Balanced article, thanks for writing it. I was taught how to choke ‘correctly’ by a man with more BDSM experience than I but I do think it’d be a public service to have an article (with drawings ; or a video) about how to do it safely.
Re. Men enjoying choking their partners - I’m still too concerned about executing the choke correctly to really find the extra dominance/the extra fake threat truly arousing. IMHE, fake fighting/fake wrestling does that better. I imagine that’s why less men than you’d expect actually enjoy it. We do it for our partner(s)’ pleasure.
Re. non consensual choking. Look, I get that fawn is an instinctive response but it’s going to be really rare that saying or indicating “no” is going to lead to your murder. Think about it from the man’s pov. Even if you were unlucky enough to have sex with the kind of man who would ignore his partner’s wishes, what would he do with the body? I don’t know how to study that but, IMHO, you’re not making things worse by indicating your boundaries. The main thing you might lose is the illusion that that guy IS the kind of person who would respect your limits.
My understanding is that, as Chesed points out, you don’t touch the front of the neck. You keep a bit of space between that and the fleshy bit of your hand that’s between your thumb and index finger.
Then you don’t dig/don’t use your finger tips to dig into the side of the throat or claw into her neck but use the flat of your fingers to apply pressure to said sides of her neck. That reduces the pressure, afaik.
Still - I wouldn’t mind someone experienced in getting choked confirming/sharing their experiences.
My personal concerns with breath play are almost entirely focused on the possibility of accidental damage rather than the direct effects of oxygen deprivation.
I mainly have negative advice for hand-around-the-neck choking/strangulation:
In a missionary or cowgirl position, with the person on top choking the person on the bottom, it is very easy to end up putting way more pressure on the trachea than intended, especially if the lower body is doing what it would be expected to be doing in that circumstance.
Despite the obvious advantages it's just a very difficult position with which to maintain control and not end up with some of the top's weight pressed on to the bottom's throat.
More broadly, I think the thing to remember is that accidents can happen and to be mindful of them. Doing any kind of breath play (including "blood flow to the brain" play, which shares many or most of the risk and safety concerns) is generally safer when down on the floor, because at least from anecdotal and personal experience, you're at least as likely to cause unintentional harm when someone blacks out and falls over as by whatever you're doing directly.
Notably, this can happen without even meaning to do any breathplay, and there is a real reason behind the stereotype about bottoms needing to be tied to a bed for their own safety.
I personally had an accident when I was playing with a top that liked to pose me like a mannequin and have my body stay where she put it. She had me on my knees and wearing a play collar then pulled my head back by my hair, and I stayed exactly like that with neither of us realizing that the collar was now strangling me (in the blood flow sense, most likely). Before either of us realized there might be a problem I had momentarily blacked out and came to halfway to the floor. Luckily we recovered quickly and rolled with it, but under slightly different circumstances I might have ended up with a very unfun concussion.
Beyond hands, the absolute rule that everyone should follow is to never do any kind of ligature play alone. It's obviously hard to have good stats about how common this is and thus exactly how likely it is to kill someone, but there is a long list of people that have died this way.
Ligature strangulation is more stereotypically associated with male bottoms and trans folks generally, but it has a whole additional set of risks which mostly come down variations on "what if it gets stuck" and "what if this accidentally turns into a hanging". Again, this is something that can be the accidental result of e.g. rope bondage slipping into positions where it wasn't intended to be, and so it's something that good rope classes will cover from early on.
The best risk mitigation is to make sure that anything that could possibly end up strangling someone is something that your rescue cutter can easily go through, and to have practiced using the damn thing under adverse circumstances. If it's something that you might do on purpose it's very much worth having prepared yourself for it by having actually cut someone out of rope that you paid money for.
Chains obviously up the risk even further, and in general, don't play with any chain you can't easily cut with tools that you keep ready for when accidents occur because chain won't always stay where you put it, and it's worth noting that tools able to cut chain are less safe and convenient han EMT knives and safety shears.
For perspective, though, lots of folks go around wearing slip chains/collars and hardly ever die. It's just a really harrowing long tail if it goes wrong.
As a man, I'm not really into it but women I've been with have wanted to be choked and so I've done it for them. The study on how often people have been choked should have also asked how often people do the choking and who initiated it
Balanced article, thanks for writing it. I was taught how to choke ‘correctly’ by a man with more BDSM experience than I but I do think it’d be a public service to have an article (with drawings ; or a video) about how to do it safely.
Re. Men enjoying choking their partners - I’m still too concerned about executing the choke correctly to really find the extra dominance/the extra fake threat truly arousing. IMHE, fake fighting/fake wrestling does that better. I imagine that’s why less men than you’d expect actually enjoy it. We do it for our partner(s)’ pleasure.
Re. non consensual choking. Look, I get that fawn is an instinctive response but it’s going to be really rare that saying or indicating “no” is going to lead to your murder. Think about it from the man’s pov. Even if you were unlucky enough to have sex with the kind of man who would ignore his partner’s wishes, what would he do with the body? I don’t know how to study that but, IMHO, you’re not making things worse by indicating your boundaries. The main thing you might lose is the illusion that that guy IS the kind of person who would respect your limits.
Yes, I've done fake choking when a woman wanted to be choked.
Multiple women have asked, I've mainly said no simply because I don't feel confident that I can reasonably guarantee their safety.
I'd definitely read a do's and don'ts guide to choking
My understanding is that, as Chesed points out, you don’t touch the front of the neck. You keep a bit of space between that and the fleshy bit of your hand that’s between your thumb and index finger.
Then you don’t dig/don’t use your finger tips to dig into the side of the throat or claw into her neck but use the flat of your fingers to apply pressure to said sides of her neck. That reduces the pressure, afaik.
Still - I wouldn’t mind someone experienced in getting choked confirming/sharing their experiences.
My personal concerns with breath play are almost entirely focused on the possibility of accidental damage rather than the direct effects of oxygen deprivation.
I mainly have negative advice for hand-around-the-neck choking/strangulation:
In a missionary or cowgirl position, with the person on top choking the person on the bottom, it is very easy to end up putting way more pressure on the trachea than intended, especially if the lower body is doing what it would be expected to be doing in that circumstance.
Despite the obvious advantages it's just a very difficult position with which to maintain control and not end up with some of the top's weight pressed on to the bottom's throat.
More broadly, I think the thing to remember is that accidents can happen and to be mindful of them. Doing any kind of breath play (including "blood flow to the brain" play, which shares many or most of the risk and safety concerns) is generally safer when down on the floor, because at least from anecdotal and personal experience, you're at least as likely to cause unintentional harm when someone blacks out and falls over as by whatever you're doing directly.
Notably, this can happen without even meaning to do any breathplay, and there is a real reason behind the stereotype about bottoms needing to be tied to a bed for their own safety.
I personally had an accident when I was playing with a top that liked to pose me like a mannequin and have my body stay where she put it. She had me on my knees and wearing a play collar then pulled my head back by my hair, and I stayed exactly like that with neither of us realizing that the collar was now strangling me (in the blood flow sense, most likely). Before either of us realized there might be a problem I had momentarily blacked out and came to halfway to the floor. Luckily we recovered quickly and rolled with it, but under slightly different circumstances I might have ended up with a very unfun concussion.
Beyond hands, the absolute rule that everyone should follow is to never do any kind of ligature play alone. It's obviously hard to have good stats about how common this is and thus exactly how likely it is to kill someone, but there is a long list of people that have died this way.
Ligature strangulation is more stereotypically associated with male bottoms and trans folks generally, but it has a whole additional set of risks which mostly come down variations on "what if it gets stuck" and "what if this accidentally turns into a hanging". Again, this is something that can be the accidental result of e.g. rope bondage slipping into positions where it wasn't intended to be, and so it's something that good rope classes will cover from early on.
The best risk mitigation is to make sure that anything that could possibly end up strangling someone is something that your rescue cutter can easily go through, and to have practiced using the damn thing under adverse circumstances. If it's something that you might do on purpose it's very much worth having prepared yourself for it by having actually cut someone out of rope that you paid money for.
Chains obviously up the risk even further, and in general, don't play with any chain you can't easily cut with tools that you keep ready for when accidents occur because chain won't always stay where you put it, and it's worth noting that tools able to cut chain are less safe and convenient han EMT knives and safety shears.
For perspective, though, lots of folks go around wearing slip chains/collars and hardly ever die. It's just a really harrowing long tail if it goes wrong.
As a man, I'm not really into it but women I've been with have wanted to be choked and so I've done it for them. The study on how often people have been choked should have also asked how often people do the choking and who initiated it