A survey of 4,702 Australians aged 18-35 has found more than half had been strangled during sex. The findings of the research on consensual sexual strangulation, commonly referred to as “choking”, have been splashed across mastheads, tabloids, and spurred a new campaign to educate young people that “there’s no safe way to strangle”.
And the study comes at a time when Australia’s domestic abuse and gendered violence epidemic has reached a devastating pinnacle. It also comes amid a moral war on porn.
Non-consensual partner violence is a serious and pervasive issue. But the panic about strangulation the nation has been quick to rally towards has not focused on consent, and the way we teach it. Instead, it has become a conversation about policing online spaces, kids [having sex!!!] and, perhaps most deliberately: porn.
Even the original researchers who published the survey on The Conversation did so with an early preface: “For some people, strangulation is a high-risk but acceptable part of consensual sex, and it is important not to stigmatise people who use it.” But these findings have provoked the same conversation about how porn – and exposure to it at a young age – ought to be held responsible for some of society’s biggest failings.
Porn has long been an easy scapegoat for issues entrenched and worsened by patriarchy: gendered violence, misogyny, and a widespread lack of consent and sex education among young people. Sex education is deeply flawed in Australia, dependent on location and type of institution. One in five Australian students attend Catholic school, where sex education is heavily informed by faith.
Behind the new campaign against sexual strangulation, Breathless, is It’s Time We Talked – a violence prevention project that targets pornography’s influence on young people. When we talk about young people and sex, porn is wielded as the ultimate excuse, loaded with the blame for encouraging and normalising “unsafe” and “dangerous” sexual practices.
But intimate partner violence is an entirely different conversation to taboo sex and pornography’s representation of it. And we need to have those separate conversations, because we cannot allow abusive partners to scapegoat criminal behaviour on porn or kinky sex.
Respect Victoria CEO Serina McDuff told Guardian Australia she didn’t think there was any research that said if you do strangulation in the bedroom, you’re more likely to experience strangulation in domestic violence.
But, she continued, “In some relationships, both are happening, and it’s problematic when the perpetrator who is exerting coercive control is also the one giving the victim and survivor information about the safety of sexual choking.”
McDuff illustrates a situation where someone is having their consent for sexual strangulation manufactured by a partner who is exerting coercive control over them. In this case, can the strangulation ever be considered consensual? It’s abuse.
When we talk about young people and sex, porn is wielded as the ultimate excuse, loaded with the blame for encouraging and normalising “unsafe” and “dangerous” sexual practices.
What counts as consent and what counts as abuse can be difficult to navigate for survivors, with coercion a high risk. In Refinery 29, an anonymous contributor wrote about how she didn’t realise being pushed to do things outside of her comfort zone by her partner wasn’t normal. She was made to feel ashamed, and “not enough”, for being uncomfortable with “kinky”, abusive sex. This “vanilla shaming” shouldn’t be seen as the fault of kink. Vanilla shaming, or any kind of sexual shaming for the purpose of manipulation is abusive and a tool of coercive control.
We need better education on what constitutes consensual and safe sex acts. There are people engaging in kinky sex, and then there are criminal abusers. But the assumption that people do not know what they are consenting to in the bedroom and that they are simply mimicking it from porn produces a dangerous “they asked for it” mentality. If the prevalence of taboo bedroom activities could be confronted realistically, perhaps it would be easier for courts and jurors to distinguish between consensual light choking and being strangled to death. As if it should be that hard.
Strangulation is, as the survey’s researchers point out, a high-risk activity. In many cases, the damage strangulation can cause to someone may not be clear or obvious externally. Choking during sex can encompass a wide range of behaviours across what is known in bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) communities as “breath play”. While it is dangerous, and is considered so in the BDSM community, it has become somewhat mainstream, through media: film, television, and memes.
It’s part of a slew of “rough sex” practices commonly seen in porn – the survey found 61% of respondents said they first heard about sexual strangulation there. But, survey respondents also reported discovering sexual strangulation through other sources, like through movies (40%), friends (32%), social media (31%) and discussions with current or potential partners (29%).
The survey revealed the high proportion of young adults who have tried strangulation in the bedroom. More than half of respondents to the survey, 57 per cent, said they’d been strangled by a partner during sex at least once. A similar number, 51 per cent, reported strangling a partner at least once.
Heather Douglas, a professor at Melbourne University Law School and co-author of the study, told the ABC the cohort they were looking at were engaging in sexual strangulation and “largely saying they were consenting to the practice.”
Participants who had strangled partners reported more often that their partners played an active role in consent (79%) including asking to be strangled, agreeing to be strangled, or withdrawing previous consent. For those who were strangled, that figure was 57 per cent. For both strangling and strangled partners, consent was largely negotiated on a previous occasion where the partner had given their future consent. 10 per cent of women and 8 per cent of men said they “did not consent, but did not ask or motion for them to stop”.
This is just further argument for better consent training and education, even around SM and kink acts. People are doing it. Apparently in larger numbers. Pointing a finger at porn as though removing it from culture would be the answer is not going to work.
Sexually explicit media is not to blame for the gendered violence embedded into our patriarchy. And, as Darcy Deviant has already written, the porn industry was never created to provide sex education to children.
Strangulation is scary, and it is the second most common method used by men to kill women. It is a major risk of homicide escalation in domestic violence. Non-fatal strangulation is rightfully a criminal offence, after decades of non-fatal strangulations leading to eventual domestic violence murder cases.
But drawing assumptions that someone who likes being choked in the bedroom is a precursor for them to experience intimate partner violence is reductive. And a panic about young people learning about choking from porn will obscure the real education we need to be doing around consent and safe sex.
We cannot allow men – or anyone – to use porn as a scapegoat for their actions, and we cannot allow porn to be the scapegoat for our failures to provide education to children, so they never need to seek out sexually explicit imagery online in the first place.
Like the war on drugs, the war on porn will fail. Panicking over taboo sex should not override our panic over the sickening rate at which men are killing women.
The sex industry isn’t going anywhere, we need to learn to grow with it.
Arielle Richards is the multimedia reporter at VICE Australia, follow her on Instagram and TikTok.
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