Choking. Biting. Slapping and spanking.
Those are just some of the kinky-sex practices that have become increasingly popular in recent years, edging their way from the margins and into the mainstream.
Some have welcomed the shift as liberating, one that has inspired people to experiment in the bedroom. They point to the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey book and film franchise, which left millions around the world entranced with its portrayal of rough, leather-clad sex.
A study in the summer of 2012 by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. found that 86 per cent of women who had read the trilogy reported that it had influenced their opinions of sex, and 67 per cent said they found this form of sex a turn-on.
But others are raising an alarm, warning that the trend stems from the influence of online pornography, which often gives a deeply misogynist and misleading portrayal of kinky sex. Critics say this portrayal leaves out the most important feature of kink: consent. They say men are increasingly taking their cues from porn, suddenly grabbing their partner’s neck to choke her, or slapping her without warning or permission.
A 2019 study by researchers at the Indiana University School of Public Health found that one-quarter of women surveyed said they had felt scared during a sexual situation; most identified a choking episode as the incident that had frightened them.
“There are a ton of men doing this s**t because they think it’s what women want,” says Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of the company MakeLoveNotPorn, which promotes healthy, consensual sex.
“They’ve grown up with porn and no other open honest dialogue about sex, and they honestly think that’s how you’re good in bed. It’s really depressing,” adds the U.K. native, who says she has experienced a surprise chokehold during sex.
‘There are a ton of men doing this s**t because they think it’s what women want. They’ve grown up with porn and no other open honest dialogue about sex, and they honestly think that’s how you’re good in bed. It’s really depressing.’
— Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO, MakeLoveNotPorn
Sexual violence is the only type of violent crime that is not declining in Canada, according to a 2018 StatsCan report. More than 4.7 million women and 1.2 million men, outside of an intimate relationship, said they have been sexually assaulted at least once after age 15, according to the report.
A spate of court cases in Canada and other countries has thrust the issue of rough sex into the spotlight. In 2014, then-CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi was charged with several counts of sexual assault and one of overcoming resistance by choking. He argued the acts were consensual, and was acquitted in 2016. More recently, trucker Bradley Barton was found guilty of manslaughter in 2021 after a Winnipeg woman died from a severe vaginal tear after what he claimed was consensual sex.
Meanwhile, in the U.K., public outrage over a series of court cases in which men argued their partners had consented to rough sex that left them dead or severely injured has prompted lawmakers to ban the so-called “rough sex defence.”
Is pornography to blame for the normalization of sexual violence? Experts are divided.
Certainly, aggressive, kinky sex is common in porn, research has shown.
During a six-month period between 2017 and 2018, researchers at Durham University published a study in the British Journal of Criminology in which they analyzed more than 150,000 video titles across the homepages of three popular porn websites: Pornhub, XVideos and XHamster. They found that one in eight video titles included descriptions of sexual aggression.
Marilyn Evans, a Toronto mother of five who founded the organization Parents Aware in 2016, is a vehement critic of pornography. Her organization provides resources to help parents talk to their children. She says her family faced the negative impacts of porn once her children became teens and that it is “so much a part of the culture today that young children and young teens don’t have a chance to explore sexual development without the influence of pornography.”
“I think that children’s exposure to violent pornography teaches children that sex and violence belong together and we’re not giving them another script,” Evans continues. “I think it’s difficult to teach consent when we’re showing a barrage of non-consensual activities.”
‘I think that children’s exposure to violent pornography teaches children that sex and violence belong together and we’re not giving them another script.’
— Marilyn Evans, Toronto-based founder of Parents Aware
Pornhub, the Montreal-based porn industry giant, attracts 100 million visits worldwide to its website every day. Some of the most common acts of rough sex found on the site are choking and spanking. As reported in August 2018 by Pornhub, rough sex sits at 35th place in popularity out of the site’s 90 categories. Men watch porn considerably more than women. In 2021, Pornhub released its yearly data report, which detailed the proportion of female and male viewership on the platform. It found that in Canada, 32 per cent of viewers that year were female, while 68 per cent were male. Globally, only 35 per cent of visitors were female.
Research has shown an association between watching pornography and practicing rough sex: in a 2019 survey of young adults who regularly watched sexually explicit material, researchers found that almost half of the participants said they had engaged in four or more rough sex acts. The U.S. study was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
However, it’s a chicken-or-egg question: Does watching explicit material make the participants more likely to engage in rough sex, or are those who enjoy rough sex more likely to seek out explicit material?
A point of agreement for many, however, is that porn depicting rough sex tends to reinforce gender stereotypes. Ryan Leeds, a sex shop worker at one of Ottawa’s Stag Shop locations, said gender norms portrayed in porn are “incredibly outdated.”
He warns: “And more importantly, they’re giving particularly men — and very aggressive men — ideas on what sex should look like that translates to the bedroom.”
Leeds said he sees these depictions in his store during every shift. In ads or in previews, women are portrayed as helpless or needy, while the man “has this stark look on his face, and this bravado that’s so overwhelming.”
These stereotypes hurt men as well as women, according to Vice reporter Louis Staples. In his July 2021 article, “How It Feels Being a ‘Vanilla’ Man in Bed,” Staples said that some men feel pressure to engage in rough sex to avoid being mocked for being too conventional. Staples cited the experiences of several male sources, and points to social media trends, such as Tik Tok videos under the hashtag #FreakTok, that promote kinky sex and make fun of those who don’t engage in it. Some of these videos have been viewed more than a million times.
Some say the popularization of rough sex is not solely because of the influence of porn, but it is also an unintended effect of the sexual revolution, with men turning women’s sexual freedom to their advantage. In her February 2018 article, “That’s patriarchy: How female sexual liberation led to male sexual entitlement,” The Guardian columnist Van Badham writes that “the flipside to the de-stigmatisation of sex for women has been a sense of patriarchal entitlement to sex with women,” pushing the idea that women want sex, and the same kind of sex, just as much as men do. In this way, women can find themselves coerced into sexual situations, expected to participate in what their partner initiates, she argues.
‘Sex positivity is just, have the sex that you want to have, and if that’s vanilla sex once a month with the lights off with your husband — cool.’
— Meg Lonergan, PhD candidate in legal studies, Carleton University
Meg Lonergan, a Carleton University PhD candidate in legal studies who researches law, horror and porn studies, says the argument that sex positivity means loving all kinds of sex is a misrepresentation of the movement, which should be about freeing people to choose what kind of sex they want.
“Sex positivity is just, have the sex that you want to have, and if that’s vanilla sex once a month with the lights off with your husband — cool,” she says. “It’s then also supporting (you) if you want to have sex with your eight non-monogamous partners while suspended from the ceiling while doing it on camera — also rock on.”
It’s that kind of consensual sex that Cindy Gallop wants to showcase with her company, MakeLoveNotPorn, which has more than 400,000 members from around the world. She started the company in 2009 to become “what Facebook would be, if Facebook allowed you to socially, sexually self-express.” Gallop’s platform, through comprehensive consent checks and a careful curation process conducted by real employees, lets people submit videos of themselves having sex naturally and non-performatively, which Gallop says is unlike pornography.
“If porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, MakeLoveNotPorn is the badly needed documentary,” she says. “We are a unique window into the funny, messy, loving, fabulous, beautiful, glorious sex we all have in the real world.”
Gallop doesn’t think porn should be banned, but that society should have access to the reality of sex as well. This way, she explains, attitudes around sex would change for the better.
“Currently, sex is an area of rampant insecurity for every single one of us. … You are terrified that if you say anything at all about what is going on . . . you will potentially hurt the other person’s feelings, you’ll put them off you, you will derail the encounter,” Gallop says. “But at the same time, you want to please your partner; you want to make them happy. Everybody wants to be good in bed. Nobody knows exactly what that means.”
Honesty and consent are key, including — and especially — for those who are genuinely interested in kinky sex, says Amanda Mifflin, a Kingston, Ont.-based woman who identifies as part of the bondage, domination, sadism and masochism (BDSM) community. From the age of 19, she has been a member of FetLife, a social media outlet where people who are into kink can connect. She says she has met a lot of men whose sexual knowledge derives solely from porn.
“You think you can just pull my hair and slap me? No. … You have to ask me (whether) that’s OK,” she says, reiterating her usual response to them. “Not all women like to be slapped or have their hair pulled. Porn doesn’t teach them that there’s an asking process.”
‘You think you can just pull my hair and slap me? No. … You have to ask me (whether) that’s OK. Not all women like to be slapped or have their hair pulled. Porn doesn’t teach them that there’s an asking process.’
— Amanda Mifflin, member of BDSM community and FetLife
Consent is highly prioritized as part of BDSM culture, she says.
People who practise BDSM may incorporate restraint and bondage, as well as playing roles of dominance and submission. But many people wrongly confuse all BDSM with rough sex, says Mifflin. According to her, BDSM is a lifestyle in which a submissive serves their dominant in a way that is “more or less like a 1950s lifestyle.”
“When I have a dominant that takes that higher place, it’s … yes, he holds control over me, but in the end of the day, I cook his meals, I take care of him, I make sure he’s happy. … For me, I gain the pleasure from pleasing them to a higher extent,” Mifflin says about her goal to live as a full-time submissive. Mifflin has been interested in BDSM since age 16.
While some might say this reinforces outdated gender norms, Mifflin says feminism means having a choice, and this is hers. Step-by-step consent is critical in BDSM, she stresses, explaining that engaging in this type of sex requires a lot of trust and time.
She gives the example of simulated rape, emphasizing how crucial conversations about consent are, before, during and after.
“At any point in time, I can stop it,” she says. “There’s a power that we gain from being put in a position like that again, and being able to say no, and it’s done.”
Some research backs this up; a 2021 report by researchers at New Mexico State University, published in the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy, said that the structured power dynamics in BDSM help to “reduce the stress hormone cortisol and [allow participants to] experience altered states of consciousness,” which can be therapeutic for victims of early-age trauma.
Velvet Steele, a Vancouver-based veteran dominatrix with almost 40 years’ experience in the sex industry, agrees consent lies at the heart of BDSM. An advocate who has fought against restrictions on porn and sex work, in Vancouver and nationally, she knows more than most how vital structured consent is to BDSM.
“I am listening to their physical cues,” explains Steele, whose real name is Susan Davis. “It is your role to ensure that they’re comfortable throughout the whole thing, and that nothing bad happens to them.”
Without step-by-step consent, practices such as choking, slapping, punching or any other form of so-called kinky sex are nothing more than assaults, plain and simple, she says. “A person who doesn’t pay attention to those cues is a criminal committing an assault and that’s not really sex. It’s a crime.”
