Copyright newstatesman
Britain is coming for hardcore BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism). The government confirmed on Monday that online porn depicting “vile and dangerous” strangulation, will be banned nationwide – the latest step in their mission to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. Yet in an online world flooded with misogynistic content and extreme pornography, will the ban actually make sex any safer for women? Sexual violence organisations think so, but others aren’t convinced, with a flurry of X posters theorising that Keir Starmer banning choking porn under the guise of defending women is “misogynistic,” and that the ban amounted to repressive kink-shaming. These claims aren’t totally ungrounded. The UK government certainly has a puritanical track record of policing sexual norms. In 2014, several steamy acts including spanking, face-sitting and female ejaculation were banned from pornography. Protestors held a mass face-sitting protest outside parliament against what they felt was an assault on sexual freedom and female pleasure. Five years later, the bans were quietly overturned. But can “sex-positive” campaigners really make the same argument about choking? As a journalist covering sex, kink and relationships, I wasn’t sure where I sat on the strangulation ban when whispers of its implementation began this summer. I’m generally sceptical about censorship and think that BDSM can be explored safely between consenting adults. Kinks, by definition, involve desires that subvert social norms. It’s also not uncommon to be turned on by consensual pain during sex. Is it really for politicians to dictate what we should and shouldn’t desire? The more I read about strangulation, though, the more I felt troubled by how little I’d actually understood the practice and what it does to the body. A very small amount of pressure on our necks can block the airway and blood vessels, preventing oxygenated blood from getting to the brain. Even a few seconds of strangulation can lead to brain damage and even death, with multiple studies revealing brain changes in women who have been “choked” during sex. Research indicates that strangulation is the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, and that it is more dangerous than waterboarding – a form of torture that is prohibited by international law. Given these potential consequences, some sexual violence experts argue that the sexual strangulation can never be consensual. “Women can’t consent to the long-term harm caused by it, such as impaired cognitive functioning and memory,” Andrea Simon, director of End Violence Against Women Coalition, told me. “There is no such thing as safe strangulation.” And yet risky sex acts have become virtually vanilla in the past decade. While, in our new climate of consent, it’s not uncommon for a romantic prospect to ask “can I kiss you?”, apparently “light choking” has become a familiar part of modern hook-ups. Data indicates that between 2006 and 2015, strangulation was uncommon in the sex lives of college students. Yet by 2024, over a third of 16- to 34-year-olds had been strangled during sex in the past year, according to a survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation (IFAS). And among those who reported being choked, only half said that they’d agreed to it in advance. Given that timeline, it seems logical to infer that the ubiquity of online porn is at least partly to blame for choking’s proliferation. Today, the majority of UK teenagers will watch porn before they lose their virginity, which means spending years inhaling a cultural script for “normal” sex before they’ve been intimate with someone else. No wonder sexual consent is so muddied. Still, I’m dubious that prohibition is the answer. In the days after the Online Safety Act was introduced, VPN apps, which make it harder for websites to identify where users are, became some of the most popular on Apple’s App Store in the UK. Marcus Johnstone of PCD Solicitors, who specialises in criminal defence representation for people accused of sexual offences, told me that tech savvy youngsters are undoubtedly using VPNs to access porn from different countries, where content may be even more extreme. A law “simply doesn’t stop people committing crime,” he says. “It doesn’t solve the underlying problem” of protecting young people on the internet. He has clients as young as 14 accessing explicit content via the dark web or encrypted private chat rooms. Porn prohibitions can “backfire,” he says, pushing “young people down a different path, which makes them more vulnerable to predators.” It’s hard to talk about the dangers of BDSM without sounding kinkphobic and moralistic. But something is clearly going very wrong. Sex game “mishap” is now a “culturally approved” defence for men accused of killing women – with a tenfold increase in “rough sex” claims in court between 1996 to 2016. Meanwhile, research has linked teenagers’ unprecedented access to porn with sexually harmful behaviour. We clearly need change. This summer, I was very pleased to read that the government’s new sex education syllabus will talk to students about porn’s links to misogyny, AI deepfakes and incel influencers. The new guidance made way less noise than the choking ban. Yet as our online worlds transform at a dizzying rate, with AI content metastasizing on nudify apps and unregulated group chats, the law will always be playing catch-up. I think this guidance will do more than relentless new laws in bringing about long-overdue cultural change. [Further reading: The woman who made the rape kit]
