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.
You know, there’s a fun observation to be made here: for every perversion you ban, the more niche ones move further up the view list. In essence, short of a complete porn ban (which is their final goal), they’re likely to make the problem worse.
In terms of boys learning violence from this kind of porn - surely the online safety act is doing that right? Of course not; that act has failed gloriously and this proposed change evidences that.
The real solution they should be considering is strong messages about “safe, sane, consensual”. Stick it up on posters, make it a mandatory banner on porn sites (who would complain, really), even take that shit into schools (it’s good practice even for vanilla). The real issue isn’t the acts themselves, it’s the way we talk about them, or more don’t!
To anyone celebrating this: you’re defending a fucking bad faith law!
Does any of the recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws are just to protect little Jimmy being a “little confused”, to protect him from “making life altering decisions”? Did any of the Nazi anti-Jewish laws were only made to stop predatory banking? Fuck no! And fuck you if you think we can just "undo it easily later on: no one wants to be the “pervert politician”, no one wants to be smeared by the opposition as “the real misogynist” or a “pervert being occupied with things other than the economy”, so no one will do it.
I don’t like choking in porn. The problem is a failure of both the lack of sexual education, and not holding platforms accountable for replatforming the likes of Andrew Tate, not some smut.
I think you’re also missing the part where some people are just legit into strangling.
One of my exes loved it, loved watching porn about it. Does she have to become a criminal now just to scratch her itch?
Prohibiting fantasies won’t stop actual bad people, as it never has. I’d say we would be better off with education on how to do it safely if you’re really into it, education of men on how to do this respectfully, again, of both are legit into it.
We should also makke sure it’s very clear for women facing abusive partners that they can leave, that they won’t lose everything they got, that they won’t lose their family, that they won’t face stigmatization, and we should make sure that they have all resources available to get back on their feet
Dark fantasies and dark sex acts aren’t the problem. Abusive partners are the problem
This guy chokes.
I am… Rather older than most of you, in all probability. My partner likes being choked; not hard, not actually cutting off air or blood, but the sensation of hands or an arm around their throat. They also like being caned, and spanked; I’m into fairly serious rope bondage (as a rope top) and CNC.
Under British law, a large percentage of the sexual activities that we both enjoy together would be criminal offenses.
For what it’s worth, in the 1920s, oral sex was considered shocking to moral sensibilities, perverted, an affront against nature, and grotesquely obscene. I suspect that the view from the year 2100–should humanity survive that long–will see choking in much the same way.
I’ve never been choked, but I like to hold my breath right as I’m about to ejaculate (cause it makes the orgasm stronger for some reason), so I could absolutely see the appeal. So long as it’s consentual, I see no issue with choking in sex.
The US and UK are in a race to see who can out-Fash the other.
It sure seems like the puritans are in charge these days. And their using kids to ram through whatever the fuck they want. As long as no one is getting hurt, I dont really see what business it is of any government what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes. I mean, even if you were choking her out, as long as it was what she wanted, its really up to you two to take on the risks.
I dont understand it, but who cares? Im not in the room. Its nothing to do with me, or anyone else. I cant help but feel this is the beginning of something a bit more sinister. Maybe someday soon, blow jobs will be looked down upon again. Or far more likely, being gay will be looked down upon again. Cos thats where these weirdos always look to when they talk about things “corrupting the youth”. A bit of slap and tickle first, attack the LGBT crowd next under the guise of protecting the children/young people. “Youre not gay, youve just seen too many blowjobs, Timmy. Youll be alright after we send you to a re-education camp.”…
Won’t be any kids to protect soon as the raging inequality continues to rise and people become completely unable to afford them.
Why do you think that sex ed is being banned, they’re trying to prevent people from having access to porn, and womens’ reproductive care is being sharply limited? They know kids are gonna fuck if they don’t have any other outlet, and kids are going to fuck unsafely. Then they’ve got the babies that they need to keep delivering Amazon packages and assembling iPhones.
The morality police in the UK strike again. They’re slowly turning into Saudi Arabia the longer they keep this up.
No wonder they keep importing people with this exact moral view.
So men don’t get choked? Why are these things always gender specific?
I like to get a little choked every now and then, during. Am I illegal?
Yes I recommend you handcuff yourself immediately, maybe tie yourself up a bit, you’ve been pretty naughty
Hhhhh okay Mami, I mean yes officer.
It’s less prevalent, but this content definitely exists too.
They do. Watch most pegging, or “Trans fucks guy” videos, and the dude will be turning fucking beetroot while getting pounded hard.
Maybe Timber is not as popular in the UK political scene.
If the argument for the ban is that depiction normalizes it, then there should be a ban on violence in all media, right?
Video games too!
Comparing brain death due to strangulation to moral panic is obviously incorrect.
I suppose I would file this one under massive sex education failure, if youths are having to learn about sex from porn there’s already a problem.
Dark fantasies and dark sex acts aren’t the problem. Abusive partners are the problem
I already don’t like that kind of shit, it’s an immediate turn-off for me.
But - I also know there’s a whole kink around it, and as long as it’s consensual…who tf cares?
I don’t disagree that it’s troubling how mainstream choking is in modern porn. It’s definitely been a huge shift. There’s nothing against it as a fetish, but it being a fetish with potential harmful consequences suggests that it should be in the same category as BDSM - something which can be problematic unless it’s done as an exercise in trust between partners with full informed consent.
And there have been plenty of seemingly not agenda-led studies which suggest that teen boys and girls are both picking up a lot of what they consider to be “normal” about sex from porn.
And not even talking to each other about it. IIRC, there was one such study which had both boys and girls engaging in a particular behaviour (I forget exactly which, maybe even choking), and neither party actively enjoyed the behaviour, they were just doing it because they thought that’s what you do and therefore what their partner wanted.
But is the solution to ban porn which features choking? Firstly, I don’t see how this could in any way be effective. How would you possibly enforce it? Are police really going to raid people’s homes based on suspicion that they’ve got a nowadays-vanilla porn video on their harddrive? The police literally don’t have enough resources to investigate and prosecute everybody creating and sharing child porn. And now they’re supposed to go after everybody who visits PornHub?
Secondly, we’re basically talking about a de-facto porn ban because, as the consultation itself noted, that describes pretty much all porn made in the last 10-15 years.
I’m not sure what the solution is. I mean, talking about the difference bewteen porn and sex is something that should be part of sex education at school. But I kind of assume it already is? It would be weird if it weren’t in 2025.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to engage with creators themselves? I know that several porn companies used to put disclaimers before their videos saying that there’s a difference between porn sex and real sex and talking about consent. Several BDSM porn producers also have pre and post-shoot interviews with the performers and make sure they talk on camera about safe words & gestures and consent.
But then that’s something that’s probably not going to be terribly effective in any case and which would require absolutely everybody to get on board, which would have been basically impossible back when it was only really studios producing content, and 100% impossible now that OnlyFans etc are the way that most performers make and distribute porn.
I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, TBH, but I’m pretty sure that “ban all the porn” isn’t the correct solution.
Nice to see a measured comment.
I don’t think it will lead to banning porn. Just tell actors/directors to stop chocking and cut some sequences from old videos. If a video is an hour long chocking session then geoblock it. I don’t think it’s an existential crisis for the industry.
Banning possession is insane though.
If you’re a porn producer in the US and the UK government says “don’t show choking in your videos any more and re-edit the past 15 years of videos”, what are you going to do? What’s in it for you to comply?
And what is the government actually going to do? Is it going to go through every single porn video on the internet to see whether or not it’s acceptable? There’s no way they have the resources for that. So then there are basically three options. 1) allow people to browse porn and probably unknowingly watch something which is now illegal, 2) do a blanket ban of studios which have choking videos - which is basically all of them, or 3) only institute a ban for the most extreme studios, which is then defeating the supposed purpose of this bill - to combat the mainstreaming of choking in porn.
I suppose option 4 is to require porn sites to label everything accurately and filter out all porn which contains choking from UK urls. But even that feels like a stretch in terms of practicality. It’s one thing to say to sites “you need to use an age-verification system which we deem acceptable or risk a fine” and something quite different to say “you need to manually review the millions of videos on your site under new criteria and implement strict new filtering based on geolocation”. If they tried this then the end result would probably be porn sites just doing an Imgur and blocking the UK entirely. Which, like the current age verification system on porn sites, would just see people using VPNs.
As legislation goes it doesn’t seem very well-thought-through. I suppose that’s what the Houses of Commons & Lords are for, but it’s far from a foolproof system.
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
First they came for the Chokers , And I did not speak out Because I like to breath
Then they came for the Foot fanatics , And I did not speak out Because I was not into feet
Then they came for the thigh highs , And I did not speak out Because I was not into socks
Then they came for the Brazilian cake farts , And there was no one left To speak out for me
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?
An article about this was posted 6 months ago and I looked into it: https://lemmy.world/comment/16311493
I wrote:
This article is feeling kind of clickbaitish, as the sources are … odd.
However, restricting blood flow to the brain can also have serious health implications.
While not all pressure on the neck will be fatal, research shows even relatively low pressure can cause death by strangulation.
The first source is a medical journal describing the physiology of the arteries in the neck, and does not seem to include anything about restricting blood flow (never mind temporarily) having serious health consequences.
The second source is a book from 1991 about autoerotic asphyxiation with the quote:
autoerotic asphyxia denotes death resulting from failure of a release mechanism of the device, apparatus or prop designed to attain cerebral hypoxia for heightened arousal.
Which is … not the same as doing this with someone, and doesn’t address the risks of a partner who releases pressure immediately after a loss of consciousness.
The issues around consent are troubling indeed, consent should always be paramount.
I also found it amusing that the beginning of the article said
Although rare, strangulation is the leading cause of death in consensual BDSM play.
Which links to a study that found a total of 16 cases that included strangulation between 1982 and 2020. Rare indeed.
My husband and I dabble in breath play, so I was curious and read a few studies myself. It seems that every case study I could find included atypical circumstances. Things like accidental hanging, or asphyxiation due to bags etc being over the head.
This paper includes a 50 year review of cases for anyone interested. https://benthamopen.com/contents/pdf/TOFORSJ/TOFORSJ-1-1.pdf
It is also worth noting that loss of consciousness due to cutting off blood flow to the brain (cerebral hypoxia) is not dissimilar to the hypoxia experienced by pilots, who even train with repeated exposure to hypoxia in hyperbaric chambers.
I would be curious to know if there were any studies of the long term effects of this on pilots. (My dive into the rabbit hole is done for the day, lol.)
porn normalized chocking
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.
The way they define choking would also ban a lot of sucking scenes.
That’s the goal. First ban kink that are more extreme, but word the ban vague enough to be applicable to other things.
We call this kind of bad faith laws as “shotgun laws”, due to how reminiscent they’re to the operation of shotgun-type weapons from video games.
“from video games”? lol?
Video game shotguns have a lot more spread than actual shotguns
I’ll forward any I find to my local MP
The porn industry is now in non-consenting bondage
I think the government should stay out of peoples pants. The issue isn’t the pornography, it’s that children are allowed on the Internet whether there is pornography. More of a parenting and society issue than it is a pornography issue.
I think the larger issue is the fact that kids are given cell phones and laptops and unrestricted access to the Internet at a young age. The problem isn’t what’s on the Internet it’s that you don’t want kids to have access to it. There are other more effective ways at dealing with the problem rather than censorship for everyone.
Maybe a better way to handle these issues is giving minors only access to online libraries and curated educational content until they are 18 or considered an adult. Then you can make your social media profiles and access adult content.
