Earlier this week, I wrote a column on the stomach-turning sex crimes (one of which included the murder of a young teenage girl) that were fueled by pornography, and the fact that violent pornography has become a ubiquitous part of our youth culture. A few days ago, The Atlanticpublished an article by Olga Khazan detailing this disturbing trend even further. The title says it all: “The Startling Rise of Choking During Sex.” While physical intimacy is generally seen as a beautiful thing, Khazan writes, “for many women, one sexual feeling that comes to mind is a darker one: fear.”
A stunning study by Dr. Debby Herbenick, a sex researcher and professor at the Indiana University of Public Health, uncovered the fact that almost a quarter of adult American women have “felt scared during sex.” Out of 347 women who responded, 23 said that their fear was rooted in the fact that their partner had suddenly attempted to choke them. Some women described their partners grasping their throats and cutting off their air supply.
It gets worse. According to Herbenick, a growing number of sexual assault cases at Indiana University include men choking their female partners, and her research in this area indicates that a full 13% of teen girls between ages 14 and 17 have been choked. Young boys want to choke young girls as part of their standard sexual experience, and girls are either resigning themselves to the fact that this is part of their culture or submitting to these acts being forced on them.
What is the reason that even young kids see choking as a violent sex act? Experts agree across the board: Violent pornography. In fact, senior editor of The Atlantic Kate Julian added that during her research into the impact of porn on youth culture, she spoke with many women who said that porn-inspired behaviors were often pushed on them, including unwanted anal sex. I’ve heard this from young girls in high school as young as thirteen-years-old after giving presentations on pornography—and this is in Christian schools.
According to Kate Julian, the results of this porn-inspired behavior is an ugly thing to see. She related that one university health center was concerned about a possible rise in sexual assaults due to the number of females coming in with vulvar fissures, which usually indicates sexual violence. But, says Julian, these young females hadn’t been technically raped: “They just had been having sex they didn’t desire. They didn’t know it was supposed to feel different.”
In short: Violent pornography has transformed the sexuality of a generation, and now women are being physically hurt during sexual interactions as a matter of course—and they don’t even know that intimacy is “supposed to feel different.” I’ve written this before, and it is essential that people understand it: Pornography is not creating a rape culture by simply spiking the numbers of rapists. It is creating rape culture by mainstreaming sexual violence in the romantic context. It is making sexual violence a part of our culture, and girls are quite literally getting hurt every day.
Pornography is killing intimacy, it is victimizing women and girls, and it is destroying men. The masculine instinct to protect women is being transformed into something carnivorous, with pornography feeding them a 24-7 digital diet of toxic sexual material that teaches them that girls are something you extract pleasure from at their expense rather than someone you love. It is staggering to consider that a full quarter of women in the United States say that they feel fear during sex, but that these women simply accept that this is how things are now.
