Possession of Porn Featuring Strangling to Become a Crime in the UK
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The UK is set to criminalize possession of porn featuring strangling, sparking debate about the limits of free speech, the regulation of consensual kink, and the potential consequences of such legislation.
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But does it cause more damage than smoking? Alcohol? Cannabis in young people?
We give people the right to exercise their own judgement in getting hurt for pleasure on those, so if the argument is that this one is not OK it better be an order of magnitude worse than the recreational drugs.
(I guess there's a distinction between the act and a recording of it, but last I checked smoking and alcohol are still legal in media for adults.)
Ed.: the act is apparently illegal too, "Due to these dangers, non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation were made a criminal offence as part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021".
And it's really... odd... how the entire article is written as if the practice is solely performed by men on women. (Even though that might be the prevailing pattern, this kind of 'condensing down' is ultimately sexist erasure.)
It's unsurprising. GB has an unholy trinity of excuses for authoritarian laws:
1. "Think of the women and girls!"
2. "Think of the children!"
3. "This is a sacrifice we have to make to stop terrorism!" (which has taken a backseat to the first two)
How is that possible, they’re categorically opposite?
Wow, this sounds like a great way to get screwed over by a former, disgruntled ex-partner. Partner wants you to choke them a bit during sex, you know (or don't know) it's illegal, but think "eh, it's fine, what we do in the privacy of our own bedroom is our business, and $PARTNER really likes it". Fast-forward to an acrimonious breakup, and your former partner is now accusing you of an illegal act.
I 100% get that domestic violence is a real thing, and even aside from that, there are some things that we do try protect people from, even if they consent to it, but I feel like this crosses the line.
Conflicting claims or testimony are common in the legal system, and we do in fact have means of resolving them. They are not, of course, 100% guaranteed to resolve things correctly, but it is simply false to say that there is no way to resolve it.
Its not an opinion; whether we have a method of resolution is a verifiable question of fact, and the answer is yes, we do.
Juries make decisions where the key evidence is conflicting testimony of two witnesses all the time, where the other evidence, if any, isn't directly on the primary question but the reliability of the witnesses.
Usually, this will resolve against the accuser where the US criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) applies, and have more mixed results where lower standards, like the preponderance of the evidence or clear and convincing evidence standards used for various purposes (e.g., usual judgements and permanent restraining orders, respectively) in the US civil justice system, apply.
Whether this resolution mechanism has satisfactory results is, of course, a subjective question.
In no way is being stabbed pleasurable. Your average person knows that this results in death, charges, jail, etc.
Light choking is quite common amongst sexual partners. It can be incredibly arousing for many. Its is, generally speaking, not at all dangerous when both parties have a very basic understanding of how to do the act safely. It is certainly possible for something to go terribly wrong, even if incredibly rarely.
There is a massive difference between domestic abuse choking and sexual pleasure choking, and tour argument is a fantastic example of how being incredibly reductive is damaging to the argument youre trying to make.
> […] However, no studies used formal neuropsychological assessment: the majority were medical case studies or based on self-report. Furthermore, few authors were able to control for possible confounds, including other physical violence and existing psychosocial difficulties.
So, not only is this not about consensual sex, but rather violence — and therefore inapplicable to consensual activities — but also built on very shaky grounds. The latter might be unavoidable in researching domestic/sexual violence cases, but the former just makes this paper completely useless in discussing consensual activities.
If they could reasonably argue that it were a safe practice, of course I would. Why wouldn't I? Except that argument can't be reasonably made. But it can be made for limited levels of sexual choking play. I specifically asked:
"But does it cause more damage than smoking? Alcohol? Cannabis in young people?"
And without a quantitative answer to this, the entire discussion is hot air and prejudice.
And I cannot help but noting that your way of argument is literally item #1 of Eristic Dialectic: The Extension. These methods are neither productive nor welcome.
And yes, in domestic violence situation, strangling is pretty consistent predictor of actual murder attempt later on.
You can't create a moral panic by having nuance. Why would they care about what people of what genders actually participate in kink play like this? No, if justifying policy is what's needed, instead you have to manufacture a pressing crisis. Just pretend that there's an epidemic of random heterosexual men watching too much porn and starting to nonconsensually strangle their partners out of nowhere. This article already endorses a lesser version of this story - that strangling porn only features women, that it's created solely for men, that its purpose is to degrade women in general through these acts (because surely no one ever is actually into choking, am I right?), and that men are rapidly becoming more misogynistic en masse because of it. Now that slots right in alongside all the societal fears and beliefs we have about protecting women. Every encroachment on NSFW content to come will keep banging the same drums of protecting a group that's seen as needing protection or is marginalized (excluding marginalized groups that the government hates, of course). And most people will probably believe it.
In the worst outcome, there have been manslaughter charges raised against men who choked their partners to death, where "strangulation kink" has been used in the defence of these men. So it is clearly a problem.
Why are you so invested in this issue? Why did you create a throwaway account just to post on this topic? What relationship do you have to politicians, civil servants, and NGOs who have been involved in this campaign?
I didn't say there weren't rapists who were strangling their partners for their own pleasure. The "problem" you're describing is already illegal. I don't think there's a first-world country where you're allowed to nonconsensually choke someone. And "it was just my kink" isn't a good defense at all - just because it's used doesn't mean anything, the defense's whole point is to come up with the most tame interpretation possible for the crime, no matter how ridiculous.
The moral panic part is when the UK government decides that blanket banning everyone from doing it consensually is going to change anything about unrelated rapists who were already fine with breaking the law. And especially the fact that they think that the effects of this blanket ban are going to be large enough for it to be worth to criminalize consenting adults over.
And then then there's the choking porn part, where they seemingly have deduced that it was brainwashing men in such dangerous capacities that it's now worthwhile to brand someone a criminal for life if they dared to have that cognitohazard inscribed on their hard drive. It's okay, you may not have hurt anyone, you may have had a happy, consensual relationship, but we must simply punish you, don't you see. It's for the greater good, for we are fighting something which was already illegal.
Statistics don't matter here. When they come for the next "immoral" kink, they'll conjure up more statistics and conjecture to make it seem less insane. But statistics aren't what caused this. There is no choking porn crisis. They just wanted to go after it, and this was the best tool available.
I assume that in this legal text "suffocation" means the prevention of respiration by other means than compressing the throat, but it should be noted that this is a modern meaning of the word "suffocation". To "strangle" comes from Ancient Greek, through its borrowing in Latin, while to "suffocate" is the native Latin synonym of "strangle", so originally the two words were completely synonymous. ("suffocate" is derived from "sub", i.e. under, and "fauces", i.e. throat)
Similarly, if you read almost any smut book at the moment, a genre which has been going through an incredible renaissance and driving massive sales, you will find that the concept of light choking is prevalent throughout.
The UK parliament have really invaded the bedroom on this one.
Can't believe they'd turn down the opportunity to get more voters.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Powers
No one voted for this, and the last government was actively voted out for all this sort of bullshit. However, to give a prime example of two faced ideology, we now have a government that had the position that trans-women are women, but as soon as they were elected switched to a trans-phobic position.
Nothing the current government does is based upon their election campaign, nothing we voted for is being pursued, and nothing happening is what we want. Labour are actively corrupt.
Any law can be framed as oppression on the basis that it informs people they're not allowed to do something. Speed limits oppress drivers who want to drive over 70 mph, etc.
Also, it was the Supreme Court who decided on the issue of transwomen being legally interpreted as men in the Equality Act, this was independent of the Government.
> it was the Supreme Court who decided on the issue of transwomen being legally interpreted as men in the Equality Act, this was independent of the Government.
Starmer (as it was he who said it, not "official government position") doesn't have to change his position based upon a court ruling that something wasn't clarified enough. They could also say, we still believe that trans-women are women, and we will work to correct this oversight. What actually happened was destroy support for him as he chases voters who would never support him anyway.
> Any law can be framed as oppression on the basis...
Except this is criminalising personal adult activities. We can justify this as a public health issue once the police prosecute ex-prince paedophiles.
Remember that "public health" can be used in all sorts of ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_ban_football_games
> Ladies should not play football... the ladies could also get injuries that destroyed their reproductive organs.
Indeed.
Overhauling the Equality Act, which would be a complex and time-consuming process, wasn't in Labour's election campaign either. They have more pressing issues to deal with.
Anyway, the Supreme Court judgment confirmed that everyone's rights are still protected so it's not like there's a huge oversight that needs to be corrected.
The Liberal Party (what's in a name, anyway?) are campaigning to make it illegal in Sweden, go figure.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/liberalerna-kriminalisera...
There seems to be a network of NGO who supplies "news" to a lot of EU "news outlets". Seeing the same, almost out of context, news in two different corners and languages of the continent, is surreal.
It is also very strange to see the repeated attempts to import US culture war issues to Sweden. Often completely unrelated to Swedish national issues, just blindly throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks and capture headlines for a few weeks.
The far-right Sverige Demokraterna party does this regularly, but other parties often fall for it too.
A more paranoid person might say it resembles Active Measures operations of a hostile foreign government that wants to distract and sow chaos in western states, but who knows...
This means that I want to see statistics with how many British men have strangled their wives/companions/casual encounters, and what percentage of them have previously watched porn featuring choking (and some plausible argumentation that those have strangled their victims because of watching porn and they did not choose to watch such rather unusual porn because they already intended to choke someone).
Without any concrete numbers any such justification is pure BS.
I have watched a lot of porn, but I do not remember ever seeing anything with choking, so I assume that this is a rather niche interest.
Even if this is a restriction that would not affect me directly, I am extremely concerned about this proliferation of laws that punish "crimes of thought", where someone is punished for possession of some kind of information, despite the fact that there exists absolutely no evidence of doing or attempting to do any kind of act against others that would really deserve punishment.
In my opinion, only those who write or vote such laws are criminals who deserve punishment, because only for them it is known with certainty that they have caused harm to other human beings, while against those punished by their laws there exists no evidence of causing harm to others.
Violence? This act of choking most of the time is requested by women themselves. It's the woman who fantasizes about it and asks her partner to perform it. I have never heard or read anywhere that the guy initiated it, simply because it adds nothing to the overall pleasure for him. Actually, women's fantasies are usually more messed up than men's on average, and you can compare the porn that men mostly watch vs the dark fantasies that women read in their books. Women's fantasies are usually about abduction, abuse, stalking, pain, among others. There's always this theme whenever you read about domestic violence or really anything bad in relationships or families, including things like manipulation and abuse. You always find that the man is portrayed as bad, the woman as the victim, a completely biased language as it's never the other way around, while in reality both can commit abuse. Males usually do so in physical form but females usually in emotional and mental form, which is far worse, and you can ask anyone who had an abusive mother.
Back to the ‘choking’ part, how will they regulate other forms of choking? And without going vulgar about it, hands aren't necessarily used, so can a woman accuse the man within the coming 3 years of the intimate event (per the article) after he had a “specific oral sex” with her and she choked on it? What if it's the other way around, the woman is big and was over the man's face? Will the same rule apply? This is a silly law and it's surprising it's already been in place since 2021. Probably in 10 years sexual intimacy will be done how it was in the Demolition Man movie, zero physical contact!
This is blatantly false. Physical violence is usually extension and escalation of mental and emotional form. Men who beat women verbally and emotionally abuse them first. Verbal abuse rates are similar in men and women, but it is men who commit more physical violence.
> you can compare the porn that men mostly watch vs the dark fantasies that women read in their books. Women's fantasies are usually about abduction, abuse, stalking, pain, among others.
It kinda sounds like your fantasy about what women have fantasies about. Also, there is no shortage of violent degrading porn in video form.
Whilst I dont agree with the poster above putting women into a singular box, or using words like "always", then point they make is very valid. At least half my female partners have requested choking over the years. It is absolutely not a niche thing. I enjoy reading the odd popular smut or semi-smut book written from the womans perspective by female authors, and almost universally they have controlling behaviours present with choking being nearly omnipresent.
The law is clumsy. The messaging is clumsy. There's too much overlap into the bedroom and too little distinction between abuse and erotic undertakings.
They did not. And I specifically reacted to their claim that males commit physical violence instead of mental one. I am not wrong there, physical violence is mixed with mental one, not something that would happen outside of it. It was very much false dichotomy and has nothing to do with how abuse actually happens in practice.
> At least half my female partners have requested choking over the years. It is absolutely not a niche thing
This may have a lot to do with what kind of person you are attracted to and chooses as a partner.
> I enjoy reading the odd popular smut or semi-smut book written from the womans perspective by female authors, and almost universally they have controlling behaviours present with choking being nearly omnipresent.
Again, this is literally about your selection of books. Especially the choking part.
I mean, I can point you to heavily violent porn on the internet. Not hidden, not hard to get, right there for anyone to find with two clicks. That does not mean most men enjoy watching beatings and humiliation as their porn, it means that some do.
In medieval and early modern English law, the “King’s peace” was the fundamental idea behind criminal justice. The Peace was not an abstract civic order; it was the personal peace of the Sovereign, extended to the realm.
The Crown was the earthly reflection of divine order. To offend that order — whether by sedition or obscenity — was symbolically akin to rebellion against the sovereign.
Pretty cool to think about how different that was, compared to today when people want the law to be based on maximizing the greatest good. What if this was banned simply because it offends the King?