recurring theme across Indian (and global) pornographic search trends year after year is incest. Whether it's the icky parent-child fantasies or sibling storylines—sometimes hidden behind the “step” label—there’s a clearly fetishised pattern of “close-but-taboo” relationships that dominate the charts. According to Pornhub’s 2023 Year in Review, “Indian” was the number one most searched category in India, with the most common related search terms being ‘desi bhabhi’, ‘sister’, and ‘Indian aunty’. Even on prestige TV, incest is depicted as sexy.

But HBO’s The White Lotus season three throws a wrench into that fantasy with one of its most disturbing scenes: two biological brothers, high and dazed, crossing a line they can never uncross. Here, incest is not glamourised, nor is it done for shock or thrill—that is so last season! This season the incest is ‘real’ and it is confusing, accidental, horrifying, and above all, impossible to laugh at.

And if we are contextualising cultural norms, this obsession with the prohibited is a rising concern everywhere, especially in India, where the bhai-behen kink is thriving in private browser tabs.

This is not your regular star-crossed siblings from Game of Thrones nor is it draped in Euphoria’s glossy teen trauma. This is a Greek tragedy. Placing this calamity on two male bodies instead of a female one—easily fetishised and sexualised in our culture—makes the commentary land a harder, more revulsive gut punch. It throws cold water on the fantasy and forces you to sit with the discomfort.

The fictional White Lotus is like the proverbial 'Hotel California'—you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. It is a luxury cage gilded for those with the arrogance of generational wealth sipping their overpriced cocktails, nursing their repressed traumas and a whole lot of mommy issues. From Tanya’s tormented equation with her deceased mother in season one to Greg/Gary’s maternal cuckold fantasies—The White Lotus brings things full circle, shifting from Freudian territory to a Gladiatorial match of incestuous fraternal love, worship and revulsion.

When shows like Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, or films like Cruel Intentions lean into these relationships, it feeds into the fantasy.

Not every story does it. Shyam Benegal’s Mandi explores the tragic romance between half siblings. But with The White Lotus, where it could have easily felt like something straight out of a sleazy porn setup, the show subverts expectations.

The cinematography and soundtrack are not seductive, the gaze is not predatory. When The White Lotus drops a bomb with the Ratliff brothers, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), getting intimate at a yacht party. We get two confused, privileged siblings in the dark, crossing lines without realising it until it’s too late. And that’s what makes this subplot, dressed up as pornified play, powerfully deranged.

The Fantasy (of Incest) vs the Fallout

The dynamic between Saxon and Lochlan is steeped in manipulation and unequal power dynamics. Saxon unwittingly grooms Lochlan with his endless talks on masculinity that heavily hinges on rape culture—he was fully on board with taking advantage of the drunk and drugged Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). His tune changes when he becomes the bait in the tangled web he fully participated in weaving for others.

The barely legal-age Lochlan, in turn, is easily influenced as a perpetual pleaser. He is constantly shifting personalities and oscillating between gratifying the more domineering personalities in his family full of narcissists. Saxon’s rejection of this narrative emphasises the complexity of power, control, and exploitation in their relationship.

There’s nothing sexy about the way the show handles their incest. No slow-motion fantasy sequence. No dreamy ambiguity. Just awkward, horrifying shards of incomplete memories and a growing sense of nervousness and foreboding. It's a bold creative choice in a media landscape where incest is often utilised for forbidden romance tropes or cheap shock value; where it takes from our cultural kinks and manifests it into acceptable fictionalities.

In India, incest exists in the shadowy corners of digital desire—euphemised into roleplay and other disturbingly normalised categories.

The fantasy is always one of accessibility, domesticity, and power: the sister/daughter-in-law who’s “too close,” the aunty next door or the brother who seduces rather than protects.

It's All in the Fam: A Noble History of Incest

This season of White Lotus isn’t just about incest. As with other seasons, it’s about privilege, spiritual dissonance, and the moral rot of the ultra-rich. In that context, the sibling threesome becomes more than just a subplot—it becomes a metaphor.

We often forget that incest, historically, was not just taboo—it was tradition. Royalty and nobility married cousins and siblings to “keep the bloodline pure.” The elite have always liked to “keep it in the family,” whether biologically, socially, or economically. Even in The White Lotus season three, there’s a clear message: the class hierarchies are honoured in these exclusionary spaces.

The rich rub shoulders with the rich, befriend the rich, and marry the rich. Social incest is very much alive, even if biological incest remains anathema.

In India, cousin marriages are legally allowed under Muslim Personal Law, which permits such unions according to Islamic tradition. Similarly, in communities like the Nairs of Kerala, where marriage of maternal cross-cousins, aka a man marrying his mother's brother's daughter, is culturally accepted; or Toda people of Tamil Nadu, where there is preference for avunculate marriages between nieces and maternal uncles, cousin and even close-kin marriages have historically been practiced.

The Real Horror

The reasons behind the existence of entire categories on sites like Pornhub and Literotica dedicated to incest are perturbing, but not surprising. In a society that tightly polices sexuality, incest becomes a paradoxical escape. It’s illicit, yes, but also familiar, accessible, and often easier to imagine than actual romantic relationships in a hyper-controlled social structure. When everything is off-limits, the forbidden starts to look like freedom.

The biggest porn sites, similar to how social media operates, use algorithms to boost user engagement. They push forth shocking and controversial content for more views.

Clare McGlynn, Professor of Law, Durham University wrote about the troubling consequences of ingesting such roleplay content. In the article, Why Incest Porn Is More Common and Harmful Than You Think, McGlynn explained, “Porn…shapes our sexual scripts.” Incest, even when fake, influences what we perceive as acceptable and expected in sexual relationships.

That’s what makes The White Lotus treatment of incest so necessary. It lets the horror of the situation unfold in between fervently anxious pauses.

In a show full of dead bodies, con artists, high-flying stray bullets, and poisoned piña coladas, it’s telling that the moment people can’t stop talking about is one that of sexual transgression between two brothers. That’s the real horror.

Not because it’s graphic or tantalising, but because it feels real. Because it’s not treated as fantasy. There are consequences to the act.

In India, perhaps it’s time to reckon with why we’re so turned on by it. Why we constantly search for bhai-behen porn, while refusing to acknowledge the realities of sexual abuse and assault within families. Why we’d rather meme incest than unpack it.

And why, maybe, The White Lotus season three is exactly the mirror we need: unflattering and uncomfortable. It is the difference between wanting to eat the rich and simultaneously longing to be them too.

(The author is an independent film, TV and pop culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)