Last week, I noted that a female porn director had come out to warn that pornography was mainstreaming sexual violence in the romantic context, and that the stark rise of choking during sexual encounters is evidence of this. “Face slapping, choking, gagging and spitting has become the alpha and omega of any porn scene,” the director noted, “and not within a BDSM context.”
Indeed, American statistics covered by The Atlantic recently revealed that nearly a quarter of American women feel fear during intimacy as a result of seemingly spontaneous porn-inspired violence, a trend that has attracted increasing attention over the past several years. In response to my column, the alleged comedian Billy Procida (who also hosts the “Manwhore podcast”) angrily tweeted at me that women were “ASKING to be choked,” that “choking is not unhealthy,” and that “you shouldn’t choke someone without learning to do it properly,” a sentence that is six words too long. He didn’t care for my response that this was the sort of thing guys who watched too much porn say.
