I was once strangled during sex. It scared the sh*t out of me.
This article was written by The Line Creative Hub member Talisa G.
[Content warning: this article discusses forms of violence, which may be traumatic to read about.]
It hadn’t been intentionally harmful, in fact, I now know the person I was being intimate with intended for it to be fun.
But it was horrifying.
Without my consent, the person I’d been having sex with suddenly put their hand around my throat, cutting off my blood flow, scaring me a lot.
Since then, I’ve learnt the person assumed it was normal, having watched something similar in porn.
But it wasn’t normal, nor was it okay, because they hadn’t asked beforehand.
What Getting Strangled During Sex Taught Me About Porn
Porn often skips over all the key, real parts of sex: consent, communication, and safety.
It also tends to showcase acts of violence in ways that can make them feel normal.
Behaviour like choking or slapping may start to feel pretty ‘vanilla’ if they’re something you repeatedly see on screen.
And then the vast majority of mainstream porn can skip straight over the important parts of having sex, with limited to zero communication about pleasure, boundaries or safety.
It makes sense if you think about it.
In a Mission Impossible movie, Tom Cruise doesn’t stop to go through all the safety protocols before he jumps between buildings.
It would make it way less entertaining if he did!
Yet, while most of us will watch these Hollywood blockbusters and know their wild moves and lack of concern for personal safety is just scripted acting, we tend to feel differently, or just ignore it altogether, when it comes to porn.
Porn As Education? Been There
In a general sense, a lot of us tend to take porn a lot more literally.
It can feel like a readily accessible guide, like a sort of step-by-step manual for how to have sex.
There’s a few reasons for this, but to name a few, it might have been the first time we ever really saw ‘intimacy’, and it might have been where some of us went when we were first learning how to have sex without judgement.
There definitely aren’t school lessons on the ‘how-to’ of safe, respectful sex, pretty much just how to put on a condom or that babies are a massive responsibility (which can reinforce some pretty harmful gender norms).
Want to know more? Check out Does Everyone Like Porn?
Especially for LGBTQIA+ youth, porn can feel like one of the only places to see the ‘mechanics’ of it all.
Searching up ‘scissoring?’ on GenericPornSiteDotCom felt way more accessible than asking my straight friends or trying to dig through random books.
But how does all of that work in reality? Not well.
It ends up being like following a recipe where half the steps are missing and the other half are done by professional chefs.
Not the most well-rounded learning resource, and you’re left to figure out what all the missing but really important steps are on your own, and setting yourself up to fumble it.
If this hits home, ask yourself some questions like:
- Is there anything missing in what I’m watching? (Consent, communication, safety?)
- Would I actually want to do this to someone? Would I want it done to me?
- Is this portrayal accurate, or more like an action movie (acting)?
- Does what I’m watching show respectful or degrading ideas of people who are of certain races, gender identities and abilities?
- How does this make me feel? What’s the post nut clarity making me think?
How Porn’s Miseducation Can Become ‘Normal’
As humans, we learn a lot just by seeing things again and again.
It’s how trends catch on, and how random things tend to get normalised without us even noticing.
The more we see certain acts, behaviour, or the way people are treated, especially women, people of colour, disabled people, or queer people, the more ‘normal’ they can start to feel, and the more we can feel expected to ‘perform’ them.
But ‘normal’ doesn’t always mean healthy, safe, or even realistic. It just means it’s what our brain is used to.
This phenomenon is why the person I was having sex with hadn’t thought twice about putting their hand around my throat without checking for my explicit consent.
It doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, but they would’ve been better off with more comprehensive education about sex and should’ve made sure they had the tools to be able to check for consent.
Whether it’s Labubus, fashion, or sex, the things we see regularly shape our idea of what’s ‘normal’.
But it's important to stay mindful about how mainstream porn may shape our ideas about sex, gender, power and the world around us.
We need to keep checking in with ourselves and our partners to make sure feeling safe is our new ‘normal’ when it comes to sex.
