It’s only breathing
There’s an interesting pattern here.
Possibly you see the pattern already.
K Rowling’s charity has warned that sexual violence has become normalised, with growing numbers of young women seeking counselling after unwanted choking during sex.
…
[Chief Executive Isabelle] Kerr, who has worked with abuse survivors for more than 40 years, said: “It would appear that it’s something that is becoming very normalised, because not only are young men thinking that they should be doing it, but young women are expecting it to be done — even though they don’t necessarily want it or like it in any way. For many of them it’s frightening.”
See the pattern? Men do it to women. What a very interesting and unusual and surprising pattern.
Beira’s Place is supporting women who have been strangled in long-term relationships or brief sexual encounters. It does not hear about men asking to be strangled, suggesting the trend is more about men enjoying power.
Ya think?
Linda Thompson, national co-ordinator of the Glasgow-based Women’s Support Project, which works to tackle violence against women, said girls involved in prostitution were particularly exposed to strangulation risks as men played out scenarios before attempting them in the bedroom at home or were seeking experiences that their partners refused.
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“We are going to have more reports coming through about strangling,” Thompson said. “It is moving into intimacy, it is moving into relationships, it is more of an expectation placed on women.”
She said girls could be branded “vanilla” for refusing, and quoted lines used to persuade them, such as: “My old girlfriend did it, why can’t you?”
Thompson added: “We have allowed pornographers and the porn industry to write these sex scripts for us.”
Let’s pause to think about the drawbacks to doing that.
Meanwhile, the ‘pro sex’ crowd continue to highlight a small number of women who choose prostitution for kicks, and talk about what a great job it is, and how empowering.
Middle class women who get titillated by selling sex, or who see it as a wonderful job opportunity, are not the proper representatives to be speaking about the project, any more than a handful of hijab and burqua wearers who feel solidarity are the proper people to be dismissing concerns of women forced into the garments.
And yet, it seems that it is almost entirely men who die of autoerotic asphyxiation.
And this is why kink shaming is actually a good thing. Chesterton’s Fence and all.
Exactly.
It’s a turn-on for men, to strangle others or themselves; it’s horrifying to women, who are only ever the victims. It’s cruel and dangerous, and ought to be prosecuted as attempted murder.
This can and does end in death for women. Witness Grace Millane, murdered during a hook-up while holidaying here in NZ. It later became know that the man convicted had choked previous partners against their will. My guess is that he didn’t intend to choke poor Grace to death, but he was so wrapped up in his own pleasure that he was utterly reckless about what he was doing to her.
Current porn is just abusive, dangerous, and socially corrosive to a startling degree – not that 1970’s porn was all fluffy unicorns. I’ve suggested to a few mothers that I know that they should actually do some research and then talk to their kids (both boys and girls) about sex and consent in contrast to online porn. Those who have had been utterly shocked by what they saw and said it made for very ‘real’ conversations. Why didn’t I suggest it to fathers? Because in my experience guys aren’t that open to having that suggestion, and tend to become so uncomfortable they don’t do a real conversation with their kids. There are exceptions of course. Guys are also much more likely to already be porn watchers and to be or become compulsive watchers.
Well that would be silly, because “murder” generally relies upon intent. Manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and assault and battery depending on the laws of a State (in this case the generic “state” rather than the American term). Needless to say men (almost entirely) should not be doing it *at all* but overcharging based on feels rather then what is legally true isn’t justice before the law and will often fail for that very reason.
It’s a tad snippy to call it “feels” when it’s strangling someone. It’s not “feels” to link strangling to murder when strangling can in fact be murder. The prosecution can decide to charge manslaughter rather than murder, but that still doesn’t make it mere sentimentality to link strangling with murder.
Well the “feels” in this case is emotional outrage, the barely unspoken outcry of “how dare he get away with it” which undergirds so much of this sort of thing. Perfectly natural, it’s how most people are wired, but if law and order are to be of any utility it’s tamping down on that feeling that is required. Overcharging people with murder isn’t going to prevent the strangling… Better to inoculate young males against the impulse via education and persuasion.
But law isn’t the only context in which we talk about murder or killing or accidents or rough sex or things getting out of hand or breath play.
@Nullius
New to me, and good to know! An awful lot of fences are being thoughtlessly razed these days.
@9 OB:
At this point I think the best approach is to ditch the “rough sex” mitigation plea and judges should be persuadable in this instance. It may well be consensual, but once someone is killed or injured the party who caused it must accept the consequences of that.
That said, I’m keen to know why we’re seeing the uptick in expectations around strangling and other riskier sexual activity, especially since I keep seeing headlines about younger people being uninterested in sex. Is it that the ones who are interested are less risk averse? Is it jadedness with normal porn or just a progression of porn site algorithms? What’s different about male peer led expectations?
Strangling isn’t exactly something they need to find elsewhere, but you wouldn’t expect a surge in that kind of behavior under normal circumstances.
@ Lady M:
Aren’t they just? As someone who lives out in the boonies half the time, I find the fence metaphor really effective. When you cross through someone’s gate out here, you leave it as you find it. If it’s open when you get to it, it’s open when you leave it. If it’s closed, you close it after you. Because you don’t know why it’s open or closed. The owner may need it to stay closed to keep the cattle in, or it may be open so the horses can come through on their own.
The burden of proof for changing the status quo is on the person who wants to change it. “But what’s the harm,” isn’t an argument. You want to close the gate? You want to take out the fence? You want to choke someone during sex? You want to let men compete in women’s sports? The burden of showing that there is no harm is on you.
The reverse is actually insane. If I threw together a bunch of random, unknown chemicals into a goopy melange, you’d have to prove it to be harmful before you stopped me from putting it in your coffee. If some guy tried to walk into a school carrying a USAS-12, we’d smile and wave him in, because we’re stupid.
Check out this for a brief discussion as to the merits of the rough sex defence in the Grace Millane case.
https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/cases/2021/2021-NZSC-74.pdf