'Choking' in porn has become the new normal. Here’s why a new UK law banning it is so vital | Clare McGlynn

This week marks a turning point in the UK’s approach to violent porn. The government has announced it will make publishing or possessing pornographic depictions of strangulation or suffocation – often known as “choking” – illegal. This bold move could transform the porn that appears on porn sites and social media platforms.

Strangulation in porn was once niche. Indeed, studies investigating the content of porn 20 years ago found hardly any instances of it. Yet an independent review of pornography released this year found that it was rife on the most popular porn sites. This summer the children’s commissioner released a report revealing that 58% of young people had seen strangulation in pornography, even though only 6% had searched for it. As renowned porn producer Erika Lust puts it, strangulation has become the “alpha and omega” of “any porn scene”.

This matters because the more porn we watch, the more strangulation we see – and the more likely we are to strangle someone during sexual activity. This is not speculative – studies of male students show precisely this link. Porn is today’s sex education: in a recent survey by LadBible, 70% of young men said that porn was their first exposure to sex.

We see this playing out in young people’s lives. Reports suggest that between one-third and one-half of young people have experienced being choked or strangled during sex. And it’s a gendered practice: mostly men strangling, and women and sexual minorities being strangled.

Pornography is not, of course, the only influencing factor. Popular culture reinforces and reproduces these messages of it being normal and harmless, with supposedly humorous memes and hashtags, such as #chokemedaddy; as well as popular songs such as Jack Harlow’s Lovin on Me referring to choking as “vanilla”. There’s also a far darker underbelly, with the manosphere normalising and encouraging it, characterising it as ultra-masculine.

This all matters because of the serious risks and harms of strangulation. We’ve long known that strangulation may cause unconsciousness, sore throats, dizziness, bloodshot eyes, incontinence and even strokes. But what is also now emerging is the adverse impact on the functioning of young women’s brains.

Medical research with MRI scans and blood tests is finding that frequent sexual strangulation is impairs brain functioning, which can affect information processing and concentration. This is worrying at any time, but especially for younger people whose brains are still developing.

And it’s vital to emphasise that these risks are not specific to non-consensual acts. Consent does not protect you from brain damage. These studies must not be dismissed as “sex-negative” or a “moral panic” (unless you don’t care about brain damage in young women).

Even more worrying is that these are hidden harms – difficult to detect, and largely unknown. Young women are largely unaware of the serious risks of strangulation, meaning they can’t freely consent to them. Many men are also strangling without awareness of the real risks to their partners – and to themselves if it all goes badly wrong. The common assumption is that this is a safe practice. This is why we also need to increase public awareness of the harms of sexual strangulation, as the #Breathless campaign has done in Australia.

This is all to explain why action to reduce the prevalence and normalisation of sexual strangulation is urgent. The government’s proposed new law means that under the Online Safety Act 2023, porn platforms and social media such as X will have to proactively detect and remove this content.

This is a brave move and very welcome. But adopting a law is just the first step – it must be implemented and enforced. So all eyes will now be on the regulator, Ofcom. Will it prioritise this issue and force platforms to act? Unfortunately, the omens are not good. Rape porn is already illegal, but it remains common on mainstream porn platforms and X.

This new law is a watershed moment. It acknowledges that mainstream porn has real consequences and that strangulation is inherently harmful. It’s the start of a fightback against the mainstream porn shaping our lives in profoundly damaging ways.

• Clare McGlynn is a professor of law at Durham University and author of Exposed: The Rise of Extreme Porn and How We Fight Back (out in 2026)