CW: Choking, violence, sex
Porn has fucked us up.
By us, I mean specifically Gen Z and younger Millennials, i.e most of us who are at University right now. I wasn’t worried about this a week ago but now I am.
This week, I wrote a feature about how normal choking during sex has become, why it’s become that way, and why it’s a problem. I went into my research armed only with the knowledge that, anecdotally, most people I know have experienced choking during sex.
I thought it was fucked up that some people had been choked without consent, but beyond that, I didn’t think there was too much to unpack. I had the impression that our generation’s attitude towards choking during sex was interesting but unremarkable. To me rough sex seems pretty normal, something most people have experience with, whether that’s actually engaging in it or being told they’re vanilla. Choking is so common that some people have the (absolutely misguided) impression that it goes without saying.
Then I talked to two experts, one from the kink community and one researching the impacts of porn on youth, and they both said: This is unusual. They said that this generation has been impacted by porn in ways we don’t even fully understand yet. Researchers are trying to catch up, but they’re way behind. There’s a lot of violence involved, both in terms of physical acts like choking and in terms of young people adopting narratives from porn that suggest coercion is a normal precursor to sex.
Both the experts I spoke to were concerned. They saw the normalisation of choking during sex as a ticking time bomb which was, sooner or later, going to kill someone or at least permanently injure them. I’d never seriously thought of it as something that was risky, but yes, there are real dangers every time someone is choked.
The internet definitely raised me when it came to sexual awakenings. I’m at the older edge of Gen Z, so I wasn’t at primary school with iPads, but I had a touch screen phone by the time I was 13. And adults have been very slow to catch up on how much access to sexual content those devices gave us. Maybe they look back and think “I wasn’t watching porn at their age so my kids won’t be,” without understanding how different iPhones are to Playboy magazines, and how much more widespread and accessible porn was for us, even if you weren’t looking for it.
To say that choking is actually bad is not to shame anyone for what they like to do during sex. It’s to remark on how fucked it is that the porn industry has had this impact, of defining the sexual preferences of a generation. Porn has undeniably affected us, in undeniably negative ways. It’s lead to us regarding violence during sex as normal. It’s not the first time people have ever engaged in violent sex, but it might be the first time it has been accepted in such a widespread way. We can thank the internet for that.
We suffered the influence of the porn industry, mostly as young teenagers with no guidelines on how to navigate what we were seeing. Watching porn, being exposed to porn, with no ability to understand it or critically evaluate it, does not give people a healthy relationship to sex.
And now here we are, adults, with more violent views on sex than ever before. Maybe this is unfounded moral panic about changing attitudes. But choking is one of the concrete risks that makes it seem like the effects of porn on our generation are not going to go well.
On that positive note, welcome to the Sex Issue.