The government is set to ban strangulation porn – but is this too little, too late?

As I touched the blooming bruises on my neck, I could feel pinpricks of shame creeping up my throat. I hoped that concealer might cover the splotches. I dabbed it on ineffectively before giving up and hoping my hair would cover the worst of it.

My date had seemed like such a nice, normal man. We’d been talking online for a while, and when we met for drinks one Thursday evening, things were looking positive. I invited him back to mine. We had sex, which was consensual. However, the part where he grabbed at my throat and squeezed it until I made a gasping, spluttering sound, was not. After he left, I blocked and deleted his number.

When I relayed the story to friends later, they listened with sympathy, but not surprise. Strangulation during sex is now par for the course. I wasn’t the first of my friends to be choked without consent during intercourse. I know I won’t be the last.

Choking has increasingly crept into the bedroom, regardless of whether we wanted it to or not. A study by government-backed charity the Institute for Addressing Strangulation discovered that 54 per cent of women aged 18-24 had been choked during sex. The research also found that 17 per cent of respondents had not given consent for it to happen.

Now, the UK government are looking to ban online pornography showing strangulation or suffocation, after a review found depictions of choking had helped normalise the act among young people.

I can understand why this step is being taken. Choking has steadily become more ubiquitous in porn. A study from the mid-2000s found that strangulation appeared in about 7 per cent of pornographic content; by 2020, it was among the top five forms of physical aggression found in online pornography.

Sexual breathplay can also be dangerous. While there are no concrete statistics on the number of people who have died from strangulation while having sex, the latest femicide census shows that, of 2,000 women aged 14 or above who had been killed in the UK since 2014, strangulation was used in 550 cases. Of this figure, 372 were strangled by an intimate partner. Death may be the extremity, but those on the receiving end of choking are at risk of stroke, dizziness, headaches, bruising and a sore throat. That’s not withstanding the sheer terror I felt in those few moments when I felt his hand clutching at my throat. The bruises on my neck eventually faded, but the psychological scars from that night still linger.

Perhaps that widespread proliferation of asphyxiation in sex may be why I didn’t say anything. As the journalist Ellen Atlanta wrote in her book Pixel Flesh: “To be desirable, to have sex, we thought, meant to submit…porn seeped into mainstream culture, and the lines blurred between fantasy and reality, between acting and agency, between desirability and what we actually desire.” I was almost tricking myself into believing this is what I want, this is what I should like, and this is how I should be treated.

However, the government’s announcement feels akin to closing the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The average age at which children watch pornography in the UK is thought to be around 13 years old, although reports suggest children as young as eight are having their behaviour impacted by sexual content online. Meanwhile, sex work has also become increasingly influential. Online content from sex workers has become more stunt-like as they too vie for space in the attention economy. Choking has become so acceptable in online discourse that it has even entered the general lexicon, with memes about choking existing beyond the internet forums they were made for.

The only way that banning strangulation porn will work is if we also give people a decent sex education. While the curriculum was revamped in 2019, students still feel schools aren’t teaching them adequately – and curiosity about sex sees young people seeking answers from the internet. A 2023 survey of 2,000 social media users found 42 per cent believe TikTok is the most accessible way to get information about sexual health, while 43 per cent said they’ve learnt more about sexual health from TikTok than they did at school. If they’re learning from extreme content online, it’s little wonder that children believe this is what garden-variety sex should look like.

I don’t wish to kink-shame those who enjoy sexual asphyxiation, but there is no way young people should be seeing it – and certainly not trying it – without being properly educated about consent and respect first. As seen through the prominence of Andrew Tate and as covered in the Netflix series Adolescence, incel culture, once at the fringes of society, has rapidly become more mainstream. Young boys must learn to see women as equals and not as disposable playthings. Both girls and boys must feel comfortable in saying no.

One of the government’s manifesto pledges was to stem the ongoing epidemic of violence against women and girls. Banning violent pornography is a small, initial step. But so much more needs to be done to curb these increasingly common and worrying acts in even the most intimate parts of life. Otherwise, these behaviours will continue to bleed out into the bedroom – and beyond.