This Dangerous Sex Trend Is Sending People To The ER—Do You Know The Risks?
Sexual choking, also known as erotic asphyxiation, has grown in popularity among young adults and teens in the U.S., and now, appears to be gaining traction overseas, including in Australia. While some individuals report finding it pleasurable, health experts are sounding the alarm about the serious physical and legal risks associated with the practice, regardless of where it occurs.
A landmark July 2024 study conducted by researchers from Melbourne University Law School and the University of Queensland took a look at 4,702 Australians ages 18 to 35 and found that sexual strangulation was a widespread practice among young people, yet most were unaware of the potential dangers or legal implications. The research revealed that 57% of participants had been strangled during sex at least once, while 51% had strangled a partner.
Despite the prevalence of this behavior, few respondents knew that even consensual strangulation can cause serious harm, and many were unaware that it is a criminal offence in every Australian state and territory. Notably, in the U.S., choking is considered a felony offense in many states, typically in domestic abuse cases.
What are the risks of sexual choking?
According to WebMD, individuals who experience sexual choking may face several serious health issues, such as trouble breathing, loss of consciousness, and memory problems. More alarmingly, cutting off the air supply to the brain can result in brain damage or even death. The pressure exerted on the neck during strangulation can damage blood vessels, reducing the oxygen reaching the brain, leading to irreversible brain damage or fatality. Other consequences include incontinence, seizures, issues with memory, concentration, decision making, depression, anxiety, and miscarriage, the New York Post notes.
Professor Heather Douglas, an educator at Melbourne University Law School and a co-author behind the shocking study, said that while many sexual choking experiences may not result in death, the person being choked may experience small amounts of damage over time, leading to health complications long term.
“It doesn’t matter if there are no apparent injuries or whether the person consented. Brain injury can also be incremental – getting a bit worse with each choking – and the person may not know they have suffered a brain injury,” she explained in a press release published July 2, 2024. The effects of repeated strangling are insidious and build over time, like the effects of repeated concussions on footballers.”
In fact, a study published in May compared blood samples from women who had been strangled during sex at least four times in the past 30 days with those who had never experienced strangulation. Researchers found that the women who had been strangled showed elevated levels of S100B, a protein commonly used as a biomarker for brain injury.
It’s a cause for concern, given that many sexual strangulation experiences often begin during adolescence, according to the data. Douglas and her team found that people typically experienced or initiated choking for the first time between the ages of 19 and 21, with respondents reporting an average of five such encounters involving three different partners. Gender and identity played a significant role: more men (59%) than women (40%) had strangled a partner, while more women (61%) than men (43%) reported being strangled.
Exposure to sexual strangulation was often linked to media influences, most commonly pornography (61%), followed by movies (40%), friends (32%), social media (31%), and conversations with current or potential partners (29%), according to the data uncovered by the Melbourne University Law School and the University of Queensland.
Sexual choking has become popular among U.S. undergraduates.
The eye-opening Australian study mirrored similar results to a campus-wide survey of nearly 5,000 undergraduate students (ages 18 to 22) at a large Midwestern U.S. university conducted that same year in December. It found that half of the respondents had experienced sexual choking, with women overwhelmingly being the ones choked during heterosexual encounters, reflecting traditional gender power dynamics.
The study also found a strong association between repeated choking and lower condom use: individuals who had been choked more than five times were significantly less likely to use condoms during sex, both at the event level and within the past six months. As previously reported, despite the heightened sensation some may experience during the act, health experts like Dr. Debby Herbenick say the potential risks of sexual choking make it a highly dangerous practice that should not be taken lightly.
“There is no zero-risk way of engaging in choking,” Dr. Debby Herbenick, a public health professor at Indiana University, told the New York Post. “Though deaths from consensual choking are rare, they do happen.”
A 2022 study revealed that strangulation—including incidents linked to domestic violence—is the second leading cause of stroke among women under 40, a finding that has raised serious concerns among medical experts. Herbernick stressed that parents must begin discussing the dangers of sexual choking with their children in their early teens to protect them from the dangers of this controversial sex trend.
“Parents need to step into these conversations because choking is unlikely to be addressed in high school sex education, even though many teenagers are already engaging in it or may soon.
