Online pornography showing strangulation or suffocation is to be made illegal, as part of government plans to tackle violence against women and girls.
It follows a review which found depictions of choking were “rife” on mainstream porn sites and had helped normalise the act among young people.
Both the possession and publication of such material will be a criminal offence, under amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill currently going through Parliament.
You know, there’s a fun observation to be made here: for every perversion you ban, the more niche ones move further up the view list. In essence, short of a complete porn ban (which is their final goal), they’re likely to make the problem worse.
In terms of boys learning violence from this kind of porn - surely the online safety act is doing that right? Of course not; that act has failed gloriously and this proposed change evidences that.
The real solution they should be considering is strong messages about “safe, sane, consensual”. Stick it up on posters, make it a mandatory banner on porn sites (who would complain, really), even take that shit into schools (it’s good practice even for vanilla). The real issue isn’t the acts themselves, it’s the way we talk about them, or more don’t!
To anyone celebrating this: you’re defending a fucking bad faith law!
Does any of the recent anti-LGBTQ+ laws are just to protect little Jimmy being a “little confused”, to protect him from “making life altering decisions”? Did any of the Nazi anti-Jewish laws were only made to stop predatory banking? Fuck no! And fuck you if you think we can just "undo it easily later on: no one wants to be the “pervert politician”, no one wants to be smeared by the opposition as “the real misogynist” or a “pervert being occupied with things other than the economy”, so no one will do it.
I don’t like choking in porn. The problem is a failure of both the lack of sexual education, and not holding platforms accountable for replatforming the likes of Andrew Tate, not some smut.
I think you’re also missing the part where some people are just legit into strangling.
One of my exes loved it, loved watching porn about it. Does she have to become a criminal now just to scratch her itch?
Prohibiting fantasies won’t stop actual bad people, as it never has. I’d say we would be better off with education on how to do it safely if you’re really into it, education of men on how to do this respectfully, again, of both are legit into it.
We should also makke sure it’s very clear for women facing abusive partners that they can leave, that they won’t lose everything they got, that they won’t lose their family, that they won’t face stigmatization, and we should make sure that they have all resources available to get back on their feet
Dark fantasies and dark sex acts aren’t the problem. Abusive partners are the problem
This guy chokes.
The morality police in the UK strike again. They’re slowly turning into Saudi Arabia the longer they keep this up.
No wonder they keep importing people with this exact moral view.
I am… Rather older than most of you, in all probability. My partner likes being choked; not hard, not actually cutting off air or blood, but the sensation of hands or an arm around their throat. They also like being caned, and spanked; I’m into fairly serious rope bondage (as a rope top) and CNC.
Under British law, a large percentage of the sexual activities that we both enjoy together would be criminal offenses.
For what it’s worth, in the 1920s, oral sex was considered shocking to moral sensibilities, perverted, an affront against nature, and grotesquely obscene. I suspect that the view from the year 2100–should humanity survive that long–will see choking in much the same way.
I’ve never been choked, but I like to hold my breath right as I’m about to ejaculate (cause it makes the orgasm stronger for some reason), so I could absolutely see the appeal. So long as it’s consentual, I see no issue with choking in sex.
The US and UK are in a race to see who can out-Fash the other.
It sure seems like the puritans are in charge these days. And their using kids to ram through whatever the fuck they want. As long as no one is getting hurt, I dont really see what business it is of any government what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes. I mean, even if you were choking her out, as long as it was what she wanted, its really up to you two to take on the risks.
I dont understand it, but who cares? Im not in the room. Its nothing to do with me, or anyone else. I cant help but feel this is the beginning of something a bit more sinister. Maybe someday soon, blow jobs will be looked down upon again. Or far more likely, being gay will be looked down upon again. Cos thats where these weirdos always look to when they talk about things “corrupting the youth”. A bit of slap and tickle first, attack the LGBT crowd next under the guise of protecting the children/young people. “Youre not gay, youve just seen too many blowjobs, Timmy. Youll be alright after we send you to a re-education camp.”…
Won’t be any kids to protect soon as the raging inequality continues to rise and people become completely unable to afford them.
Why do you think that sex ed is being banned, they’re trying to prevent people from having access to porn, and womens’ reproductive care is being sharply limited? They know kids are gonna fuck if they don’t have any other outlet, and kids are going to fuck unsafely. Then they’ve got the babies that they need to keep delivering Amazon packages and assembling iPhones.
So men don’t get choked? Why are these things always gender specific?
I like to get a little choked every now and then, during. Am I illegal?
Yes I recommend you handcuff yourself immediately, maybe tie yourself up a bit, you’ve been pretty naughty
Hhhhh okay Mami, I mean yes officer.
It’s less prevalent, but this content definitely exists too.
They do. Watch most pegging, or “Trans fucks guy” videos, and the dude will be turning fucking beetroot while getting pounded hard.
Maybe Timber is not as popular in the UK political scene.
If the argument for the ban is that depiction normalizes it, then there should be a ban on violence in all media, right?
Video games too!
Comparing brain death due to strangulation to moral panic is obviously incorrect.
I suppose I would file this one under massive sex education failure, if youths are having to learn about sex from porn there’s already a problem.
Dark fantasies and dark sex acts aren’t the problem. Abusive partners are the problem
I don’t disagree that it’s troubling how mainstream choking is in modern porn. It’s definitely been a huge shift. There’s nothing against it as a fetish, but it being a fetish with potential harmful consequences suggests that it should be in the same category as BDSM - something which can be problematic unless it’s done as an exercise in trust between partners with full informed consent.
And there have been plenty of seemingly not agenda-led studies which suggest that teen boys and girls are both picking up a lot of what they consider to be “normal” about sex from porn.
And not even talking to each other about it. IIRC, there was one such study which had both boys and girls engaging in a particular behaviour (I forget exactly which, maybe even choking), and neither party actively enjoyed the behaviour, they were just doing it because they thought that’s what you do and therefore what their partner wanted.
But is the solution to ban porn which features choking? Firstly, I don’t see how this could in any way be effective. How would you possibly enforce it? Are police really going to raid people’s homes based on suspicion that they’ve got a nowadays-vanilla porn video on their harddrive? The police literally don’t have enough resources to investigate and prosecute everybody creating and sharing child porn. And now they’re supposed to go after everybody who visits PornHub?
Secondly, we’re basically talking about a de-facto porn ban because, as the consultation itself noted, that describes pretty much all porn made in the last 10-15 years.
I’m not sure what the solution is. I mean, talking about the difference bewteen porn and sex is something that should be part of sex education at school. But I kind of assume it already is? It would be weird if it weren’t in 2025.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to engage with creators themselves? I know that several porn companies used to put disclaimers before their videos saying that there’s a difference between porn sex and real sex and talking about consent. Several BDSM porn producers also have pre and post-shoot interviews with the performers and make sure they talk on camera about safe words & gestures and consent.
But then that’s something that’s probably not going to be terribly effective in any case and which would require absolutely everybody to get on board, which would have been basically impossible back when it was only really studios producing content, and 100% impossible now that OnlyFans etc are the way that most performers make and distribute porn.
I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, TBH, but I’m pretty sure that “ban all the porn” isn’t the correct solution.
Nice to see a measured comment.
I don’t think it will lead to banning porn. Just tell actors/directors to stop chocking and cut some sequences from old videos. If a video is an hour long chocking session then geoblock it. I don’t think it’s an existential crisis for the industry.
Banning possession is insane though.
If you’re a porn producer in the US and the UK government says “don’t show choking in your videos any more and re-edit the past 15 years of videos”, what are you going to do? What’s in it for you to comply?
And what is the government actually going to do? Is it going to go through every single porn video on the internet to see whether or not it’s acceptable? There’s no way they have the resources for that. So then there are basically three options. 1) allow people to browse porn and probably unknowingly watch something which is now illegal, 2) do a blanket ban of studios which have choking videos - which is basically all of them, or 3) only institute a ban for the most extreme studios, which is then defeating the supposed purpose of this bill - to combat the mainstreaming of choking in porn.
I suppose option 4 is to require porn sites to label everything accurately and filter out all porn which contains choking from UK urls. But even that feels like a stretch in terms of practicality. It’s one thing to say to sites “you need to use an age-verification system which we deem acceptable or risk a fine” and something quite different to say “you need to manually review the millions of videos on your site under new criteria and implement strict new filtering based on geolocation”. If they tried this then the end result would probably be porn sites just doing an Imgur and blocking the UK entirely. Which, like the current age verification system on porn sites, would just see people using VPNs.
As legislation goes it doesn’t seem very well-thought-through. I suppose that’s what the Houses of Commons & Lords are for, but it’s far from a foolproof system.
I already don’t like that kind of shit, it’s an immediate turn-off for me.
But - I also know there’s a whole kink around it, and as long as it’s consensual…who tf cares?
The way they define choking would also ban a lot of sucking scenes.
That’s the goal. First ban kink that are more extreme, but word the ban vague enough to be applicable to other things.
We call this kind of bad faith laws as “shotgun laws”, due to how reminiscent they’re to the operation of shotgun-type weapons from video games.
“from video games”? lol?
Video game shotguns have a lot more spread than actual shotguns
I’ll forward any I find to my local MP
The porn industry is now in non-consenting bondage
But what if I like being choked? UwU
In this thread: a lot of chocking
Chock full of it!
