No-one wants to take a critical eye to sex for fear it might lead to them missing out on it.
The boundaries of sexually acceptable behaviour have expanded with remarkably little scrutiny of what drives male sexual desire, or of the sexual culture we have created around it.
Last week in Sydney a 16-year old girl was killed during what is now sanitised, condoned and even promoted as “sexual choking”. It was, of course, strangulation, and the language we use to describe such acts matters because it determines what we are willing to see. To call strangulation “sexual choking” turns an act of violence into a sexual preference. It takes this violence and places it in a category where ordinary moral and legal judgements are suspended.
Sexual strangulation has moved from the margins of sexual behaviour into the mainstream. What was once regarded as extreme or rare is now sufficiently widespread that young women can expect to encounter it as a seemingly “ordinary” part of sexual relations, despite the catastrophic injuries it can cause. The “rough sex” defence has become a tool to minimise criminal culpability. It is only England and Wales that have explicitly legislated to state that consent to serious harm for sexual gratification is not a defence, while Northern Ireland has separately undertaken a review of the issue.
If we had greater clarity about what is going on here, if we could bring ourselves to do the proper scrutiny of men’s sexual desire and how it feeds into our permissive sexual culture, then we would at least begin by treating strangulation as the criminal act of violence it is, rather than allowing the context of sex to obscure what is happening. But I suspect we won’t. The mirror is still too inconvenient for us.
Media in Australia has legitimised the act, and written sympathetically about the “heartbroken boyfriend”. It was seemingly just an expression of love that became an unfortunate accident. We’ve lost our goddamn fucking minds.
What would ordinarily be understood as a clear act of violence is deemed acceptable if it is perpetrated in the bedroom. Moving rooms somehow transforms violence into a “kink”. And this “kink” is something not to be shamed. Kinks are to be tolerated, or celebrated, even if they lead to death. A young girl’s role was to be the vessel for this kink, and it was the boy’s ability to “express his sexuality” that was most important. Her death, well, that was just collateral damage.
Yet an act does not cease to be violent because the people involved are naked, nor does consent transform every act into something harmless.
Within this moral vacuum, personal desire has come to be privileged over personal restraint. The assumption is that if a desire exists, an individual should be free to pursue it, regardless of the cost. This sits within a broader bastardisation of liberalism, where the freedom to exercise personal responsibility has been replaced by a freedom from responsibility.
Sex has become a prominent area where this bastardisation is visible. We have failed to ask whether a particular desire is good, healthy or worthy of cultivation, and instead ask only whether it satisfies an instinct and gains – often dubious – consent.
The sexual revolution made a mistake when it assumed that liberation meant the removal of moral judgement itself. A free society does not have to celebrate every desire merely because it exists. It can distinguish between freedom and harm, between pleasure and cruelty, it can set social boundaries around what it chooses to normalise.
As Louise Perry has written in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, in dismantling the old social mores around sex, we have replaced them with a culture that is unwilling to impose any limits on sexual desire and implications. We now believe that consent negates the nature of any act. Yet a woman’s consent does not alter the underlying character of a man’s intent. If a man is sexually aroused by the domination or suffering of a woman, consent does not transform that desire into something benign.
The burden of sexual freedom has not fallen equally on men and women. Men are, on average, physically stronger than women, and sexual relationships therefore contain an asymmetry that cannot simply be wished away by invoking consent. A culture that tells women they are liberated because they are free to participate in increasingly aggressive sexual practices, while treating male aggression as just another form of sexual expression, risks confusing women’s freedom with men’s freedom to exercise their worst desires.
Consent here is a flimsy justification because there is no genuinely safe form of strangulation. The physical vulnerability of the neck means that serious injury or death can occur even when someone believes they have consented to strangulation. This creates a fundamental distinction between consent and informed consent. People cannot meaningfully give informed consent to risks they do not fully understand.
The problem is compounded when violence is recast as intimacy. Strangulation is not made less serious because it occurs during sex. Nor is the desire to strangle someone rendered morally neutral merely because it is described as a kink. Somehow, through our deep aversion to examining and scrutinising male sexual desire, we have managed to reframe the concept of “attraction” into meaning “attracted to harming women”. And become ok with it.
Teenage girls and younger women are especially vulnerable to this murky world, where social pressures and the intense attention of male sexual interest combine with the lack of fully developed adult capacities to analyse situations and make confident, informed decisions. Coupled with this are the physical realities that even a teenage boy’s hands wrapped around your throat can produce enormous force. A culture that eroticises male physical dominance is one that is profoundly risky for women and girls.
It is also a culture that has abandoned its humanity. In eroticising male sexual violence we have chosen a coward’s path to our social conditions. Humans have always possessed violent impulses, but rather than seek to civilise ourselves and restrain these impulses, we have instead funnelled them into a culture of sexual legitimacy. We find it far too difficult to ask ourselves why men would use sex as a vehicle to harm women, so we’ve decided to instead become comfortable with it.
We’ve also made some convenient excuses to avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror. The narrative emerging from this death in Sydney has been that the porn industry has socialised men into believing that strangulation is a legitimate form of “sexual expression.” This often frames boys and men as “victims” of the porn industry and weakens their personal responsibility. The reality is more uncomfortable: male desire and the culture the porn industry creates are mutually self-reinforcing. The porn industry didn’t invent the impulse to hurt women from nothing, it worked with a pre-existing demand and amplified, commercialised and legitimised it.
Porn entrenches this violent sexual culture, and its influence is utterly corrosive, but in order to have a serious analysis of why a 16 year old girl is dead from a sexual encounter we need to confront its actual psychological drivers. Why do men want to hurt women, and what is it about sex that is the vehicle for this desire? Why is an act that restricts another person’s breathing first interpreted as a sexual practice rather than an act of physical violence? And what does that tell us about the assumptions we have allowed to develop around male sexuality?
The central lesson from this girl’s death is therefore also the one we are most reluctant to acknowledge: not everything becomes acceptable when it becomes sexual. Some things remain violence, whatever room they happen in, whatever euphemism we give them, and however much we might prefer not to look too closely at male sexual desire and the culture of sexual freedom that has facilitated its brutal excesses.