23-04-2025
Chilling real reason women are allowing choking, slapping and even mock rape during sex: CLARE FOGES
What do you expect teenagers to be learning in sex education lessons in school? How to put a condom on a banana?
Or how to consent to having your windpipe squeezed by someone much stronger than you, their fingers in a tightening ring around your neck, to the point where you are unable to resist, or start blacking out, or die?
Teenagers in Bridgend, south Wales were recently treated to a presentation – funded by the local council – teaching them that 'consent (when it comes to choking during sex) should happen every time sexual choking is an option'. Message: this sexual practice is absolutely fine, kids, as long as you're both on the same page! 'It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first and giving them the space to say no.'
Irony of ironies that this PowerPoint was produced by the council's domestic abuse service, Assia. Are they out of their minds? Teaching 14-year-old girls that choking is just any other 'option' on the sexual menu?
What about a little light beating? Or vigorous hair pulling? Is that OK, as long as a shy and embarrassed teenage girl is given five seconds 'space' to say no before being assaulted?
I am not so much outraged as depressed at the world my four children are growing up in, where violent and degrading sex becomes ever more normalised.
I grew up, thank heavens, in the pre-internet age, where the closest I came to hardcore material was an illicit copy of The Joy of Sex I found in my school library.
While my eyes might have been on stalks at the pictures of a rather hairy couple contorted into all sorts of undignified positions, the message of the book was clear: 'Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more.'
How did we go from The Joy of (mutually satisfying) Sex to The Joy of Strangulation taught in schools? Hardcore online pornography is, of course, the main culprit. It has created a great sexual divide, with a line roughly scored through the middle of my own Millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996).
While there are of course many in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s who may keep a cat 'o' nine tails in the bedroom, I would wager that most would be alarmed if a new sexual partner suddenly morphed into the Boston Strangler.
Yet to younger Millennials and Gen Zers (born 1997 to 2012), reared on the porn diet of spitting, slapping and 'mock' rapes, choking is standard practice.
A BBC-commissioned 2020 survey, which spoke to more than 2,000 men aged between 18 and 39, found 71 per cent had slapped, choked, gagged or spat on their partner during consensual sex – with a third not even bothering to ask the woman if she'd like to act as a human spittoon/punch bag.
In her book Escape: How a Generation Shaped, Destroyed and Survived the Internet, thirty-something journalist Marie Le Conte writes that, for her generation, choking is 'so mainstream' and adds: 'If I were to rank it, I would say it sits somewhere around the light spanking mark.'
A 39-year-old friend recently re-joined the dating scene after the end of a 12-year relationship.
She met a fun and handsome man on a dating app. After several dates, things progressed to bed, where during the act she realised the man's hand was on her neck. He squeezed, then tighter, and tighter, until she felt an unpleasant pressure in her head.
'Why didn't you just shove him off?' I asked.
'Well...' she faltered, 'it's what people do these days, isn't it?'
The next morning this Romeo made a joke about being so turned on he got 'a little carried away', as though non-fatal strangulation is somehow an act of flattery, rather than a crime; the practice was made illegal when non-consensual as part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.
Men such as these – who may be nice guys in their everyday lives – have been desensitised by years of watching extreme porn. The sexual act on its own is too 'vanilla' to arouse them.
In order for the pulse to keep racing, the ante needs to be upped by increasingly rough behaviour, including choking. A lot of them will say that the women they go to bed with like being strangled – or ask for it. But how much have women's expectations of what they should be like in bed been shaped by porn too – even by women's magazines?
In 2016, Women's Health magazine stated: 'If blindfolds and role play have veered into vanilla territory for you and your partner, there are still plenty of sex moves that are considered extra freaky. Like choking.'
And here's a truth about women that may be un-PC – we can tend to be people-pleasers. We want to impress the man we are with.
In her brilliant novel Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn captured this male-pleasing tendency of young women: 'Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex...' These days the Cool Girl must also love choking, being spat on and called a slut. Otherwise you may be revealed as – horror of horrors – 'vanilla'.
The more choking is normalised, the more young people will think this is risk-free. But it patently isn't. Strangling someone restricts blood supply to the head. Oxygen levels drop dangerously fast. According to a 2020 scientific paper, consciousness can be lost within as little as four seconds of arterial pressure.
The normalisation of choking and other rough sexual acts is dangerous – and it is used as an excuse by dangerous people.
We are at a strange place in terms of women's rights. While ladies run businesses, conquer boardrooms and reach the highest offices of state, in the bedroom empowerment is going backwards.
Perhaps the two are related? Perhaps many young men – conditioned by the Andrew Tates of this world to believe that female empowerment is the cause of a lot of their own discontents – are using the normalisation of violent sexual acts to get their own back?
They have been brainwashed by misogynistic crackpots to believe that their biological destiny is to achieve mastery over women, and here in one sweaty-handed, grasping stroke, is their chance to do just that.
In future it would be best if Bridgend County Borough Council stick to filling in potholes rather than propagating the idea that, with consent, choking can be safe, risk-free and harmless. It is not, it is not, it is not. I don't care if it makes me sound 'vanilla'. The normalisation of strangulation is simply horrifying.
Florence's perfect accessory...
Florence Pugh wore one of her signature semi-sheer dresses at the premiere of the film Thunderbolts, set off with a dash of orange eyeshadow. But her best accessory? Granny Pat who, in her 80s, is Pugh's regular cheerleader at premieres.
The Spanish war on tourists continues with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wanting a crack-down on holiday rentals. Are they mad? Tourism accounts for around 12 per cent of Spain's GDP.
I had been toying with the idea of Mallorca this summer but the prospect of being met off the plane by placard-wielding protesters has put me off.
It's adios for now.
Don't ban Mr Whippy!
A pantomime boo to the Royal Borough of Greenwich, which plans to ban ice cream vans around Greenwich Park.
Do these interfering officials understand how important a Whippy is to the British summer?
This wondrous white stuff is the taste of childhood, sunshine and happiness. In my 20s, I drove an ice cream van for a while and remember the joy on people's faces as my van approached with its tinkling tune.
Let Greenwich people enjoy their 99s.
Try feeding your own children!
This week free breakfast clubs opened at 750 schools with a national roll-out soon. Much back-slapping from politicians about how this will improve life chances for kids.
I'm not convinced. If some parents have no money for breakfast, should that be addressed via the benefits system?
The PM said breakfast clubs will bring 'breathing space for parents'.
But surely chucking a Weetabix and milk in a bowl isn't beyond us? We can't keep outsourcing the work of families onto schools.
