It’s impressive to me how many men have done it without checking,” 29-year-old Anna* tells me, when I ask her how she feels about choking during sex. “I distinctly remember thinking ‘I wonder what I responded to that read as consent to that?’. Was it rough kissing? Something else?” The thing is, Anna* isn’t averse to choking, at least in theory. “There’s no doubt that power and sex are related,” she says. “We can all enjoy giving up power, taking it, feeling it”. But, she stresses, “it has to be our power. You have to be choosing to play with it.”
In 2020, a national probability survey of Americans aged 18 to 60 years found that 21 per cent of women reported having been choked during sex. Twenty per cent of men reported that they had choked a partner during sex. What was striking, however, was the difference across age groups. The survey reported adults aged 18 to 29 engaging in choking at much higher rates than older adults. This apparent generational shift in sexual attitudes has been backed up a number of times, with another US survey finding that 58 per cent of female college students have been choked during sex, with a quarter having been choked by age 17.
