35
votes
On the increased popularity and serious risks of choking during sex
Link information
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- Title
- 'There is no safe way to do it': the rapid rise and horrifying risks of choking during sex
- Authors
- Anna Moore
- Published
- Jul 7 2025
- Word count
- 2208 words
Rule #1 of kink (and perhaps, sex in general...) - never do anything that has the remotest chance of causing physical or mental harm without a previously agreed-upon means of communicating "stop right now". Safe word or safe gesture/noise. Martial arts tap-out, tape a bell or air horn to a body part that can operate it if you have to... There must be a method of not just withdrawing consent, but indicating a potential emergency.
Of course there's no consensus for providing sex education about consent, safety, self-confidence, first aid, trust, boundaries, communication... I learned more from the lesbian BDSM community in an hour than anyone is likely to hear in a school sex ed class or a year's worth of online porn.
Rule #2: forget everything you see in porn.
I have a minor bone to pick with the cited statistics on choking - the linked stroke study was based on research about partner injury in the context of reported domestic violence. This isn't the same situation as kids generally imitating something they've seen in online porn, except for the ones bent on violence and rape in the first place.
The data on hypoxic brain damage from consensual choking is alarming enough that I don't dispute the need for better education at all, but moral panic based on exaggerated claims is never helpful. The statement "a person cannot consent to being harmed for the purpose of sexual gratification" in the description of the Domestic Abuse Act is so general that I can see real injustice resulting from innocent and essentially normal consensual sex acts.
We need to urgently spread this message to as many young people as possible. Urgently.
more controversial opinion follows.
At the risk of being labelled sex negative, I hope society eventually move to a model where, until two (or more) people are sitting down sober with all their clothes on discussing having vanilla sex for the first time, it is automatically assumed that no sex at all will be happening and nobody is pressured to "make a move" or to anticipate their partner will be "making a move". First time with a partner sex cannot be spontaneous: one cannot assume safety at the hands of a stranger, and one cannot assume a known partner to understand safety and consent without prior discussion. It will be too late to discuss boundaries and understanding of safety when folks are already in the middle of a brain damage inducing or lethal act that takes less effort than opening a can of coke.
And that until another such sober clothes wearing, detailed discussion about kink happens, it is automatically assume that no kink at all will be happening and nobody is to suggest or assume or to bring up or initiate a kink during sexual encounters.
explicit communication is one tool among many that you can use to establish trust. it's not like it's hard for people to lie or misunderstand, and you absolutely can assume all sorts of things about people without their explicitly saying them—you have to. it feels very reductionist to say that thou canst only negotiate by such-and-certain means, and everything else is Bad Communication or Too Risky (for whom?)
I don't think your stance is sex-negative at all. I kind of came of age in the radically sex-positive feminist early 1990's, and what you've described is what was discussed as optimal sex communication at the time. But I'll emphasize the "feminist" part, because much of the discussion was led by women who didn't expect men to "just know" what was pleasurable for women, who had no means of establishing trust and safety besides face-to-face conversations.
Tinder, Hinge, etc. and online porn have created unrealistic expectations for safety - it's not an Uber ride or a set of norms and values which should be imitated.
From an informed, sex-positive standpoint, I think that participants having dispassionate straight talk about consent and boundaries and safety before beginning is chef’s kiss. Fully on board with that.
But I don’t think it’s realistic. We’re animals. We have hormones and pheromones and impulses. It may be ideal to suppress all that, but I think it’s naive to expect society to willingly do so en masse.
Honestly I don’t know what the dating / hookup scene is like these days. I’ve been monogamously married for decades, from long before Tinder and the rest. If these apps are basically Uber for sex (as opposed to romance/dating services) then that’s actually a great context for these consent conversations to be normalized. Because everybody’s already up-front about what they’re there for. But if the range of expectations becomes broader and more ambiguous, then that becomes a much bigger ask.
It isn't about suppressing hormones and pheromones and impulses, but creating a context for releasing them in a way that's maximally pleasurable and minimally harmful to partners in sex. Most people want good things for each other, to be well regarded, and to participate in loving relationships, even when they're painfully horny. I don't think it's unreasonable to teach kids about boundaries, consent, etc. before they're storming with hormones, and let them practice talking about their feelings and concerns. But in the spirit of realism, reason and ignorance/religious shaming are at odds. I'll agree that there just aren't enough people confident of what they do/don't want to sit down and frankly, effectively negotiate sex in advance.
I also haven't looked at hookup apps myself - I don't know if you can filter on preferences, boundaries, or predefine consent before you even start a chat. Considering that they don't even block known predators, I'd think that sex ed these days should probably include training in online safety.
I mean, the idea of teaching kids and having it work is "a tale as old as time." You can teach kids and give them space to talk, but they won't really learn, have confidence, or be able to have mature conversations until they awkward their way through a half dozen situations or so, at least.
I think teaching kids is helpful because it gives them a backdrop against which to compare their lived experiences against. But even as an old married monogamous guy, I remember my first forays into dating. No amount of prep or logic can offset the hormones or emotions. All you can do is give them a backdrop for comparison and a moral compass and let them find their path.
Agreed - my beginning fumbles were a complete abandonment of the Reason Titanic after running into the icebergs of lust and embarrassment. It's no surprise that kids are waiting longer or avoiding sex altogether these days because they are communicating more with each other about how fraught it is.
Agreed on sex ed. Maybe even just part of non sexual phys ed: airways are fragile; people being tied up improperly can cause nerve damage; putting fire crackers in your butt has severe consequences; things slide a lot better with lubrication; how to do dumb "jackass" type stuff safely...etc etc
I know the water boarding example is there for the shock value, but isn’t that kinda obvious? The whole point of torture is not to kill the person, it’s to make them suffer. Given two forms of torture that cause the same quantity of suffering, but one places the person at a higher risk of death, you would choose the safer one every time. I would guess that many daily activities besides erotic asphyxiation are far more dangerous than waterboarding. As the saying goes, dead men tell no tales.
I think it does an effective job at emphasizing that choking is lethal though. Pretty sure the people who need this message most aren't thinking about it in terms of torture and lethality.
Yeah, I had the same thought. It was kind of a silly thing to add to the point.
This is obviously a piece meant purely to evoke emotion, rather than examine anything factual, as it starts off with an anecdote about someone who has a "tinder situation" open up with "can I come over and rape you?" Simply put, I find this article extremely dismissive. "There is no safe way to do it" is nonsense, and the author jumps to conclusions not supported by the evidence. One of the first pieces of evidence they link to is a pre-print, meaning it has not gone through any review. I have personally found that people linking to pre-prints to be a huge red flag, as they are usually trying to wrap up their idea in the guise of scientific credibility. They then go on to cite interviews with women who dealt with choking during sex in a non-consensual matter and how that was harmful to them - talking about non-consensual acts and framing it as "the risks of choking during sex" is clearly not any review in good faith.
You inspired me to dive into the PubMed database. The reference I found that mentioned stroke subsequent to choking came from an article discussing choking from domestic abuse and sexual violence.
However it looks like researchers are starting to examine what the effects might be from consensual choking.
This article was interesting I thought:. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37459254
Edit - Here is another study
Ah yes, the one study that always gets linked as it's arguably the only real study looking into this. It has some serious drawbacks and limitations, but it is the closest thing we have to unbiased research on the subject.
A few thoughts to chew on with this particular study:
As an aside: I think there's some serious points to be made about sexual coercion and dangerous acts with individuals who already do not respect someone's autonomy. Those who coerce are much less likely to care about the health of the person they are exerting that coercion on, and in that context strangulation (I use that word here instead of choking because I think it is more about power and the assaulting person's sexual gratification) is a big problem. But trying to modify the behavior of people who are already treating others as objects is a much more difficult problem than trying to teach people who are being coerced or forced into acts of the dangers of an act they didn't really sign up for. I'm not so certain teaching people of the dangers of an act they didn't fully opt into is going to do much except victim blame or make them feel worse about actions done to them without their full consent.
Thanks for your thoughts. I did edit to include a second study before I read this reply.
In addition to coercive/antisocial individuals, I also believe there are risks to teens believing that breath play is a standard component of sex.
Thanks for finding and including another study! A lot of the same reflections still apply to this study as well, I just want to provide some food for thought when reading through these studies and how they should be interpreted or viewed.
Very true! I view this as a broader public health issue as a result of the commercialization of porn, but it is important to call out!
Thought on the difficulty of making strangulation pornography illegal: make it so that if any performer claims lifetime disability due to brain damage, the companies are responsible for the rest of the performer's lives. Make it financially ruinous and it will stop faster than moral ethics culture kindness consent what have yous.
the problem is depicting it, not doing it. you can't tell from a video if that hand is really squeezing or not
True, but it's good if at least the performers' safety is covered, first.