Violence
It Was Scary, But Then It Was Kind of Exciting: Young Women’s Experiences with Choking During Sex.
Open Access: No.
Abstract
Choking/strangulation during sex is prevalent among young adults, with one study finding that 58% of women college students had ever been choked during sex. However, no qualitative study has examined women’s experiences with choking/strangulation during sex outside of intimate partner violence. The purpose of our qualitative interview study was to investigate women’s experiences with choking and/or being choked during partnered sex. Through in-depth interviews with 24 undergraduate and graduate women students ages 18 to 33, we sought to understand how women communicate about choking, their learning about and initiation into choking, their feelings about being choked and choking others, as well as consent and safety practices used in relation to choking. We found that women had first learned about choking through diverse sources including pornography, erotic stories, magazines, social media, friends, and partners. While all 24 women had been choked during sex, only 13 of 24 had ever choked a partner. They described having engaged in choking with men as well as women and with committed as well as more casual partner types. Participants described consensual and non-consensual choking experiences. While many women enjoyed choking, others did it largely to please their sexual partner. Women described different methods and intensities of having been choked. Although very few had ever sought out information on safety practices or risk reduction, and only some had established safe words or safe gestures with partners, participants consistently expressed a belief that the ways in which they and their partner(s) engaged in choking were safe.
Relevance
Some of the female participants in this study believed that men who did not engage in “choking” and other forms of “rough sex” were not fully masculine; they were emasculated. “Most viewed choking as mirroring a relationship where men are expected to be dominant and therefore serve as the choker, while women were expected to play a more submissive role and be choked.”
Pornography was a source of information on “choking.” Furthermore, “many women described pornography as playing a role in their partner choking them; for example, women often talked about the first person who choked them being someone who watched pornography and who the women felt did sexual things to them that the partner had seen in pornography.”
Many “initial choking experiences…occurred without prior discussion or explicit consent. Participants described these first experiences as surprising, aggressive, scary, part of a sexual assault, or accidental” and sometimes occurred “the first time they had vaginal intercourse.”
“Some interviewees discussed accepting being choked for their partners’ pleasure, even when they didn’t personally find it arousing”.
Most had never sought information about choking techniques, risks, or safety” and. “most participants had been choked multiple times and some had been choked dozens of times or more than 100 times.”
Citation
Herbenick, D., Guerra-Reyes, L., Patterson, C., Rosenstock Gonzalez, Y. R., Wagner, C., & Zounlome, N. (2022). “It Was Scary, But Then It Was Kind of Exciting”: Young Women’s Experiences with Choking During Sex. Archives of sexual behavior, 51(2), 1103–1123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02049-x
