Possession of porn featuring strangling to become a crime in the UK

> And it's really... odd... how the entire article is written as if the practice is solely performed by men on women. (Even though that might be the prevailing pattern, this kind of 'condensing down' is ultimately sexist erasure.)

You can't create a moral panic by having nuance. Why would they care about what people of what genders actually participate in kink play like this? No, if justifying policy is what's needed, instead you have to manufacture a pressing crisis. Just pretend that there's an epidemic of random heterosexual men watching too much porn and starting to nonconsensually strangle their partners out of nowhere. This article already endorses a lesser version of this story - that strangling porn only features women, that it's created solely for men, that its purpose is to degrade women in general through these acts (because surely no one ever is actually into choking, am I right?), and that men are rapidly becoming more misogynistic en masse because of it. Now that slots right in alongside all the societal fears and beliefs we have about protecting women. Every encroachment on NSFW content to come will keep banging the same drums of protecting a group that's seen as needing protection or is marginalized (excluding marginalized groups that the government hates, of course). And most people will probably believe it.

The simplification in the article is because it is mostly men doing this to mostly women.

In the worst outcome, there have been manslaughter charges raised against men who choked their partners to death, where "strangulation kink" has been used in the defence of these men. So it is clearly a problem.

You created an account about half an hour ago and have submitted nearly 1/6 of the comments on this post. You're more or less uncritically parroting the talking points of the special interest groups behind this while dismissing real concerns about liberty, censorship, and sexism.

Why are you so invested in this issue? Why did you create a throwaway account just to post on this topic? What relationship do you have to politicians, civil servants, and NGOs who have been involved in this campaign?

> So it is clearly a problem.

I didn't say there weren't rapists who were strangling their partners for their own pleasure. The "problem" you're describing is already illegal. I don't think there's a first-world country where you're allowed to nonconsensually choke someone. And "it was just my kink" isn't a good defense at all - just because it's used doesn't mean anything, the defense's whole point is to come up with the most tame interpretation possible for the crime, no matter how ridiculous.

The moral panic part is when the UK government decides that blanket banning everyone from doing it consensually is going to change anything about unrelated rapists who were already fine with breaking the law. And especially the fact that they think that the effects of this blanket ban are going to be large enough for it to be worth to criminalize consenting adults over.

And then then there's the choking porn part, where they seemingly have deduced that it was brainwashing men in such dangerous capacities that it's now worthwhile to brand someone a criminal for life if they dared to have that cognitohazard inscribed on their hard drive. It's okay, you may not have hurt anyone, you may have had a happy, consensual relationship, but we must simply punish you, don't you see. It's for the greater good, for we are fighting something which was already illegal.

Statistics don't matter here. When they come for the next "immoral" kink, they'll conjure up more statistics and conjecture to make it seem less insane. But statistics aren't what caused this. There is no choking porn crisis. They just wanted to go after it, and this was the best tool available.