Online pornography showing strangulation or suffocation is to be made illegal, as part of government plans to tackle violence against women and girls.
It follows a review which found depictions of choking were “rife” on mainstream porn sites and had helped normalise the act among young people.
Both the possession and publication of such material will be a criminal offence, under amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill currently going through Parliament.
This is in direct response to some recent studies that claimed that chocking is the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40. Other studied found that there is no safe amount of oxygen deprivation, any chocking leads to brain damage. Other risks of choking are difficulty swallowing, incontinence, seizures, memory problems, depression, anxiety and miscarriage.
What happened is that porn normalized chocking. It used to be limited to the “hard core” types of porn but now it’s mainstream and kids that grew up watching it think it’s just normal part of sex. Most women asked about it say that they don’t enjoy it but do it “for their partner’s pleasure”.
So yeah, the government treats it as a public health issue and bans it.
I’m not a scientists, I didn’t review all those studies and frankly I don’t care one way of the other. Just wanted to give people some context.
You can read more about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/07/no-safe-way-risks-of-choking-during-sex
I’m not sold on the “porn normalized XYZ”, or non porn either. There’s plenty of content of all kinds showing all kind of things that would be deemed dangerous, wrong, lethal, immoral, cruel, etc. but somehow, it’s only porn and kinks we’re talking about. If the prevalence of something in easily accessible media was a thing, I’d have a thing or two to tell about cops choking/gasing/beating up people laying on the ground.
I’m more concerned by the amount of people that consider fictional content to be guidelines for how they actually live their life. It seems that there’s enough of them to warrant censoring weird shit, but as long as this side of the issue is not addressed, this will not stop.
When I was younger (yes… classic one) a lot of people were worried that younger generation could not distinguish fiction from reality. And we didn’t even have realistic fiction, too. Now that we do, it seems that too many people consider “normalisation” through any media the natural course of things. Kinda like video game making people violent… only when it is convenient.
Finally one single comment nuancing this instead of just going “wtf censorship!!!”. Women are literally feeling pressured to get choked during sex because we have a sick porn industry thriving on depicting women as an object you can treat in any way you want. This is a fucking disgusting cultural development and moat people here (99% men obviously) are defending it. What you do at home in consent is up to you, but you guys must realize that the way we depict women in porn will shape the culture of how men expects women to behave, and what obscure shit women feel they are expected to put up with.
Like, I get it, but this but unironically. The UK has already put a bathroom ban out for trans folks. How long before they ban trans porn because it’s considered harmful? How long before they start to label other trans things as adult and ban those too?