When was the last time a partner choked you during sex? When was the last time you choked someone else?
If you are over 40, like me, then this is probably a strange question. If you are under 40, it is, unfortunately, not. This is because upwards of 40% of women age 18-29 report being choked during sex; among teenagers who are sexually active, 13% of girls 14-17 report already having experienced choking.
Note that I say “women and girls,” and not “people.” This is because choking is not only on the rise, it as also highly gendered: in a review of 300 forensic records involving strangulation in San Diego, 298 of the cases involved women being choked by their male partners.
I can hear the eyes rolling now. “Don’t be such a prude. Just because your generation is completely vanilla doesn’t mean our generation doesn’t enjoy a bit of kink. Lighten up.” Except that kink involves explicit consent, and many women report being “surprised” by their partner initiating choking in the middle of sex. Besides, consent is only the bare minimum when it comes to kink: the full definition includes not only negotiation beforehand, but also verbal and non-verbal signals to stop during the act, and finally, complete aftercare once the scene has ended, including open discussions about what worked and what didn’t. Anything less than that is not kink: it is abuse.
And yet, even with all those steps in place, choking is still a murky issue. How can a partner truly consent when the organ responsible for consent (the brain) is being compromised? If we don’t accept that women who are drunk or drugged can consent (newsflash: we don’t), then why do we accept that they can consent when their brain is being deprived of oxygen? Especially when some of the side effects of oxygen deprivation involve amnesia, agnosia (loss of initiative), and submission? In the Red Wing study of 1943, which studied the effects of strangulation on prisoners and servicemen (oh, the 40s—such a simpler, ethicsless time), consciousness (and therefore the ability to consent) was lost in as quickly as 4 seconds. Not only that, but when the lead researcher attempted to strangle himself, using a machine with an “escape button” (again, wtf), he reported “forgetting that the button was there” after only a few seconds of being strangled.
We can only assume that some long-suffering assistant got the aforementioned researcher out, since he lived to tell his tale. Others are not so lucky: in the UK last year alone approximately one woman a week was strangled to death by her partner. And this number only includes the women who died immediately: because injured brain cells can take up to two weeks to die, strangulation is thought to be the second leading cause of stroke for women under 40.
So why is this happening? Mostly because we have stopped talking about sex. Even though we are still having just as much of it. Comprehensive sex education has been stricken from most school curriculims by state legislatures who have convinced themselves that if we ignore teen’s questions about sex then the questions will just go away. But questions will always search for answers—and in this case, the answer they have found is porn.
Don’t get me wrong. Pornography, in and of itself, is not the problem here. The problem is in using porn as a substitute for sex education. Because in the same way that watching Gordon Ramsay on television doesn’t give you a real inkling of what working inside a commercial kitchen is like, but is instead a “gag reel” of greatest disasters, watching sex in a porno doesn’t tell you what actual sex is really like—it is also a “gag reel” of sexual extremes, but this time with actual gagging. The big difference is that acting like Gordon Ramsay will probably just get you fired—acting like the (trained and supervised) lead in a porno can get you charged with murder.
So what’s the solution? Well, let’s start with the presumption that the people we are having sex with don’t want to hurt us, and don’t want to be hurt in return. (I’m not discounting the very real fact that strangulation is a huge red flag for future risk of being murdered by your partner. I’m just setting it aside for the purposes of this discussion.) If we truly don’t want to hurt our partners, we will talk to them. And if we truly don’t want our children to hurt or be hurt by their partners, then we will talk to them as well. And talk to our schools and legislatures about having the conversation too—not because it is the school’s job to teach our children about sex, but because the more places they hear the truth the more likely it is to sink in.
So pour yourself a stiff shot of whatever courage you prefer, and ask your sons if they have ever choked their partner. Ask your daughters if they have ever been choked. Chances are they won’t walk to talk about it with you—at all. Don’t let the conversation end there—keep pushing. And if all else fails, use the word they seem to fear the most when it comes to sex. Tell them that not wanting to talk about consent—informed consent, which you are only trying to provide the information part of—well, that is the most vanilla thing of all.