A 16-year-old woman from Sydney’s northern beaches died in hospital in late August after reportedly being strangled during consensual sex with her partner. The tragedy has sparked a long-overdue reckoning with the consequences for young women of the pornification of sex and the normalisation of sexual violence that has come with it.
In recent years, sexual strangulation has gone from being a relatively marginal phenomenon to an everyday sexual practice. In Australia, 61 percent of young women report having been strangled during sex, according to a 2024 survey of thousands of 18- to 35-year-olds. Men are most likely to be the stranglers. There is no safe way to strangle someone. According to David Corlett and Marie Crabbe, founders of anti-strangulation advocacy group Breathless:
“Potential consequences [of strangulation] range from neck pain to loss of bladder and bowel control, headaches, memory loss, seizures, brain damage, stroke and, as seems to be the case with the young woman from the northern beaches, death. The risks and consequences are cumulative, so the more someone is strangled, the more likely they are to suffer harm.”
Only a tiny percentage of middle-aged and older adults have engaged in sexual strangulation, but among young people it’s become commonplace. Maree Crabbe, who is also the director of It’s Time We Talked, says strangulation wasn’t an issue before about 2019. But things have changed dramatically since then. “In recent years, we’ve been hearing it’s become normal for young people of all backgrounds, socioeconomic groups, cultures, sexual orientations”, she recently told the Sydney Morning Herald.
So how did a potentially deadly act become a normal sexual practice?
The main driver is pornography. Recent research found more than 60 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds had encountered sexual strangulation depicted in pornography. One study comparing the content in the most popular pornography across the two and a half decades to 2024 found that sexual strangulation has gone from almost non-existent to featuring in 15 percent of scenes.
Pornography has become the de facto sex education system for millions of young people. And strangulation is just the latest trend in an industry that maximises profits by selling more extreme depictions of violent and degrading treatment of women.
A landmark 2010 study of best-selling pornographic videos, published in the journal Violence Against Women, found that 88 percent contained physical aggression, while 49 percent of scenes contained verbal aggression. Perpetrators were usually male, whereas targets were overwhelmingly female. Targets most often showed pleasure or responded neutrally to the aggression.
So the vast majority of mainstream pornography, whether it depicts strangulation or not, reinforces the idea that violence and humiliation are not only permissible, but pleasurable for women. The pornography industry has “blood on its hands” for propagating this sort of violent content, according to Chanel Contos, founder of Teach Us Consent.
An example of how normalised strangulation during sex has become came from this year’s Eurovision song contest. Romania’s 2026 song entry “Choke Me” repeats the words “choke me” 30 times in three minutes. The song also contains the lyrics “It’s hard to breathe in” and “make my lungs explode”.
Many mainstream commentators emphasise the importance of avoiding “kink-shaming” when addressing the issue of sexual strangulation with young people. This dresses up the prioritisation of men’s sexual gratification over women’s safety as sex-positive open-mindedness. And it wilfully ignores the fact that sexual desires and practices are not simply a matter of individual preference; they are shaped and constructed in a society where women are not equal to men, and enormous profit can be made from sex by companies competing for market share.
The reality is that people’s sexual inclinations have not radically changed on their own over the last 50 years, such that the majority of men now enjoy inflicting harm on women. Market forces have pushed things in this direction. In an attempt to be more sensational and attract market share, pornography companies have taken the male-dominant trope that underpins the construction of mainstream heterosexuality and pumped it up to a new extreme. This has shaped attitudes to sex and sexual desire, which in turn further reinforces the business model. And underpinning it all is the continued second-class status of women.
Fifty years after the women’s liberation movement and the accompanying so-called sexual revolution, women’s structural oppression remains firmly entrenched. Recent analysis has shown that women perform the lion’s share of unpaid domestic labour—totalling 31 billion hours a year and valued at $688 billion, or about one-third of gross domestic product—making it Australia’s biggest industry. In the formal economy, women continue to be paid less than men and remain concentrated in low-paid industries and low-status occupations.
As long as you have a system in which half of the population are socially and economically worse off, ideas will continue to exist that justify that inferior status. It’s no accident that, within this context, violent and misogynistic attitudes among young men are on the rise.
A recent Australian study found that, on average, around 20 percent of men and boys agree that gender equality has gone too far, that feminism is a hate movement, that it’s permissible to pressure girlfriends into having sex, and that feminism should be resisted with violence.
Research into sexual strangulation demonstrates a connection between broader attitudes to women and the acceptance of sexual practices promoted by and depicted in pornography. The Breathless Campaign finds that:
“[Y]oung women assume that ‘their partners found choking [sic] arousing because they felt powerful, dominant, or sought control’. And it seems they are right. Young men say that they ‘choke’ their partners during sex not only for their partners’ pleasure or because it feels ‘kinky’ or ‘adventurous’ but also because it is a way they can be aggressive and to explore power.”
Add to that the impact of the online marketplace cashing in on our alienation. Dating apps have turned prospective partners into profiles to be browsed. Social media encourages people to market themselves as brands. Influencer culture has turned women’s bodies into content, and OnlyFans sells sexual intimacy by subscription.
Capitalism is rapacious. Left unchecked, the market moves in and co-opts everything, even our most intimate desires, sexual relationships and bodies. The logic of the market then drives everything to extremes. Our sexuality is reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold rather than an expression of genuine interpersonal connection.
If we want to reclaim our humanity and achieve real sexual liberation, we must fight back against this process. We can’t let these profit-driven corporations continue to shape our desires, mediate our relationships and dominate our lives.
The last time there was organised resistance of this sort was in the late 1970s, when grassroots women’s organisations emerged and organised in response to an uptick in sensationalised, sexualised violence being packaged and sold as entertainment.
In 1976, the exploitation film Snuff arrived in US cinemas claiming to show the real rape, murder and dismemberment of a woman on screen. It was a hoax—the murder had been staged—but distributors deliberately encouraged audiences to believe otherwise as part of their marketing strategy.
Feminists picketed the film’s New York opening. One leaflet read: “That sexual violence is presented as sexual entertainment, that the murder and dismemberment of a woman’s body is commercial film material is an outrage to our sense of justice as women, as human beings”.
When Snuff headed for LA, women picketed cinemas for hours, distributed leaflets, bombarded theatre chains with phone calls and organised boycotts. Some poured cement down cinema toilets. Others threw bricks through theatre windows. Within a week of Snuff opening in Southern California, every cinema had dropped it.
Also in 1976, Atlantic Records launched an advertising campaign for the Rolling Stones album Black and Blue, featuring a bound and bruised woman (Anita Russell) exclaiming, “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones—and I love it”.
In response, women vandalised a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, writing “this is a crime against women” and mounted a three-year-long boycott of Atlantic Records, which was forced to pull the campaign. A historian of anti-pornography campaigns, Carolyn Bronstein, notes:
“Members of WAVAW, WAVPM, and WAP [anti-violence against women and anti-pornography groups] believed that mainstream media images were powerful agents of socialisation; they taught men and women about their respective worth in society and communicated insidious gender stereotypes.”
Activists at the time were asking, “what happens when we (as a society) are saturated by an endless stream of images that eroticise female submission and humiliation?” They weren’t interested in “obscenity” like those on the Christian right who objected to any depiction of sex. They were making a political argument about the cumulative social impact of a system that exploits and sensationalises violence and degradation of women for the purpose of making profits.
Today, it’s taken for granted that true feminism is on the side of women’s individual choice and sexual freedom. Concern about the negative social impacts of women’s objectification and commodification is routinely dismissed as authoritarian, anti-sex prudery.
The era of sexual strangulation gives a new intensity to these debates. The goal of sexual liberation was never supposed to be the freedom to reproduce every brutality of an oppressive society in the bedroom and call it empowering, simply because it was consensual.
An act of aggravated assault has been normalised to the extent that millions of young people encounter it as ordinary “vanilla” sex. And it is regularly leading to the deaths of women.
We should ask what kind of society teaches young men that putting their hands around women’s throats is sexy and teaches young women to expect, accept or desire it.
Activists once had the confidence to challenge how capitalism shapes and distorts our most intimate desires. In the age of sexual strangulation, the left desperately needs that confidence again.
Sex education and targeted censorship are stopgaps that can only get us so far. If we want a world that is safe for everyone and in which sex is for pleasure, not profit, we need to fight sexist oppression and the market’s domination of our lives. We need an alternative to capitalism.
