Girl on the Net

I don’t do choking any more. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, it turns out that something I have loved for many years is far less safe than I realised. It’s too much risk. I’m not going to order you not to do choking play, but I will tell you that this breath play article by Jay Wiseman is worth a read – it gave me useful information in a way that genuinely changed my mind. As I’ve said to a couple of dudes since I stopped being comfortable with choking: “sorry to be a buzzkill, but we’re gonna need to do something different.” I’m no medical expert, so I don’t think it’s my job to explain the detail of the risks involved with choking and asphyxiation, and I wouldn’t expect you to trust me as a source on that anyway, but here’s what I am an expert in: making shit horny! Instead of scolding you for enjoying this particular kink (I enjoyed it myself for a very long time), I’m going to share some safer alternatives to choking. Activities that – for me – capture a similar vibe to being choked or having my breath restricted, but without the underlying dangers.

Let’s begin with this important point:

You are not a bad person just because you enjoy choking

When I talked about this on Mastodon a while back, I received quite a few messages from people horrified at the idea that I would write an article about this. Choking isn’t safe, did I not know that?! Yes, I did. That’s why I wanted to write about it. I don’t personally think that preaching abstinence or scolding is helpful when it comes to influencing sexual practices, but I do think that sometimes if people we trust give us useful information, it can help us make informed decisions about the risks we’re willing to take. I used to love being choked, and although my partner at the time had some very strict rules about doing it (because he had read some stuff about how to choke people ‘safely’ and wanted to make sure that we weren’t pushing it beyond those limits), we did choke play quite frequently. At one point we went through a period of doing it so often that he joked about me having developed something of a sex catchphrase:

“Choke me and my cunt gets tighter.”

Being choked was a cum trigger for me, and the fact that it also made me involuntarily squeeze my cunt meant it naturally became a cum trigger for him too. Hot, no? Maybe not for everyone. But for the pair of us, absolutely. This was wildly hot and we enjoyed playing with it – him taking point on trying to do it safely, and me just wallowing in the feeling of it, like the ignorant-yet-eager slag I am.

I tell you this to highlight that I’m not going to call you an immoral pervert if you like choking too. Perverts are extremely welcome here, and you can easily be a perv without being morally reprehensible. Enjoying asphyxiation doesn’t make you an arsehole. Some of us like choking during sex – it’s hot! And it’s OK to acknowledge that it’s hot, even if on balance we realise it is unsafe to practice.

There are other sex things that fall into similar categories for me: activities which, though I used to embrace them with a horny, YOLO glee, have had to be abandoned. Touching someone’s cock while they’re driving is probably a good example of this. When I was young, and – crucially – before I had much experience of driving myself, cars always seemed like big safe boxes. Of course this guy wouldn’t crash just because I was giving him a lazy handjob through his jeans! Then I learned to drive (kind of) and realised that actually fucking hell that’s an unreasonably dangerous thing to do, and to this day my body still breaks out in cold sweat when I think about how reckless I (and a couple of younger lovers) were.

Other things have been dropped because I thought through the consent implications: public sex is a big one. I remember giving hand jobs beneath coats on buses, blow jobs in doorways and alleys. On one memorable occasion I managed to get a guy to pump cum down my throat as I pretended to be asleep with my head in his lap and a hoodie draped over me, on the back seat of the Oxford Tube at midnight. These days? It’s not so much that I don’t have the courage, it’s more that I recognise my past courage for what it actually was – mostly arrogance and selfishness. There’s a consent issue here, isn’t there? Though I’m pretty sure I was rarely spotted doing these things, ‘rarely’ is not ‘never’. I suspect that some events weren’t as cunningly concealed as my youthful self believed, and it’s possible that a few people saw what was happening and felt uncomfortable. There are those cold sweats again!

I think sometimes we are averse to change because changing can mean admitting that your past self was wrong. I certainly feel that way sometimes. If I acknowledge that choking is dangerous, then I have to also acknowledge that my past self was foolish and reckless – not just for doing it but for writing about it in the ways I have here. That’s hard, but it’s also OK. An important part of growing as a person is recognising that we all make mistakes, and correcting course doesn’t mean that we’ve failed. If anything, it’s an important step towards success. Becoming a better person today than I was yesterday, and all that jazz.

So: you’re not a bad person if you enjoy this kink. It’s possible that you – like me – didn’t know or really take in just how risky it could be. Maybe now you know, you want to keep being choked anyway – I’m not going to order you to stop. I have no authority over you and I wouldn’t want it even if you offered. But perhaps you feel the way I felt when a good friend helped to educate me: sad that a fun sexy thing has to be crossed off the list of possibilities. If you’re in this boat, I’m here to help. Because as someone who used to enjoyed being choked, who also happens to be a professional sex writer getting paid to capture the details of why this or that thing is hot… I like to think I’m in a good position to come up with alternatives that hit a similar sexy tone with less danger.

Safe alternatives to choking

When you discuss this publicly, often people will suggest things that look a little like choking but don’t involve putting pressure on either the blood vessels of the neck or the windpipe. Just holding someone’s jaw and pushing upwards, for instance. I’m not going to suggest these here because as far as I’m concerned they run into two problems:

1. Unless you’re a qualified medical professional, I don’t think you know exactly how much pressure constitutes ‘too much’, which exact pressure points are OK and which are not, and I also don’t think you’re necessarily going to have the control to hit the perfect angles when you’re deep in the middle of a fuck. I certainly wouldn’t.
2. It doesn’t have the same vibe as choking. And what I’m after here is a vibe. The feeling of being dismissively fucked up. Used. Abused. All that sort of thing. Placing your hand very carefully around my throat, while safer than just strangling me, does not achieve the same ‘fuck you, you slut’ impact from my subby perspective. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

So here we go. Safer alternatives to choking:

Belt in mouth

I’ve discussed this one before in detail during a smutty post about having someone dump their cum into my ass. Grabbing a belt (or a t-shirt, or indeed any item that is either long and fabric-y or can be made so with judicious twirling) and putting it in somebody’s mouth, then putting that in their mouth and using the ends to yank them or generally move them around. That’s an excellent alternative, in my opinion. It’s a replacement for the thing I used to do with men where I got them to wrap a t-shirt round my neck and tug on it while fucking me doggy-style. Turns out the actual choking/strangulation was far less important than the knowledge that they could pull on both ends of this item for leverage – to get their dick all the way nice and deep inside.

Bonus here is that having a belt wedged between your teeth makes you drool, which I am told is quite a hot thing to watch in the mirror when you’re getting railed from behind.

Fishhooking mouth

I am reliably informed that one of the reasons choking is often hot to the person doing it is that it makes you pull faces. And although I used to have a big hangup about how ludicrous I almost certainly look at the moment of orgasm, now that I’m older and wiser and sexier than I used to be, I recognise the pure joy in making someone pull faces that look ridiculous, because their total abandon in the moment often shows just how much they’re enjoying the fuck.

I think using both your hands to keep someone’s mouth open (‘fishhooking’ either side of their mouth) can be hot in similar ways to the belt-in-mouth suggestion above. Plus there’s usually even more drooling.

Shoving/crushing my face down

Shortly after I started drafting this post, I got my cunt deliciously annihilated by a guy who had pinned me to his living room floor. I was on my back, legs bent and hips slightly twisted to the side, folded into a small pretzel of humiliated horn while he pounded me. I looked up into his eyes and got a pleasurable few seconds to observe the determined fuckrage on his face, before he put one of his big hands on my left cheek and turned my head to the side. Pressing down on it, so I was forced to look away from him. My right cheek crushed against the rug gave me the same devastatingly horny shivers as I’d get if he were choking me. I was being made to confront the fact that I was nothing more than a hole for him to use, I was restrained and constricted enough that I had something to squirm against, and – yeah – I also drooled quite a lot as he slammed his dick home.

The same can be achieved if you’re getting fucked from behind, of course: a twist of the head and then their hand planted firmly on your head or the side of your face, pushing you down so you get a mouthful of duvet or mattress or rug, but not applying pressure to your neck.

Honour bondage/hold your breath

If the thing that appeals to you about erotic asphyxiation is the inability to breathe, there are ways of doing this more safely (note: nothing is 100% safe, but this is far safer than most). In kink, the term ‘honour bondage’ refers to the practice of putting someone in a position, or shaping their body, and then telling them to hold that position under threat of punishment. Mmmm, punishment. The same can be done with breath play.

Telling someone: “hold your breath for a count of ten” means they have control of their own breathing, and it’s up to them to obey you. As I say, this is safer – ask any parent of a toddler who has tried to hold their breath until they get their own way. It can also be horny as fuck to play with someone’s ability to do this, for instance by slowing down the count when you get closer to ten so they plead with their sexy sexy eyes for you to finally give them permission to breathe.

You can enhance this one with a little weed, if you’re into that sort of thing. Here’s a recent story about me blowing weed smoke into a guy’s mouth and not letting him breathe out until I’d enveloped his cock with my cunt. You’re WELCOME.

Wank fantasies/sexy threats

Kinks don’t need to be practiced to be enjoyed. A lot of the things I dream about, especially in a super-kinky space, are acts which are impossible (or incredibly difficult) for me to actually pull off (hehe). For example: I love the idea of being whacked with a thick leather belt, really really fucking hard. But in reality my bum is delicate and I’m a precious princess, so the kind of beating I can take falls far short of the intense thrashing that I dream about when I wank. Real-life thwacks are usually dispensed much more gently, with softer implements like canvas belts, or delivered through a pair of jeans so it muffles the pain. That doesn’t mean this kink suddenly disappears, though, or that I stop enjoying it. I enjoy it in my head, and in the whispered sex stories that I tell with boys I’m fucking where we wallow in fantasies about the acts we’d like to partake in but can’t.

I think the same is true of choking. Even though I know, and my partners know, that the specific act of choking is off the table because it’s unsafe, talking about it still turns us on. Whether it’s the threat of ‘don’t make me put my hands round your throat’ or the promise of ‘choke me and my cunt gets tighter’, throwing a little choking chat into a fuck still has some power. And as long as you and your partners understand that there is a firm boundary between speaking and acting, you can play with pretty much any fantasy that gets you both off. Make your threats/promises/fantasies as explicit as you like – the words themselves aren’t going to hurt you, and we’re all grown-ups who (I hope) understand the radical difference between dreams and reality

These alternatives to choking aren’t the saaaaame!

I get it. It’s not the same. Each of the suggestions above feels hot to me, and some of the reasons it feels hot dovetail neatly with the reasons why I used to enjoy choking. But for many of you, these alternatives to choking just won’t press the same buttons. I don’t expect everyone to read this article and immediately see the appeal of honour-bondage-style ‘hold your breath’ play, and I anticipate a lot of comments along the lines of ‘but this isn’t the same!’

That’s OK.

It’s not meant to be exactly the same, because it can’t be. I’m trying to pull out some of the different aspects that appeal to me and recommend alternatives to choking that might press similar buttons, but the fact remains that my ‘getting choked until my eyes go funny’ button will never be pressed again. If you’ve come to the same conclusion and it makes you sad, here are two things that might help:

1. Think about why choking appeals to you, and find your own safer alternatives. The suggestions above speak specifically to what I find horny about it, but for you the appeal might come from a different place, so focus on that when trying to be creative with what you do. This applies to things other than choking too, by the way: if you have a kink that your partner doesn’t want to partake in, examining what it is you find hot about it can help you identify similar kinks or areas of crossover with things that your partner does enjoy. There’s a guide here on doing this kind of exploration – basically, working out the ‘why’s’ of what turns you on, rather than just ‘what’ does it for you. Even if you can’t find suitable safer alternatives, often doing this kind of exercise can help you identify kinks, tones, acts and fantasies that are worth exploring to keep your sex life rich and entertaining.
2. Reframe what you’re doing: not ‘less of’ this particular sex act, but ‘more’ considered and caring consent. Anyone who is lucky enough to enjoy a rich and varied sex life throughout adulthood will always find things that pop in and out of their repertoire. Sometimes a partner introduces a cool new kink, or you read a guest post about it on your favourite sex blog and it awakens something within you. At other times, you’ll have to shelve a particular act because a new partner has different limits to what you’ve been used to in the past. Shuffling the deck of kinks you enjoy, sometimes removing cards or adding new ones, is part and parcel of what makes this journey fun. And sure, it’s gutting when you have to cut something you used to love, but it would be far more devastating if you or someone you cared about got injured or worse because you didn’t want to pack away this particular toy.

Personally, when it comes to choking, I’m trying to frame it in terms of my own limits and consent. Rather than whining in my head, like a pushy partner wanting to spank me even when I’m not feeling it, I’m treating myself in a more consensual way and recognising that although I thought I did consent to choking before, I was actually blocking out a lot of the risks. Sometimes through genuine ignorance, because I had no idea that the ‘safe’ ways we were practicing it were still not safe enough to justify taking that risk, and later because I just figured I’m one of those people who bad things tend not to happen to. Neither of these approaches placed enough value on myself or my partners.

So yeah. I’m not doing choking any more. But when I zoom out and look at the wealth of sexual possibility on offer, it’s not so much a loss as it is a change in focus. There’s plenty more we can do, and exploring those alternatives is a large part of what makes sex fun.