Why Are All These Teenage Girls Getting Choked In Bed Nowadays?

What is going on here, and does it "say" anything to us?

Since 2018, there’s been a renaissance of information around this idea that choking — once among the greatest of sexual taboos, or something you did only with a long-term partner after many discussions — is now so commonplace, or desired, that young men are just going for it on a first sexual encounter, with no discourse involved. Feels pretty troubling. A lot of this initial research came from the United Kingdom, but now some of it is getting picked up in major American outlets.

Here is just the second paragraph of the above article:

For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

And actually, an old friend of mine from college texted me recently to tell me she was working on a documentary series about sex, sexual morality, and sex among teenagers. If it gets greenlit for eight episodes, one entire episode may focus on the choking aspect.

The title of this particular post is a supposedly “playful” reference from a Jack Harlow song, which shows how “mainstream” choking hath apparently become.

There is a lot to unpack on that particular topic.