"choke me daddy"

Once reserved for a very small subset of the BDSM community, sexual strangulation has become so mainstream among young adults that many now consider it vanilla. Alexandra English reports on the troubling trend

- Alexandra English

In her early twenties, Sophie* was on a gap year in Europe, working and living in a hostel in Budapest and running its pub tours. It was a whirlwind of new friends, international travel on her days off and, of course, cute boys.

“There was a guy on one of the tours, and we were flirting and drinking, and later we went back to the hostel,” she says. “One of the perks of working there was that I knew which rooms were empty.” One thing led to another, they started having sex and “towards the end, he put his hand around my neck”, she recalls. He didn’t ask first. “It took me by surprise and I was a bit frightened. I just waited to see if anything else was going to happen. He was a bigger-set dude, very tall, very broad. I was young and naive and pretty drunk. He was a nice guy and I didn’t think he was trying to be violent but, looking back now, really anything could have happened.”

It’s a story that’s become all-too-familiar in girl group chats across the country, and not only among women in their twenties. Non-fatal sexual strangulation is becoming more and more common among younger and younger people.

THE RISE OF SEXUAL STRANGULATION

Non-fatal sexual strangulation – also known as erotic asphyxia, breath play or, more colloquially, choking – was once a fringe activity reserved for a small population of the BDSM community. For some people, the element of risk, the power play and the lightheaded high from a lack of oxygen intensifies their pleasure. But that element of risk is so extreme that some studies suggest that even as recently as 20 years ago, fewer than five per cent of people had ever engaged in erotic asphyxiation. But times have changed, and drastically.