The Same Old Sex Talk Isn’t Enough
8 min read
Growing up in a Catholic family, I spent a lot of my teen years being lectured to about the downsides of premarital sex. At their best, these talks, usually delivered in sex-segregated groups, contained a message that, looked at sideways, might have been described as feminist: Dating someone did not entitle them to your body, and a man’s libido was never to be favored over your own (spiritual) well-being. At their worst, they were objectifying and cruel; one speaker advised a group of middle-school girls to envision our purity as an apple that we would one day offer our spouse.
Now I have two daughters of my own. I want to offer them sexual guidance that recognizes the value of caution, but I also want to spare them the sort of shaming my peers and I were subjected to. Yet I’m not confident I know where the line between caution and shame lies. This ambivalence was heightened recently when I read an opinion article in The New York Times about the rise of sexual choking among young people. The practice, relatively rare 20 years ago, has lately become fairly common among college-age kids, according to research by Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health at Bloomington and the author of Yes, Your Kid: What Parents Need to Know About Today’s Teens and Sex. The majority of female college students surveyed at one large American university said that a partner had choked them during sex; 40 percent said they were under 18 when it first happened; and, according to the Times article, most said their partners “never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks.”
This development is troubling for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that choking is incredibly dangerous, regardless of how it is done. Even when it isn’t deadly (and it is, occasionally), repeated asphyxiation restricts blood flow to the brain, which research suggests can result in brain damage not unlike the sort caused by recurrent concussions. The second reason is that the emergence of choking and other “rough sex” behaviors has a decidedly gendered arc, with women overwhelmingly on the receiving end. Some women insist that they enjoy being choked. But there is little evidence that the practice’s newfound popularity has led to an increase in women’s pleasure (they still report reaching orgasm far less often than men), nor has it been matched by an uptick in other practices that might (the idea of using vibrators still seems to give some young men the ick).
Even kink communities—a pretty adventurous lot—have cautioned against choking and articulated that there are limits to what consenting individuals can safely do together. And anyway, doing kink ethically requires a lot of communication about personal desires and boundaries, discussions that young people don’t seem to be having.
In considering all of this, I at first found myself wondering whether the chastity proselytizers of my youth were right to encourage some degree of sexual restraint. The boundless sexual exploration endorsed by a more liberated culture seems to have inadvertently trapped young people in sexual dysfunction—that is, acceptance of sexual variety has morphed into an expectation of sexual violence. Some, no doubt, have discovered a genuine taste for a rougher variety of sex. But it seems that many feel they have no other option. In fact, Herbenick suspects that the violent nature of modern sex is one reason young people are having less of it.
But after talking with researchers, I realized my initial hunch wasn’t quite right. It’s not that an ethos of sexual freedom has backfired; it’s that “freedom” was never really possible in the first place.
We often talk about sex as an exploration, or a discovery, as if an individual’s sexuality—the ways in which they derive thrill and gratification from sex—is something fixed and internal, there for the finding if they are brave enough to look. There is likely some truth to this, Elizabeth Morgan, a psychology professor at Springfield College, told me. Evidence suggests that individual physiologies can predispose people to different sensitivities, Morgan said, and biology “governs certain places on our body that produce different sexual responses.” Even the satisfaction some people seem to derive from choking has a biological explanation: Asphyxiation can produce euphoria. Yet sexuality isn’t fixed; people can “learn to connect physical pleasure with all sorts of different things—people, objects, places, parts of the body, or whatever else,” Morgan said. And these tastes are inevitably shaped by culture.
Young people gather information about whether they should be having sex, and what it ought to involve, from a diversity of sources—subtle and not—over years. Taken together, these data form the “sexual scripts” they rely on in the uncertainty and vulnerability of a sexual encounter. “Teens are not being raised in a vacuum, and they are exposed to a variety of images and messages and song lyrics and pictures and magazines and TikToks and social medias and friends,” Morgan told me. “All of that is shaping their formation of what, when they get maybe alone with one other person, what they’re supposed to be doing.” And it happens whether people realize it or not. In a study published in 2006, Morgan found that among 334 undergraduate students, those who watched dating game shows were more likely to hold gamelike, adversarial beliefs about dating. Some participants reported watching the shows to learn about relationships, while others insisted they watched just for fun—but both groups seemed to internalize the game’s messages about dating as a brutal competition.
The sudden popularity of sexual choking makes a lot more sense when you recognize the social influences guiding sexual behavior. Of the many young men and women Herbenick has interviewed, there were only a few she believes would have found their way to the practice had they been born in another era. Most are “engaging in choking because of the influences around them,” Herbenick told me, including peers, pornography, social media, and TV shows that “tell them that this is what sex is like today.”
The prevalence of rough sex is evidence of the degree to which porn in particular and the internet in general have hijacked the sexual formation of young people—and how dysfunctional sexual dynamics can get as a result. Much of the sex that porn depicts is, well, fake. It is ordered not toward the pleasure of those who appear in it, but toward the titillation of those watching it. And the way that sex unfolds on-screen—without much discussion, as though everything that’s happening is intuitive, expected, and welcomed—creates the impression that it is okay to proceed, without asking, with the expansive list of behaviors it depicts, including the violent ones, Emily Rothman, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told me.
The result is that porn and pop culture haven’t so much mainstreamed kink as unkinked it. Young people are arriving to the bedroom with divergent expectations, at a time when many more options for sexual play are on the menu—choking is “just kind of what you do when you have sex,” Herbenick said—which means that if you do not want to be choked or slapped or spit on in bed, you have to say so ahead of time.
This is a problem much bigger than any individual parent can solve, but it’s also not one parents can simply ignore. They can attempt to delay their children’s exposure to porn or steer them toward a better version of it, Morgan told me. But given the easy visibility of rough sex in general—in pop culture and on social media—there’s no getting around the need for parents to talk with their kids about what they’re seeing, even if it requires the adults to push through their own discomfort.
At baseline, that means offering kids context: Explain that the spontaneous, nonnegotiated sex they see on-screen is not real life, that it does not offer a good model for how to engage in sexual behavior, and that the rules of porn don’t necessarily align with the law. Strangling someone without their explicit permission is assault—and even with permission, it could land you in legal trouble if it ends in injury or death. Herbenick told me that many of her students express surprise when she shares articles about young men who have been charged with murder for sexual choking gone wrong: “They say, ‘But it’s consensual, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Does it matter? She’s dead.’”
Equipping kids to navigate this confusing sexual landscape is a delicate task that requires raising children who feel entitled to consent, consideration, and respect within their partnerships, but who are also prepared for the eventuality that those things won’t be offered to them. These conversations will inevitably be awkward, but in such a confused sexual landscape, they are also essential. Rothman told me she has counseled her daughters that there is a decent chance a sexual partner will one day attempt to choke them, that it’s not safe, and that it is on them to state clearly: “I don’t do that.”
Although parents don’t have the power to set the ethical framework guiding modern sexual behavior, we can offer children the one we would like to see take root, ideally one that goes well beyond the boundaries of consent. “We want them to be thinking about good sex, mutually pleasurable sex, intimacy, human connection, care, compassion,” Herbenick said. “Not just ‘Did this person say it’s all right?’”
In other words, there was perhaps one seed of truth in the offensive apple metaphor I heard when I was in middle school. It is good to take your partner, whether present or future, into consideration as you explore your own sexuality—but not to ensure your desirability in someone else’s eyes. Rather, you should care that the sex you want to have is the sort a partner will enjoy, because they, like you, are human. It shouldn’t be a turnoff to treat them like one.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
