So, About Choking: What Men Are Not Being Told
- JELQ2GROW
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
Choking during sex used to sound like something you would only see in niche porn. Now it is in hookup stories, group chats, and memes, something many of us have tried at least once, on the giving side or the receiving side.
On one big United States campus, a random survey of almost five thousand students found that 58 percent of women had been choked during sex at least once, and a lot of men had either been choked or done the choking.
So choking is not a weird outlier anymore. It is part of the default script a lot of young men walk into bed with.
How choking snuck into the script
Very few people heard “let’s talk about strangulation” in sex ed.
Instead, most guys learn the move from porn, partners, friends, and socials. One rough sex survey led by researcher Debby Herbenick found that porn and past partners were the main teachers for things like choking.
Porn hands you a visual. Choking is the moment the scene gets “serious”. Social media adds jokes about “hands on my neck” as a love language. Friends talk about what they did with their situationships, and everyone nods like this is just how sex looks now.
Put that together and a lot of men meet choking as a package deal. Rough sex, good sex, confident sex, all blur into a picture that comes with a hand on a throat.
What usually does not come with it is anatomy, risk, or any real script for talking about it.
Quick reality check on the body stuff
Under the hotness, choking is pressure on someone’s neck, which is where the blood and air for their brain travel.
Clinically, it sits under “non-fatal strangulation”, meaning pressure that changes blood flow or airflow without killing the person. Emergency guidelines on strangulation note that even short events can injure blood vessels and brain tissue, sometimes with no obvious marks.
A research group at Indiana University has been looking at what happens when choking is not a one-time thing. In one 2023 study in Brain and Behavior, women who had been choked frequently during sex showed clear differences in brain structure compared with women who had not, including changes in areas that handle movement, consciousness and emotion.
Another study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience found that people with a history of repeated sexual choking had different activation patterns in their brain during memory tasks.
So yes, it can feel intense and erotic. At the same time, the body reads it as “something is threatening the brain’s oxygen” and reacts accordingly.
What sex educators are saying when the mic is on
People inside sex education and kink worlds are starting to be very direct about this.
In an article for Our Bodies Ourselves called “Safe Alternatives to Choking and Breath Play”, sex educators Heather Corinna and Giselle Woodley write that there is no safe way to engage in breath play and encourage people to treat sexual choking as a serious risk, not just a sexy visual.
More recently, public health researcher Debby Herbenick said in an interview about choking that there is no completely safe way to do it and that people can experience cumulative brain injury over time, even when nothing looks dramatic in the moment.
These are people who care about pleasure, kink and autonomy. Their vibe is not “stop liking what you like”. It is more “your partner’s brain is not a stress toy.”
What this looks like from the guy side
Most research so far focuses on women and gender diverse people who get choked. Their stories already show a messy mix of fear, arousal and pressure. One interview study with young women literally has the quote “it was scary, but then it was kind of exciting” in the title.
Men are usually on the other end of the hands.
In campus data, more men report choking partners than being choked themselves. Reporting from Australia and the US includes men who say they felt they were supposed to choke someone if they wanted to be seen as good in bed, even though they never felt properly informed about what they were doing.
So the scene can look like this. Partner reaches for your hand, moves it to their neck. Maybe they say something, maybe they just look at you. You have seen this exact shot in porn a hundred times. Part of you is into it. Another part is thinking “if I mess this up, I could actually hurt them.”
On top of that, there is a quiet script in the room that says a good man should know what to do without stopping the moment to talk about it.
If breath play is on the table, some ground rules
People are not going to stop playing with hands around necks just because a PDF somewhere says “never risk free”. So if this kind of play is already part of the menu, a few tweaks can shift it much closer to grabbing and holding, and further from “I forgot this is a real windpipe”.
One useful thing to consider from choking guides is the mindset. Scenes go better when both people know what the “choke” is meant to do. Is it there to add fear and edge, is it about feeling owned, is it mainly about the visual and the photos in someone’s head.
Talk when nobody is horny yet
The hottest conversations usually start way before pants are off.“Hey, when you say you like choking, what exactly are you into?" Sometimes the answer is pressure, sometimes it is the hand there, sometimes it is the eye contact, and the “you have me” feeling. Knowing which one it is already changes the way you touch.
Make it opt-in, not surprise content
A lot of people in studies described a hand suddenly on their neck with zero warning. That is how you get panic and weird flashbacks.Ask.“Is neck stuff something you actually like, or just a porn thing you have gone along with?”
Let the other person say “actually no” without having to write an essay.
Think “grab” and “frame”, not “strangle.”
For a lot of people, the hot part is not cutting air, it is the feeling of being held, pinned, claimed.
A firm hand that holds the side of the neck, jawline, back of the neck, collarbone area, can give that “hands on me” feeling without turning the front of the throat into a stress ball. The more it feels like being grabbed and framed, and the less it feels like a literal squeeze on the airway, the better everyone’s nervous system is going to sleep that night.
Use real check-ins, not vibes only
You already know about safewords. With anything around the neck, it helps to add a physical signal too, because sometimes people cannot talk. A strong double tap, a hand squeeze, something that has been agreed when everyone still had oxygen and opinions.
Stay out of the drunk and messy zone
If coordination is off and nobody is tracking time or pressure, risk goes up fast. If everybody is pretty lit, the neck can wait for another night.
Watch what happens after, not just during
After sex, people are usually busy being proud, or sleepy, or ordering food. Checking in can be as simple as “how did that feel for your body, be honest, you can roast me if something sucked”.If someone mentions dizziness, out-of-it feelings, weird headache, voice changes, that is information, not drama.
This is not a certified safety protocol; there is no such thing for choking. It is just the difference between “winging it because porn did it” and “at least two adults having a plan”.
Rough sex that does not need the neck
Plenty of what gets called “choking” is actually a cocktail of other things, not the airflow part. Control, weight, being grabbed and held in place, sound, rhythm, words.
A lot of kink educators break choking into levels, from pure fantasy to full-on breath or blood restriction. The lists get nerdy very fast, but there is one part that is useful for most people. The closer things stay to a “fantasy choke”, the more it feels like grabbing and holding, not like strangling. A firm hand that frames the sides of the neck, jawline or back of the neck, or that grabs high on the chest and collarbone area, can feed the “hands on me” fantasy without treating the front of the throat like a stress ball.
If the idea of breath play is hot but the risk feels like too much, there is a whole playground that stays away from the neck completely.
Some ideas for that rough, “feral” energy men get sold so hard
- Stronger grip on hips, thighs or hair, held with care
- Pinning wrists above the head or to the bed, with clear consent
- Playing with pace, going from very slow to very intense, then backing off again
- Using voice, saying exactly what a partner does to you, or what is about to happen to them
- Negotiated power games, who gives orders, who follows them, who gets to say yes or no
Breath play is one kink. Being rough can be an entire universe.
Leaving it in your hands
People are going to keep doing what turns them on. Men are going to keep getting asked to put hands on necks. Some men are going to ask for it themselves.
The difference now is that anyone who reads this is not walking in on pure autopilot. Whatever mix of grabbing, roughness, or kink ends up in your sex life, at least it can sit next to real information and conversations, not only next to a Pornhub thumbnail.
And if someone really feels pulled toward more intense breath play, that is usually the point to step out of the do-it-yourself zone and into actual kink education, workshops, vetted courses and people who specialise in this, instead of stitching together techniques from memes and shaky TikToks.