Pornography’s deadly grip on marriages today

Pornography is an inversion of conjugal love, and it is becoming ever more extreme and violent. As pornography has become more widely accepted and trivialized in secular culture, its most dangerous elements have increasingly been adopted. With that adoption, the underlying ways in which men and women relate to one another have become disordered, often in very disturbing ways.

England has an entire organization called The Institute for Addressing Strangulation (IFAS), because the choking of women has become so pervasive. It is government-funded, and in addition to studying the prevalence of asphyxiation, the group tries to adjust its social acceptability. Choking during sex has been normalized as a result of its incorporation in pornography. When surveyed, the degree to which this has become socially permissible becomes clear:

• In the United States, a 2020 survey of nearly 5,000 undergraduate students revealed that 64% of women and 29% of men reported having been choked during sex.
• A 2024 Australian study involving 4,702 individuals aged 18 to 35 found that 57% had been strangled during sex at least once, and 51% had strangled a partner.
• An IFAS survey released in December 2024 found that over one-third of Britons aged 16-34 have been strangled during consensual sex at least once.
• A smaller survey in 2016 by the Indiana University School of Public Health indicated that 21% of women and 11% of men aged 18 to 60 had been choked during sex, with a higher prevalence among adults under 40.

Asphyxiation is so in vogue that it is the focus of many pop songs, making up the entire subject of “Take My Breath” by Weeknd, which has almost 190 million YouTube views and made it to the Top 10 charts in the US when it was released. It’s the reference in Jack Harlow’s “Lovin on Me”—“I’ll choke you but I ain’t no killer baby”—along with similar lyrics in dozens of songs.

In recent decades, pornography has become gradually more explicit and increasingly violent. The days of scantily clad models on magazine covers seem tame by comparison. As with most negative exposures, people’s tolerance increases over time. Those who work in emergency rooms or as Emergency Medical Technicians can describe how numb they become to the gore and bloodshed they see regularly. Likewise, with pornography, what originally interested viewers is no longer impactful years later. So, they seek more extreme variants, and the industry is all too willing to accommodate.

And yet pornography is sometimes used by children and young teenagers as education, as they try to understand what adults do. Thus, their impression of sexual relations is distorted, and what they “learn” will prove harmful to later relationships.

What happens in that online world eventually seeps out into how men and women relate to one another. It is from here that we get the increase in emergency room choking incidents and accidental damage from sodomy, even amongst heterosexual couples. Pornography has become a dark underbelly of male-female relations.

Whenever the topic is broached, many want to jump to modernity’s only moral fulcrum: consent. There are variations, but it all sounds the same: “The women in the videos chose to be there”, “I’m a willing consumer—an adult with a credit card. Who has the right to stop me?”, or “My girlfriend consented to it.”

The last one takes on a different tone when said over a dead body. That is, tragically, becoming a more common event. In plenty of cases, the woman did consent, but certainly not with the intent to die. In other instances, it’s the lie an abusive boyfriend or husband tells after killing his partner in an argument. Strangulation is known to domestic violence experts as a predictor of homicide; those who choke their spouses are seven times more likely to kill them.

Between June 2022 and August 2023, 32 police departments in England and Wales recorded 29,767 non-fatal strangulation offenses, averaging over 2,100 cases per month. In a society that normalizes sexual asphyxiation and views consent as the ultimate judge of morality, law enforcement has an almost impossible job bringing charges against an individual who declares, “She agreed to it!”

What can we infer about male-female relations when supposedly healthy couples are willing to put their hands around the throats of their spouse and prevent them from breathing? Sure, you can get lost analyzing hormonal reactions and dopamine releases, as people do when trying to justify the abhorrent—but that’s all tangential to the point of being irrelevant.

Recognizing what we know about real love, which is to will the highest good for the beloved, can we say that the couple loves each other? Knowing that love is not merely an emotion and is reflected in the choices that we make, how could we defend their claim of love? Their actions instead betray, “I am willing to risk killing you because it gives me pleasure.” Such relations are at best mutually exploitative associations.

Compare those unions to the classical Christian understanding of two spouses trying to help each other get to heaven. In the conjugal act, they further offer to extend each other’s presence in the world; by offering themselves in totality (with their fertility), they implicitly say to the other, “I want you to exist forever, and any children we bear will cause you to echo throughout time.”

It’s not difficult to see how this is the very opposite of the couple that was earlier described. The Christian relationship is ordered towards life, whereas the pornography-inspired pair is ordered towards death. In the latter case, the husband, who is supposed to be the primary protector of his wife, becomes her most likely cause of injury. The woman, a potential bearer of life, who should be looking into the eyes of the man who loves her, teeters on the edge of death.

This betrays the flippancy with which we see life. Never has there been a better metaphor for the subordination of life itself to pleasure. It is the hedonism of our age. Behind veneers of a subjective morality that rejects a purported antiquated rigidity, our actions belie a complete disregard for man.

Moreover, the bond of the couple becomes the bond of the family, which is the foundational building block in any healthy society. Thus, the culture that results from such a broken understanding of love and union will surely and inevitably soon breathe its last.