Is it ok to choke my partner? How can I do it safely? Is it ok to say no to being choked? These are the questions Martin Griffiths, a trauma surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust, hears regularly from young people. Speaking at the Times Crime and Justice Summit this week, Griffiths warned that sexual strangulation is becoming “a massive issue” and that pornography is driving the trend.

“If you look at what’s happening, what people can see, there’s a movement towards violent pornography, demeaning acts with women, BDSM, bondage,” Griffiths said. “That’s something that people are normalising as part of sexual behaviour.”

Having spent the past 18 months researching the impact of porn for a book, I can confirm he is right. This multi-billion-dollar industry has done more to entrench misogyny than any manosphere influencer ranting on a podcast. Yet, despite innumerable think pieces on toxic masculinity, there’s a curiously coy silence from mainstream pundits when it comes to discussing the harms of porn.

Thanks to the online porn explosion of the mid-2000s, entire generations have had their sexuality shaped by algorithms which are designed to escalate: what was kinky yesterday is vanilla today. In this way, porn doesn’t just reflect desires: it scripts them.

Nowhere is the cultural impact of porn more obvious than in the trans trend. Figures from Pornhub, the world’s largest pornography platform, show that in 2023 “transgender porn” was the sixth most-viewed category across the world. For some men lost in the endless scroll of “sissy hypno” and “forced feminisation” content, identifying as a woman is the climax of self-actualisation. This goes beyond a kink and becomes a form of identity — one shaped more by pornographic tropes than anything else.

Meanwhile, young women — faced with a world where womanhood is equated with being degraded and choked — are increasingly opting out; according to the UK Census, they’re the demographic most likely to identify as “asexual”, “demisexual” and “queer”. Who can blame them?

Porn may even be influencing who we fancy. In an effort to outwit the Coolidge effect — the biological drive for novelty — straight men report that they are turning to gay porn and vice versa. But this isn’t sexual liberation: it’s a dopamine-fuelled arms race. As one pornographic scriptwriter admitted to a journalist during an undercover investigation, the aim of his job is “to push stuff that’s less accepted, like putting a trans male or a trans female in a scene […] Test it out, see if you can get a bigger audience with it. See if you can convert somebody.”

But perhaps the most dangerous part of porn isn’t in the acts it encourages, but instead in the ideology. Porn teaches. It teaches that men are dominant, women are submissive, and that violence is not just permissible but sexy.

And the consequences are measurable. Men are becoming more regressive on gender equality than their fathers and grandfathers. Those born after 1980 are more likely to believe that men who care for their kids are “less manly”, and that gender equality has already gone “too far”. However, it’s also true that some of this backlash may stem from the perception that equality has already been achieved or even overcorrected — especially among those who didn’t grow up witnessing the more blatant forms of gender inequality faced by earlier generations.

Meanwhile, a 2024 Government survey of 3,000 UK adults of both sexes found that while 74% agreed it can be rape even if a victim doesn’t fight back, only 53% of Gen Z said the same. And just 42% understood that marriage doesn’t imply permanent consent — compared to 87% of over-65s.

This isn’t just about how we have sex: it’s about how we see each other, and ourselves. So while pundits panic over podcasters in the “manosphere”, the real ideological wrecking ball has been smashing through our minds, our relationships and our society. Griffiths is right to raise the alarm about choking — but the fingerprints of pornography go far beyond bruised necks.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.

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