Non fatal strangulation and choking during sex

[ArabellaScott]

Grim read.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62zwy0nex0o

@LadyBracknellsHandbagg

If you read my previous posts (literally just a few before the one you've quoted) you will in fact see that I didn't say he strangled me. At all. In fact those and all subsequent posts I'm very opposed to the practice.

The post you have quoted was one I made in response to a pp who made the judgement that a casual sex Was Very Bad for women and not enjoyable or liberating.

As you were.

What hell am I reading on this thread?
Who is so stupid as to think choking is a good idea?
Please have more respect for your health people - and if not go into a neurological ward to see the effects of brain damage through hypoxia - hopefully enough to scare some sense into you.

I think The Odyssey's coming in for some unfair flak here and feel compelled to offer an apologia for one of the foundational texts of my country 😁

The Odyssey is chock full of women showing agency over themselves and men:

1. Odysseus literally cannot get home without the help and advice of Kirke and Kalypso; they are both independent women living alone who literally enable the hero and the narrative to move forward (and Kalypso literally turns boorish men into pigs, which I very much enjoy)
2. Penelope's Homeric epithet, or one of them, is 'wise' - very rare for female Homeric characters to be described in this way but throughout the poem we are told that it's her wiles and cunning that keep the suitors from marrying her and she is explicitly contrasted with the hotter headed, more frivolous Telemachus;
3. When Odysseus washes up on Phaiakia, it's not King Alkinoos who he's told to appeal to but Queen Arete - the narrative explicitly presents her as the decision maker in the marriage and the kingdom
4. Nausikaa is explicitly presented as brave and independent - she's the only one to confront the naked Odysseus and take him to task whilst the other girls flee in terror;
5. The driving divine force behind all the events is Athene and she is explicitly shown in Book 1 as being able to persuade Zeus away from his original preferred couse of action.

In fact the Odyssey centres female agency so much that Samuel Butler, and a number of academics since, have theorised that it was composed by a woman. Female bards were quite common in Aegean Greece (where the Homeric poet(s) probably lived) - eg Sappho.

You can’t take one end of the scale and apply it across the board.

But that's what you've done throughout this thread! Every time I or another poster has expressed reasons why violent sex is bad physically, mentally and socially, you've rushed to dismiss that poster as having had either an isolated and non-representative experience, or in effect as being too emotionally broken/not enlightened enough to understand and enjoy the deep pleasures of being harmed by men during sex.

You've based your entire thesis on what you accuse us of doing! As Sadiq Khan would have us say: Maaaaaaate!

There’s a huge difference between defending anal sex and defending violent sex.

This thread is about NFS, strangulation, asphyxia and choking.

Maybe make a new one if you want to continue defending anal sex?

Anal sex can cause injury, yet women who refuse it risk being called prudes. It's not unreasonable to challenge the normalisation of an act that can lead to tearing and incontinence, especially if the man involved doesn't respect the woman enough to be gentle and doesn't make sure that she's well-lubricated, relaxed, and not in pain. The kind of man who asks for anal isn't the kind of man who will be gentle.

Like strangulation, the injuries from anal may not show up immediately. Like strangulation, men who want anal have questionable beliefs about women. Like strangulation, men who want anal will risk their partner's health to orgasm.

It's absolutely possible as a women to enjoy casual (safe sex) and not be putting our liberation back centuries.

At various times in this thread you've not only defended but eulogised rough sex, pressing, anal, porn and polyamory as bastions of sexual equality and safety which afford women agency, respect, joy, autonomy and safety.

But, please, do continue to school us on the 'ethical porn' that's made 'by women, for women'. I look forward to learning about all the many, many female pornographers who've become billionaires through the exploitation of women making empowering feminist content for women, to match the number of billionaire MALE pornographers such as Hugh Hefner, Bernd Bergmair, Leonid Radvinsky, Richard Desmond, Roger Luard, Anthony J Lynn, Paul Raymond, David Sullivan, Russell Gay, Harrison Marks, Maurice Girodias, Bob Guccione, David Gold, John Lindsay, David Warterfield, Carl Slack and Mike Freeman.

I don’t have a problem myself with casual sex, but any man who wants to strangle a woman during sex is dodgy, imo.

Horrific.
I've been around a bit in my younger days, nearly 40 years ago , and nothing like this was ever suggested. I've been settled for 37 years and it has never been hinted at as something to 'spice things up a bit'
It's just awful.

It is Kirke (Circe) who turns the piggish crew into swine, not Kalypso (Calypso), and despite Hermes magic herb (Holy Moly), attributes not transforming Odysseus to his own mind (noos), presumably he is already human enough.
But yes, Homer does have a goodly crowd of women and goddesses in the Odyssey. As a child, meeting for the first time his sleeping around when his wife was faithful, I came to conclusion that he probably couldn't say no to goddesses, but as an adult, an Indian friend pointed out that Arjun (who has similarities with Odysseus) did, though he was punished by having to wear women's clothes for a year.
Sorry for digression, but had to get those goddesses the right way round! Funny how none of the violent sex acts makes it into myth.

Well, men who refuse, reject or otherwise insult goddesses tend to come to a bad end, in the whole corpus of Indo-European myth. In Greek myth, Hera and Artemis have a particularly long trail of luckless mortals who got owned for not showing the proper respect. Transfiguration into animals figures a lot, it's interesting.

If I was given the choice, I'd definitely play nice and sleep with Kalypso. With Kirke, Odysseus does sleep with her but makes it quite clear that he only does so because he feels forced and pressurised by her, and is worried that she will hurt him (Od 8.300ff). Call it coercive control. I mean, he's definitely not romping around enjoying himself at that point. It's not the balance of power we might expect, very far from it.

It's not that the Odyssey has lots of female characters per se, it's that the female characters drive the action and the decisions of the hero more than the male ones do.

I don't think myth shies away from the horrific realities of rape. Epic poetry certainly doesn't. Andromache's lament in Iliad 6 and again in 22, makes the horrors of rape and the effects of violent conquest of women quite explicit, it's upsetting. Fast forward a few centuries and Euripides has whole plays given over to the plight of women in war.

TLDR: Greek myth and literature has a surprisingly nuanced approach to gender and power.

Here I go again defending a long dead bloke.
!. He didn't have brief relationships with a number of women. He had one of a year with Circe, and 7 years with Calypso who kept him prisoner. No others.
2 He didn't kill the maids. He got his son to do the dirty. The maids had betrayed their mistress by inviting the suitors into the women's quarters to see that Penelope was unpicking her work so she would never finish weaving the shroud for her FIL, as well as sleeping with the suitors. It is possible that this was a blasphemous act as well, but treason will do. As well as being nasty to Telemachus. It's more complicated than Margaret Atwood's interpretation, that the maids were Odysseus' property and he was hypocritical to punish them.
3.Odysseus was acting for Zeus, since the suitors were in breach of the laws of xenia or hospitality, which bound both guests and hosts. This is matched by the death of the last of Odysseus' crew, who had broken xenia when they ate the cattle of the sun god on Thrinakia. Both slaughters are marked by the ritual use of sulphur as a purifying agent. Athena won't let him let off even the nicest suitors as they have all broken that law.

Some of the women who I worked with when working for an advocacy service for victims of domestic violence confided that part of them was addicted to and enjoyed the violence.

Does that mean we should talk about domestic violence in more open terms? That we should teach children about it being a reasonable approach to being in a healthy relationship because you may actually enjoy it… eventually. In fact, you may find yourself being unable to be in a relationship without it being a possible feature.

Or should we stick to the fact that you cannot consent to violence and harmful acts?

You need to stop this.
Urgently.
What the actual F does he get out of it?

No woman has had anal sex once and loved it.

Some women have anal sex to please a male partner despite the pain they experience.

Some women eventually get to a point where they are not in pain when receiving anal penetration. But this is only achieved after many times of it being painful.

THAT is why it is abusive.

Speaking from personal experience (unfortunately), the cycle of abuse absolutely CAN be addictive because after every incidence of violence comes what experts call the 'reconciliation' stage. This is where he is prostrate with grief and guilt and cannot do enough for you. And weirdly you do feel quite confident and powerful during this phase as you know you are 'safe' for a bit and you don't have to live under quite such tight an atmosphere of fear and control as you normally do.

Until the next time. And the cycles tend to get shorter, and the violence worse, as time goes on.

So yes absolutely women can get addicted to this, they're miserable but so addicted they don't really realise how miserable they are. Drug addiction functions in the same way. You're so locked into the cycle that you can't step back and see how miserable it all is. Or you don't let yourself see it, for the sake of your sanity. And when you've finally escaped, you can really see it then, in the cold light of day, and you can barely believe how you were living.

I mean, Stockholm Syndrome is a thing too, right? This is why the whole obsession with tick box consent, as if sexual acts were simple commercial transactions, is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Absolutely.
Many of my clients told me this. That the violence was worth the huge high of the tender reconciliation. That the begging and crying of their abuser made them feel powerful and guilty despite them knowing the reality of their situation.

I think humans have evolved to do this. We’ve evolved to minimise our own abuse because it’s some people’s only way of survival.

The sex industry is full of abuse. Correct. Does that mean every woman working in the porn industry is being beaten and abused? No. I’m not saying it is a desirable career choice. I am saying that there are women in the industry who are doing so from self empowerment. Who are not abused, drug addicts, or whatever else. It doesn’t make it “the norm” but it means it exists.

For every so called empowered happy hooker girl boss sex worker there are thousands of women and children being trafficked, raped and murdered in service of this.

I watched my mother do this for almost 20 years, and now I struggle to be in the same room as her. Always buying the bullshit that it would all be kittens and roses from now on. He would punch her and they they'd be sitting in the bath together, giggling and groping. He'd call her a f**king cunt and kick her out of the car and make her walk home, terrifying me in the process, and then we're moving house so they're even more in debt but it's going to solve all their problems. He loses the plot on holiday, ranting that having children ruined his life, and then they're having another baby. It really is that insane.

I want to point out that Spanakopita's description above adds important context.

You're so locked into the cycle that you can't step back and see how miserable it all is. Or you don't let yourself see it, for the sake of your sanity. And when you've finally escaped, you can really see it then, in the cold light of day, and you can barely believe how you were living.

The 'high' that comes with reconciliation has to be seen within the context of someone who has been effectively brainwashed, conditioned to respond to those cues, and utterly trapped in the situation - mentally, as well as often physically (plus emotionally, financially etc).

I'm not quite sure how to describe it - it's the 'high' of temporary relief from stress. It's a prisoner being awarded a privilege, briefly. It's not a real 'high'. There's the 'boiling frog' problem, plus being addled by manipulation and coercion, fear, gaslighting, confusion and stress to the point one is not in right mind.

I would say the absolute worst thing about being abused, is that one is often not aware one is being abused.

It's always rather remarkable how much of a contrast you get on these threads between women who know what they're talking about, or have experience of the issue, or treat women who do - and those who say yeah, but under these circumstances, in that light, if you half close one eye, then it's not that bad.

That, and the usual fascinating runaway train to something else entirely - like Greek mythology.

So very true

There's often an understandable confusion about why abused women don't leave. And the suggestion that they are hooked on a high suggests that the positive feedback from the situation is what is keeping them there, but I don't think that's quite it and doesn't give the full picture.