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

Ok, so it can cause some brain damage. That's not good.

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.)

The intention behind "non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation were made a criminal offence as part of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021" might be good, but I do not see how this can be implemented in practice, because domestic abuse seldom has witnesses, and as noted in TFA "non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation" frequently leave no marks on the victim, so it is impossible to prove that they have occurred.

I assume that in this legal text "suffocation" means the prevention of respiration by other means than compressing the throat, but it should be noted that this is a modern meaning of the word "suffocation". To "strangle" comes from Ancient Greek, through its borrowing in Latin, while to "suffocate" is the native Latin synonym of "strangle", so originally the two words were completely synonymous. ("suffocate" is derived from "sub", i.e. under, and "fauces", i.e. throat)