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

But does it cause more damage than smoking? Alcohol? Cannabis in young people?

We give people the right to exercise their own judgement in getting hurt for pleasure on those, so if the argument is that this one is not OK it better be an order of magnitude worse than the recreational drugs.

(I guess there's a distinction between the act and a recording of it, but last I checked smoking and alcohol are still legal in media for adults.)

Ed.: the act is apparently illegal too, "Due to these dangers, non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation were made a criminal offence as part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021".

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.

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.