THE GUARDIAN – Now that Lucy has been in a steady relationship for a year, she finds herself looking back at previous sexual encounters through a new lens.
The slaps to her face. Hands round her neck. The multiple late-night messages from one partner – nine years older and, in her words, “a Tinder situation”: “Can I come over and rape you?”
“I like to think I enjoyed my single 20s,” says Lucy, now 24. “I was an avid Hinge and Tinder user and I liked to think of myself as the ‘cool girl’. But I’ve been thinking about it so much – I’m not sure why. There was the friend of a friend who slapped me so hard in the middle of us having sex – no warning, just from nowhere.
“It actually made my teeth rattle. There was another guy I met at a bar. We got together that night and he started choking me so hard, I felt this sharp pressure, this pain I’d never experienced before. I was drunk but it sobered me up in one second. I still wonder what he did to me to cause that pain.”
Never was “rough sex” discussed before, during or after. “Among my friends, there’s this competitiveness about not being boring, not being ‘vanilla’. I think it’s very prevalent for women my age, and no one wants to kink-shame anyone,” says Lucy (not her real name).
“There’s a lot of talk about online porn and what that has done to men’s brains and expectations, but I also saw a lot of very violent porn when I was a teenager. I don’t know why or how I found it.
“The women in porn never push back or say, ‘Don’t do that’ when they’re choked. I think I became quite performative. I like to think I’m a strong woman but … I don’t know if it’s about male validation.”
Growing concern around the normalisation of “choking” – ie strangulation – during sex has led to the recent announcement that pornography depicting it will be criminalised …
