Sexual choking is on a rapid rise. It kills. It is a threat to human brains, human minds and human dignity. We need to stop it in its tracks, whether as parents and grandparents, members of school boards, public citizens, or merely human beings.
I did not know about this rising threat. Did you?
I’ve lived a bunch of years, experienced a ton of life as a physician, soldier, husband, father, citizen. I’ve treated plenty of victims of sexual assault and I’ve testified in court in rape cases. I’ve performed autopsies on young men who died of autoerotic asphyxiation. But this was all news to me. (Maybe I don’t watch enough television.)
In The New York Times, (free link), Peggy Orenstein writes:
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex
Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”
For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four. (my bolding)
Nearly two-thirds of women.
What’s bad about this is the damage it does to the people being choked.* They suffer repeated anoxic brain injuries that cumulatively reduce healthy brain tissue, induce inflammation, and depression and other mental health issues. And, of course they kill.
[U]ndergraduate women who have been repeatedly choked show a reduction in cortical folding in the brain compared with a never-choked control group. They also showed widespread cortical thickening, an inflammation response that is associated with elevated risk of later-onset mental illness. In completing simple memory tasks, their brains had to work far harder than the control group, recruiting from more regions to achieve the same level of accuracy.
Please do read the article. Fair use dictates that I stop quoting at this point.
Nobody here, I think, is a member of the Junior Anti-sex League.** It’s not about that. A lot of us here may think to ourselves, I’ve heard everything, seen everything, done half of it. Not true, of course. Nobody has. But widespread use of porn and the exploitative and abusive slant of the industry leads young people to experiences us old folks were blind to. Me, anyway.
If you are a teacher, a librarian, a parent or grandparent, you can do something to stop this. If you are on a school board, a college campus, a clinic, a social-services organization. If you are on social media, for Pete’s sake. Let other people know of the danger, warn them of the mortal danger.
*in truth, perpetrators of violence are damaged, too. But that’s a story for another day.
**1984. George Orwell. Membership applications closed. Legacy members very, very few.