Hardcore porn, choking and rape: UK universities left to tackle rising tide of sexual assaults

[DerekFaker]

In The Observer today. Shocking stuff. After all the gains from feminism, we seem to be going backwards. What can we do?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/17/hardcore-porn-choking-and-universities-left-to-tackle-rising-tide-of-sexual-assaults

I note you purposefully omitted the rest of the post, any reason why?

Because you are saying you have friends who engage in this practice, and I actually question how common it is. Really? Or are they just saying that for giggles? How many friends? Two? Ten? How many people do you discuss sex with?
I cannot believe that anyone would deliberately strangle anyone for fun, much less ask for it. Apparently it happens, I would say always as violence, and often within a coercive controlling relationship.
The research findings are not credible. It's not my field, but the researchers I have met who worked in sexual behaviour used to talk about the difficulty they had getting accurate survey responses. In any behavioural survey, people construct an idea of themselves that conforms to the norms of their group. The respondents always skew to those interested in the survey topic. And in any controversy some respondents try to influence the survey results by responding often. Researchers may recruit online, inviting respondents to respond anonymously. So you get entirely fictional responses.
Ordinarily you would report it as something like: "our target population was 10000 students, 55% female. We got 4000 responses, of which 1500 failed the lie detectors we included. 80% of the remaining 2500 responses were male. yada yada" but there is no such discussion.
Obviously the reviewers of Archives of Sexual Behaviour will be looking out for that, so these results are either real or the reviewers are not doing their job. Either way, news reports that any behaviour is normal then tend to reinforce peoples perceptions of their own experience.
This needs looking at by a journalist with a factchecking team.

I agree. Again, why I think kink SO isn't cool. It's literally based on things being off-kilter, on dysfunction and fetishes, and that's what's being normalised. It also tends to escalate because fetishes have an addictive quality.

You really don't need kink to have fantastic sex, but it's become a thing driven by (highly capitalistic, misogynistic, rapey) porn that great sex = kink. It's 'training' people to need kink to gain a sexual hit. Pleasure for both parties, especially women, seems to have gone by the by.