Young women's boundaries have been eroded so much

[crochetmonkey74]

I'm currently working on an outreach programme for new adults (women only group)
My remit is to work with them on relationships guidance. This week the session has been romantic and sexual relationships. I've been really surprised by their resignation that certain things , although they don't want to do them, can't be disagreed with as that would be "kink shaming."
Several of then are ND so see everything in very binary terms so when I'm working with them and saying some things are more extreme and wouldn't be part of a normal or average sex life, they are very quick to pull me up on the word normal. It's very worrying how little say they think they have in a sexual relationship anymore. I've got a great team and we've all been chatting about how to tackle and redirect, but just thought it was interesting to share/chat about

I agree with the point @HepzibahGreen brought up about the dangers of the effect of porn on men. This is the only way change can be made, it's a male industry, aimed at men and profiting men. So a social change has to come from men. A much stronger campaign aimed at the harm it can cause men would be more effective than the harm it causes women, sad bit true.

Personally i can't understand why it can't be banned outright. It's possible, if child pornography can be banned so can violent adult porn. People argue it will be driven underground and will still exist, well of course it will. There will always be a small portion who seek it out but let them off, it won't be 11 yr old kids at a bus stop.

Yes. Before they’ve even kissed or held hands with a girl. But porn doesn’t show those small important steps - it’s straight to anal or choking your partner within 90 seconds.

I don’t think as a society we’ve begun to wake up to how irreparably damaging to all of us the ready availability of porn to any smartphone user (including, and most frighteningly, to very young children) is.

For decades and more people (men and women) who were genuinely into more extreme sexual practices first worked out they liked what they liked without help from anyone else telling them they should like it it then they managed to find each other without these practices becoming mainstream knowledge and without the exception that every partner they wanted to have sex with was going to be automatically a participant.
They knew these practices were not the norm and if they wanted to do them they needed to find an equally enthusiastic partner, they also knew that it wasn’t something that would happen in a mainstream relationship so if they found themselves in one they didn’t do those things with them!

the vast majority of sexually active adults were quite happily having sexual encounters with each other without even knowing about the more extreme practices because it wasn’t even on their radar. They had no idea that bob and sue at number 16 we’re having completely different sex to them. AND THEY DIDNT NEED TO!

then the ones who did found each other and when they couldn’t they had “normal sex” or didn’t have a partner.

there is space for consenting adults to decide what they do in private but there is NO REASON why it’s suddenly become public knowledge that these practices exist and worse that every adult should be doing them and liking them and if they don’t there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

This is the current position on non fatal strangulation with consent:

It is a defence to non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation under section 75A(2) SCA 2015 for the ‘victim’ of the non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation to have consented to the activity. This is most likely to apply in cases where the non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation was performed as part of a sexual activity, or among friends during horseplay.
That said, the defence will not apply if the victim suffered serious harm and the alleged perpetrator intended to cause said serious harm or was reckless as to whether the victim would be seriously harmed. In this case, ‘serious harm’ means any grievous bodily harm, wounding, or actual bodily harm.

So it's these words in particular "was reckless as to whether the victim would be seriously harmed" that are relevant.
So yes a person could consent but if the other person injures them and can't prove they didn't behave "recklessly" it could still be an offence.
This was important as we needed something to counteract the "rough sex" defence that saw men get away with murder.

So while it isn't illegal as such, choking is not something that women or men should be engaging in lightly. Because you risk serious harm to the receiver and a potential prison sentence to the person committing the act.

What if they both enjoy breath play?

I'd want to know a teenage girl comes to try much less enjoy "breath play" ffs

Please don’t use the term “child pornography”.

Images showing sexual abuse of children.

Girls go along with this stuff because they just want to liked, loved, and think if they do whats asked then they will be. ND girls especially as they experience a lot of rejection from both sexes. So what it boils down to is their self esteem, and building that up. Also when dealing with autistic girls, you need to be super logical. His kink, doesnt have to be your kink as a PP said. He cant shame you for that, if you cant shame him - thats not fair. Ask yourself do you really want to do this, and unless the answer is an enthusiastic yes, then its a no. They do all understand consent, so should get that any pressure pushing at the boundaries of consent is not ok.

Im raising some late gen Z early gen A boys and they are quite conservative, so are their girlfriends. They have access to all the information, good and bad, and the conversations are being had in school. The boys I know just want a girl who is their friend, I think for the most part normal is still normal. And for the ones that arent, there is often more to it, abuse at home etc.

The fact the phrase kink shaming even exists is depressing.

I wonder would one answer be a legal age of consent for anal to be older? 18 or 20? People in UK take the legal age for sex very seriously in fairness, couldn't it be the same for this? The hope would be that women have an extra few years maturity to enable them to say no confidently. Or yes if they are into that.

It's not choking, it's strangulation. And there are plenty of men and women who enjoy riskier sexual practices, there always has been. But most people discover their enjoyment of these things slowly, as their sex life develops and mature, who understand consent and enjoyment. I think this is very different to young people now experiencing and feeling pushed into dangerous practices when they have barely any experience of sex becuase they think its what they should do.

Porn was around in the early 00s but hard to find. Someone might have a magazine that a fried of a friend of a friend found in a Bush and it was just pictures of people having sex. You could find it online but again, you really had to go out of your way to. Our formative sexual experiences weren't shaped by seeing violet sex normalised.

Introduce the notion of choice-shaming or autonomy-shaming

Being pressured into something by being told they are shaming their partner if they don't conform is a pretty heavy indication of coercive control. They should never be made to feel ashamed of having an autonomous preference or choice for not doing something.

Can you teach them to say, 'I'm not shaming you. I just have different preferences from you. Being different is not the same as shaming.'

Maybe then they could learn to be directly assertive: 'I'm not into anal and I'm not into coercive control.'

No shame involved. No coercion either.

One of the issues I think is that there has been so much emphasis consent. But the message "if you really don't want to do something during sex but you go along with it, that is not consent" has not transmitted with it. Consent has become a buzzword and the meaning has been lost.

And isn't it funny how the sexual practices we're talking about involve men inflicting hurt or harm on women. He wants to try "breath play", great let's start by choking him, let's try spanking him, using a strap on to penetrate him but that's not how it goes. It's legitimising men inflicting harm on women under the guise of consensual sex, which is why our girls need iron clad boundaries.

If my DD grows up, gradually makes her way through consensual sex to explore other activities safely and having done her own research I'd still have concerns but it would be her business. Some spotty teenage boy shoving his dick down her throat to hear her gag as a first approach, absolutely not ok.

My point stands and the horse has bolted. Breath play isn't illegal but hurting someone is, which is correct.

Many people believe that Michael Hutchence accidentally killed himself because he was practicing breath play when masturbating. It can obviously be a dangerous practice and I'm not advocating for it, I'm simply saying that some people enjoy it.

If a man asked me to choke him during sex, I'd refuse as I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it. We need to teach girls to not do anything they're uncomfortable with, no matter how innocuous. We also need to encourage young people to discuss what they're comfortable with before having sex so this kind of thing isn't sprung on them.

Ideally degrading and violent porn should be banned. However I was a teenager before the internet and girls still agreed to do things they weren't comfortable with because they didn't have the confidence or self esteem to refuse. There was still bullying, peer pressure and 'slut shaming '.

With kids like these I'd have to be almost embarrassingly frank and genuinely sex positive.

"Did you come?" "Oh, so you did it for him. And what did he do for you?"

They think they're being "sex positive" but genuine frank conversation about healthy and mutually pleasurable sex is so much more sex positive.

At this age I'd be amazed if half of them are anywhere near orgasm in these scenarios. (Lol at the previous poster who thinks they might 'enjoy breath play'. They should still be figuring out if they like oral or not at this age, ffs.) Tell them to buy a vibrator and then decide which kind of sex they prefer.

Our formative sexual experiences weren't shaped by seeing violet sex normalised.

Absolutely. This is the crux of the matter and the challenge to a lot of us parents. And honestly, our children nowadays require (and deserve) bolder, honest, real dialogue at younger ages courtesy of what they're exposed to, which is different than what I was exposed to. I'm 52. The world of my youth wasn't full of instant gratification and online porn. It was still full of bad shit. I had horrible things happen to me as a child growing up in a time when online anything didn't exist. But with the influx of online porn and its affect on society, we have to talk and talk and talk to our sons and daughters and navigate this world with them (so that they don't start out having sex with 'breath play' or 'anal' in pole position!). Breath play. SMH.

One of the first talks I've had with my kids is, "Hands on the neck means the relationship is done, right then and there."
That's the first lesson.
I don't want 'breath play' to be their first lesson about hands on the neck. Hands on the neck needs to be taught for what it is: An act of violence, not a sex game.

If, by some chance, they eventually go down the BDSM route in their sex lives, I want them to be armed with the language and knowledge around consent, safety, no means no, stop means now. I sincerely hope they don't get into 'breath play' because that's acting out a violent fantasy that doesn't belong in any sphere, in my opinion. So much more can go wrong than right with that one.

The word 'safe' is everything. It covers so much ground.

However I was a teenager before the internet and girls still agreed to do things they weren't comfortable with because they didn't have the confidence or self esteem to refuse.

I worked with young people in the 90s before sex has become pornified, girls were agreeing to oral, or going closer to full intercourse than they were comfortable with - not contemplating anal, or choking.

Ffs can we stop with the cutesy euphemisms. ‘Breath play’ just makes it sound fun and kinky and not at all dangerous or deeply troubling.

I hope you can tell that my use of 'breath play' was rather sarcastic in my post!
Honestly, I feel like I need to hop over to Reddit just to start a thread called: TIL Breath Play is the nicey nice way of being strangled during sex.

Because it's true. TIL this! 😆Never knew it was called breath play until now.
MN! Ah the treasure trove of shit my peabrain's collected over the years is a marvel!

Sorry I meant that to @poppyzbrite4 but by the time I posted more replies had shown up, I should have used a tag. 🙏

But calling it "breath play" is an attempt to normalise it. That's the problem.
Realistically it's something no one should be doing. Someone can appear fine during and after and then die days later. There are so many serious effects it can have that are often not immediately apparent.

Now ultimately, yes people will still choose to engage in it. But it should never ever have become "common" and something that is seen as "normal" sexual practice. It puts pressure on the person who has to say no, to something they really should never have been asked at all. That's the issue with a lot of these things.

No one is saying that consenting adults can't do this or that. But the thread is about young women, some of whom are ND. They are not in long standing relationships with trustworthy partners. They are fairly new to navigating the world of sex and relationships. It isn't wrong to tell them that choking isn't normal. It's something that should be discouraged as it's so risky.

My point was that girls were agreeing to things they didn't want to do. It doesn't matter what they were agreeing to, the point is they didn't want to do it. You shouldn't do anything you don't want to do sexually, no matter how inocuous and we should be teaching girls that.

Just because a small group of people like to do something doesn't mean it's normal.
Women should have the strength to think someone wanting to choke them is a weirdo, not someone they have to be kind to

Oh please don't worry! I am openly shaming 'breath play'. It should just come with the eyeroll emoji tagged on at the end.

On the one hand, I agree. But on the other, the things I agreed to do but didn't want to when I was young, were not things that harmed me physically. That's the difference between then and now.

I have chronic IBS and believe me, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. So the fact that young women are risking serious problems in that area for the sake of sex baffles me! Whether they enjoy it or not, bowel problems are no joke. They rule my life. Women's bodies were not designed for anal. Yes lots of people do it, yes it's been going on for hundreds of years but again it's a risk of serious long term damage.