WHY DO YOUNG WOMEN PUT UP WITH THIS????
There is no safe way to do it’: the rapid rise and horrifying risks of choking during sex
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe-way-risks-of-choking-during-sex"Now thought to be the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, it can also lead to difficulty swallowing, incontinence, seizures, memory problems, depression, anxiety and miscarriage. How has this extreme practice been normalised?
Now that Lucy has been in a steady relationship for a year, she finds herself looking back at previous sexual encounters through a new lens. The slaps to her face. Hands round her neck. The multiple late-night messages from one partner – nine years older and, in her words, “a Tinder situation”: “Can I come over and rape you?”
“I like to think I enjoyed my single 20s,” says Lucy, now 24. “I was an avid Hinge and Tinder user and I liked to think of myself as the ‘cool girl’. But I’ve been thinking about it so much – I’m not sure why. There was the friend of a friend who slapped me so hard in the middle of us having sex – no warning, just from nowhere. It actually made my teeth rattle. There was another guy I met at a bar. We got together that night and he started choking me so hard, I felt this sharp pressure, this pain I’d never experienced before. I was drunk but it sobered me up in one second. I still wonder what he did to me to cause that pain.”
Never was “rough sex” discussed before, during or after. “Among my friends, there’s this competitiveness about not being boring, not being ‘vanilla’. I think it’s very prevalent for women my age, and no one wants to kink-shame anyone,” says Lucy (not her real name). “There’s a lot of talk about online porn and what that has done to men’s brains and expectations, but I also saw a lot of very violent porn when I was a teenager. I don’t know why or how I found it. The women in porn never push back or say, ‘Don’t do that’ when they’re choked. I think I became quite performative. I like to think I’m a strong woman but … I don’t know if it’s about male validation.”
Growing concern around the normalisation of “choking” – ie strangulation – during sex has led to the recent announcement that pornography depicting it will be criminalised in an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill.
Among my friends, there’s this competitiveness about not being boring, not being ‘vanilla’
It has become so standard among young people that one recent council-funded sex education presentation for Welsh secondary schoolchildren included “safe” choking advice such as: “It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first …” and: “Consent should also happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time.” When the presentation was made public, Fiona Mackenzie, the founder of campaigning group We Can’t Consent to This (WCCTT), was “absolutely furious but not at all surprised”.
Mackenzie formed WCCTT at the end of 2018 in response to the growing number of women and girls killed or injured in violence claimed to be consensual. How has the landscape changed in the years since?
“When we began, we were focusing on two aspects,” says Mackenzie. “The first was the men who were successfully using the ‘rough sex defence’ to murder women, claiming it was consensual and therefore getting away with it or getting ludicrously short sentences. The other part, which is the part I didn’t realise was an issue until a month or two in, was that so many young women were being strangled by their sexual partners.”
Almost seven years on, there’s been progress on the first part. The Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 clarified that a person cannot consent to being harmed for the purpose of sexual gratification and also made non-fatal strangulation a specific criminal offence. Before that, it fell under general offences such as battery, the mildest assault possible. “The major win for us is that [when women are] subjected to a non-fatal or a fatal assault during sex, there will be a much better response from the criminal justice system,” says Mackenzie. “There have been several cases since where the men have been prosecuted and convicted for murder by juries and given long sentences.”
On the second aspect, though – the normalisation of strangulation during sex – Mackenzie believes the situation has only worsened. “I’d hoped that lots of other charities and sex educators, the government and academics would get behind it, but instead what we’ve got is this completely mad idea that we can somehow help women to keep having violent sex but in a safer way. Maybe in a hi-vis jacket?”
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@damekatydenise_
- not quite what I had in mind. I said I wanted someone who could light a fire deep within me; I guess having a chest I can light a match on is as close as I’ll get. 
