It’s impressive to me how many men have done it without checking,” 29-year-old Anna (not her real name) tells me, when I ask her how she feels about choking during sex. “I distinctly remember thinking ‘I wonder what I responded to that read as consent to that?’. Was it rough kissing? Something else?”
I read my colleague Hadley Freeman’s column in The Sunday Times this weekend in a growing state of shock. Hadley described how, on three occasions, a man had choked her in bed. I then read the section in Escape, the book she references, written by another journalist, Marie Le Conte. Le Conte writes that choking during sex was “mainstream” among those under 40. “If I were to rank it,” says Le Conte, “I would say it sits somewhere around the light spanking mark . . . not so out of the ordinary that you would mention it to someone.”