Human sexuality is vast, diverse and ever-shifting. Yet in the mid-2010s, the internet began to move toward something like consensus on an erotic behavior that has traditionally been outside the mainstream: choking.
Public figures like President Obama and Pope Francis received countless Twitter replies from people exhorting them to “choke me, daddy.” Memes stripped away context to make it seem as though characters from Disney films and SpongeBob SquarePants were engaged in extreme breath play. And while the trend of wishing that a celebrity crush would run you over with a car sort of came and went, the desire to have a partner’s hand around your throat remained constant.
Now, you may be shocked to learn, the choking craze — at least as it manifests on social media — has entered the sphere of academia. This month saw the publication, in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behavior, of a study conceptualized by Debby Herbenick, a researcher and professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health as well as the lead investigator for the school’s National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. It’s titled “#ChokeMeDaddy: A Content Analysis of Memes Related to Choking/Strangulation During Sex.”
Herbenick and her co-authors collected hundreds of memes related to sexual choking, the creators of which probably never imagined being cited by a bunch of PhDs seeking to understand the socially reinforced conditions of bedroom behavior today. Of particular interest to this team was the likelihood that young people are learning about the practice — technically strangulation, they note — through online jokes.
“Given that memes, through their humor, can make difficult topics more palatable and minimize potential harm in the phenomenon they depict,” the authors write, “more concerted, synergistic effort that integrates media literacy into sexuality education programming on the potential risks that may ensue for those engaging in sexual choking is warranted.” In other words, all those choking posts can have the effect of normalizing the behavior, which in turn can leave us with the impression that it’s less dangerous than it actually is.
The existing data, say Herbenick and her colleagues, show that choking has become far more widely accepted among college undergraduates as a form of “rough sex,” even in the past couple of years, and that it is increasingly common for adolescents to try it. Because young subjects in previous surveys indicated that they’d heard about sexual choking from memes — and the research in the area of sexual learning via memes is basically nonexistent — the team endeavored to categorize the “messages” delivered through this trend.
While the memes reviewed covered a wide range of perspectives, a few common themes emerged, including “Romanticization of Danger and Violence,” “Consent and Communication During Sex” and “Sexual Shame and Religion.” The material also tended to present a strong gender dynamic, with men doing the choking and women being the ones who get choked. While this had the tendency to produce a troubling strain of misogyny, the researchers concluded, the memes could also be quite nuanced, revealing an intention “to highlight and contradict” such themes, or “bring to light problematic viewpoints or practices.”
That memes are shared and endorsed among peer groups makes them especially influential, the paper noted, and therefore these posts “could have the potential to normalize sexual choking by using humor and depicting assumptions that the behavior is common and enjoyed and that the potential for harm or death (especially for women) is acceptable.” They may also create the false impression that there is a “safe” way to engage in sexual strangulation.
None of this is to say that parents and political leaders need to whip up a moral panic about choking memes. Quite the contrary, in fact: Herbenick and her team believe they present an opportunity “to gauge current ideas and beliefs about sexual behavior and evolving sexual practices,” and that sex education professionals might turn to them as “a particularly engaging factor” in their curricula. “Educators could even encourage their students to create their own memes that convey healthy messages around sexuality while remaining humorous,” the paper concludes. The takeaway is that if kids are internalizing the concepts they’re exposed to in social spaces online, then it’s up to adults to understand that ecosystem and counterweigh its misleading precepts.
There’s a lesson here, too, for those of us who like to shitpost about how ridiculously horny we are and the lengths we go to satisfy our lusts: you never know who’s reading your “choke me daddy” memes — a friend, or an impressionable youth, or even a professor of sexual health. Like it or not, we’re all choking on the same content.