Pornography is an inversion of conjugal love, and it is becoming ever more extreme and violent. As pornography has become more widely accepted and trivialized in secular culture, its most dangerous elements have increasingly been adopted. With that adoption, the underlying ways in which men and women relate to one another have become disordered, often in very disturbing ways.
England has an entire organization called The Institute for Addressing Strangulation (IFAS), because the choking of women has become so pervasive. It is government-funded, and in addition to studying the prevalence of asphyxiation, the group tries to adjust its social acceptability. Choking during sex has been normalized as a result of its incorporation in pornography. When surveyed, the degree to which this has become socially permissible becomes clear:
- In the United States, a 2020 survey of nearly 5,000 undergraduate students revealed that 64% of women and 29% of men reported having been choked during sex.
- A 2024 Australian study involving 4,702 individuals aged 18 to 35 found that 57% had been strangled during sex at least once, and 51% had strangled a partner.
- An IFAS survey released in December 2024 found that over one-third of Britons aged 16-34 have been strangled during consensual sex at least once.
- A smaller survey in 2016 by the Indiana University School of Public Health indicated that 21% of women and 11% of men aged 18 to 60 had been choked during sex, with a higher prevalence among adults under 40.
Asphyxiation is so in vogue that it is the focus of many pop songs, making up the entire subject of “Take My Breath” by Weeknd, which has almost 190 million YouTube views and made it to the Top 10 charts in the US when it was released. It’s the reference in Jack Harlow’s “Lovin on Me”—“I’ll choke you but I ain’t no killer baby”—along with similar lyrics in dozens of songs.
In recent decades, pornography has become gradually more explicit and increasingly violent. The days of scantily clad models on magazine covers seem tame by comparison. As with most negative exposures, people’s tolerance increases over time. Those who work in emergency rooms or as Emergency Medical Technicians can describe how numb they become to the gore and bloodshed they see regularly. Likewise, with pornography, what originally interested viewers is no longer impactful years later. So, they seek more extreme variants, and the industry is all too willing to accommodate.
And yet pornography is sometimes used by children and young teenagers as education, as they try to understand what adults do. Thus, their impression of sexual relations is distorted, and what they “learn” will prove harmful to later relationships.
What happens in that online world eventually seeps out into how men and women relate to one another. It is from here that we get the increase in emergency room choking incidents and accidental damage from sodomy, even amongst heterosexual couples. Pornography has become a dark underbelly of male-female relations.
Whenever the topic is broached, many want to jump to modernity’s only moral fulcrum: consent. There are variations, but it all sounds the same: “The women in the videos chose to be there”, “I’m a willing consumer—an adult with a credit card. Who has the right to stop me?”, or “My girlfriend consented to it.”
The last one takes on a different tone when said over a dead body. That is, tragically, becoming a more common event. In plenty of cases, the woman did consent, but certainly not with the intent to die. In other instances, it’s the lie an abusive boyfriend or husband tells after killing his partner in an argument. Strangulation is known to domestic violence experts as a predictor of homicide; those who choke their spouses are seven times more likely to kill them.
Between June 2022 and August 2023, 32 police departments in England and Wales recorded 29,767 non-fatal strangulation offenses, averaging over 2,100 cases per month. In a society that normalizes sexual asphyxiation and views consent as the ultimate judge of morality, law enforcement has an almost impossible job bringing charges against an individual who declares, “She agreed to it!”
What can we infer about male-female relations when supposedly healthy couples are willing to put their hands around the throats of their spouse and prevent them from breathing? Sure, you can get lost analyzing hormonal reactions and dopamine releases, as people do when trying to justify the abhorrent—but that’s all tangential to the point of being irrelevant.
Recognizing what we know about real love, which is to will the highest good for the beloved, can we say that the couple loves each other? Knowing that love is not merely an emotion and is reflected in the choices that we make, how could we defend their claim of love? Their actions instead betray, “I am willing to risk killing you because it gives me pleasure.” Such relations are at best mutually exploitative associations.
Compare those unions to the classical Christian understanding of two spouses trying to help each other get to heaven. In the conjugal act, they further offer to extend each other’s presence in the world; by offering themselves in totality (with their fertility), they implicitly say to the other, “I want you to exist forever, and any children we bear will cause you to echo throughout time.”
It’s not difficult to see how this is the very opposite of the couple that was earlier described. The Christian relationship is ordered towards life, whereas the pornography-inspired pair is ordered towards death. In the latter case, the husband, who is supposed to be the primary protector of his wife, becomes her most likely cause of injury. The woman, a potential bearer of life, who should be looking into the eyes of the man who loves her, teeters on the edge of death.
This betrays the flippancy with which we see life. Never has there been a better metaphor for the subordination of life itself to pleasure. It is the hedonism of our age. Behind veneers of a subjective morality that rejects a purported antiquated rigidity, our actions belie a complete disregard for man.
Moreover, the bond of the couple becomes the bond of the family, which is the foundational building block in any healthy society. Thus, the culture that results from such a broken understanding of love and union will surely and inevitably soon breathe its last.
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People would be astonished (or maybe not) how much pornography has infiltrated the common priest all the way to the Vatican. Sin has no limits or borders.
Thank you, troll Brian for laboring the obvious, but you’re more to the point with “sin has no limits or borders.”
Three points:
Consider that most sexual abuse occurs within families. And, that in the United States the contracted and independent Jay Commission College of Criminal Justice Report (2004) found that 85 percent of clerical instances of generic “sexual abuse” involved homosexuality (and not the therapeutic cover-story pedophilia). Welcome to the secularist world where even binary “marriage”—the concluding focus of the article—has been redefined to include the oxymoron “gay marriage.”
So, without limits or borders, even the inborn and universal Natural Law/morality of true personal flourishing is supposedly obsolete. But, the “family,” for example, was central to Pope Leo XIII’s prescription for overcoming the societal disintegration related to the Industrial Revolution (Rerum Novarum, 1891). And now, the current Pope Leo XIV has chosen this name to help remind a fallen and amnesiac world of those permanent truths so fashionably ignored or even denied. It’s almost as if there’s something “revealing” in Genesis about today’s slippery slide into redefining what is “good” and what is “evil”, based on “knowledge.” In Hebrew, “knowledge is cerebral but is also inseparable from what first fully experienced or done! We believe what we do, and do not do what we believe. The doctrine (!) of Original Sin as “original” to ourselves and not to the Creator God.
So, yes, “sin has no limits or borders,” not even to your limited fixation on an infiltrated priesthood (many of them possibly victims themselves).
Instead, if at their origin all addictions manifest and amplify estranged feelings of deeply not “belonging,” then perhaps the gospel of a more original love and even divine agape/caritas, still means something today. And, it’s in Scripture as well as Tradition, that for all of the failings of its members throughout history, the perennial Catholic Church as such still does connect us to both the words and deeds (e.g., Mt 28:19) of the incarnate Jesus Christ.
These oxygen starvation stats make me and perhaps other readers relieved they are behind the times. I guess it’s one of the new forms of ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ Disturbing, to say the least.
A terrible reality well studied by the author. When we omit the life giving feature of conjugal relations the trend is toward death. Before asphyxiation for pleasure we had the snuff films, the evil pleasure of killing the woman after sexual relations. Mankind’s unwitting association with the author of death, Satan.
If it’s unwitting, it’s only because the people enjoying them are witless.
Exactamente Amanda. They’ve abandoned the natural propensity of reason toward truth, and cannot distinguish good from evil if it bit them.
To go through the difficult process of discerning truth, one must first admit it exists and is worth seeking, despite the difficulties and uncertainties associated with that pursuit.
If the devils first great lie is that he does not exist, the second is that the truth does not exist.
The lives of many are deprived of theology, religious devotion, philosophy, scientific studies, mathematics, history, intellectual conversation and manual crafts and work. This leaves a giant emptiness that invites the demonic to fill it. We need a true system of Catholic education, from grade school to universities: a revived Catholic intellectualism.
We’ve reaped the bitter crop from moving the Overton window towards violent sex, making it acceptable. I can only echo Abp. Fulton Sheen’s “The Case for Intolerance.”
Do not marry a porn addict.
Do not date a porn addict.
Do not be a porn addict.
As the omission of Life in the conjugal act leads to death in the natural order it leads to a form of eternal death in the supernatural. Although this death is figurative because the soul is eternal. God’s gift of life in his own image requires this. We can lose grace, we cannot lose our existence, as Catherine of Siena repeats in her Dialogues.
In a world given to disbelief in the eternal judgment of good and evil, sensual pleasure becomes overwhelming to the will – there are no barriers or guard rails. A rationale why pornography, which leads to all forms of sexual perversions, and death as well, addressed by author Sarah Cain. A priority for our new pontificate is the urgency in returning to the original Gospel message of life and death, judgment and eternal life or eternal hell.
An incentive for those of us staving off the errors of the day fighting the good fight – to help those suffering the demonic grip of pornography and its consequences is to offer our sufferings in resisting these evils for those who have failed. To participate with Christ’s salvific act of crucifixion in saving souls.
If history is to again repeat itself, we will eventually see a turn to morality!
Br. Jaques, perhaps we have gone too far this time to ever return to a common morality again. Technology will never go away and any control of it will be impossible because it will be able to go around any barriers set up to contain it. Just like the mutation of insidious infections go around the most powerful antibiotics. We have already reached the point of no return. May God have mercy on us.
Probably.But we will bec tanding,like Tamurlane, on the bodies of the dead.
Thai you for this article, depressing and distressing as it is.
We all know the demonic evil of porn. But I had no idea it was creating this level of horror.
Strangulating one’s spouse? Absolutely Satanic.
The complete lack of morality in a vast majority of the secular public is disturbing. Anything goes, it would appear. Yet the church remains resolutely quiet on issues of sexuality for fear of “offending” a certain segment of catholics. Beyond the porn addicts, there are of course the adulterers and cheaters, trans and same sex attracted, and mostly young couples living together (over time, often with several different partners) . Those young people may or may not marry, or have a church wedding if they marry at all. And may or may not Baptize their baby. Either they dont think its important, or they cant be bothered to follow the minimal procedures involved. But since they are never advised by any authority figure ( parental or church) they are doing the wrong thing, how would they even know to make better choices? Fortunately not all act on their impulses, but in general it has become the societal norm to NOT follow church mandates on sexuality, to no good result.
Today a large group of people entered my church for a funeral, all talking extremely loudly, even though several of us from the Mass had lingered to continue to pray. Which signaled that they were NEVER taught to be respectfully quiet in a church. If they dont even know THAT basic a church behavior, why would they imagine the church even HAS a position on the subjects of sex and porn? Very sad.
I’m visiting family in the St. Augustine diocese today and the bishop has instructed everyone parish to post this sign:
“You have entered a Holy Temple. Out of respect for Jesus truly present in the Holy Eucharist and for anyone who may be praying please maintain silence while inside this Sacred Place. ”
I was impressed.
That is impressive. A great idea. But most pastors are so afraid of offending their members, who then complain to the Bishop, that most would refuse to take a blunt position like the one you explain, no matter that it makes all the sense in the world. Personally, I would post a sign on my church’s inner doors which would say, “Turn off cell phones NOW. Please maintain a respectful silence while in the church.”
On another issue, I would also post a sign near the votive candles at the front of the church which says” No candle lighting during Mass.” (Believe it or not I have actually seen people do this. More than Once!) You wouldnt think an adult Catholic would need such signs but evidently, an awful lot of them do. Discouraging.
“The Lord us in his Holy Temple. Let all the Earth keep silent before Him. Phones that ring may be recovered from the font after Mass.”
The devil, being a pure spirit, cannot commit sins of the flesh. But in his envy and hatred of the human body—especially the body redeemed in Christ—he wages a relentless war through it. One might almost say he has constructed a kind of twisted “theodicy”: since he cannot act through his own body, he attempts to sin through ours. His frustration becomes fury; his incorporeality becomes corruption. And so he seeks a doorway—an access point—into our soul through the body.
This isn’t poetic exaggeration. Anyone who has struggled with lust in today’s culture knows the unnerving pressure—the sudden impulses, the “need,” the impulse that arrives without warning, like a storm through a window left slightly open. It feels inhuman, because it often is. As soon as the soul flirts with darkness, the devil rushes in—not only with temptation but with overwhelming tension on that precise plane. As if, denied his own flesh, he needs to borrow ours.
And what is the devil’s most efficient tool in our time? The device in our pockets. Smartphones and digital media have become, in many cases, not neutral tools but Trojan horses—portals of premature and toxic exposure, particularly for the young. The pervasiveness of pornography today is so widespread that one wonders whether it’s even possible to fully escape it without divine intervention. It creates not only personal devastation but what could rightly be called a civilizational pollution.
The first sin the devil wants to multiply is the sin of the flesh. Why? Because it hits both body and soul; it splits what God has joined. Saint Augustine, ever the realist, once wrote: “Lust indulged became habit, and habit unresisted became necessity” (Confessions, Book VIII). The devil knows how to speed up that progression in the digital age. He no longer needs to tempt slowly through the senses—he now floods the imagination and hijacks the body’s chemistry directly.
But there is a man who answers this devastation—not with noise, but with silence. Not with ideological crusades, but with purity lived. St. Joseph is the man of divine chastity—not the chastity of repression or fear, but the chastity that can share a home with the Virgin Mary. In him, the masculine body becomes a shield, not a weapon; a dwelling of strength, not of domination. His silence speaks louder than modern chaos.
And here lies the mystery: the devil tempts through disordered flesh, but Joseph resists in the flesh, not by denial of the body but by a higher ordering of love. In his self-possession, Joseph offers a forgotten truth: chastity is not weakness, but the strength to see others not as prey, but as persons to be cherished. This virtue is a Marian virtue, because it springs from reverence before the mystery of another.
Joseph, protector of the Redeemer and guardian of purity, is needed today more than ever. Not only as a model but as an intercessor. When the world is flooded by impurity, it is no longer enough to run away; we must run toward someone greater.
“As the omission of Life in the conjugal act . . . ”
I’m more and more convinced this is the root of the rot.
Weird and disturbing. What is the matter with people?
It’s extremely disturbing William, I agree.
Maybe when you disconnect the marital act from procreation this is what you end up with.
I remember in the Old Testament God spoke about choosing life or death. Looks like more people are choosing death today. Or something associated with it.
Great article! Don’t forget St. Augustine was an orgy and blood sport fan before conversion. Sadly, I’ve never heard one single sermon about such sins as domestic violence or porn, let alone depravity of any kind. Only exhortations to keep families together at all costs and to appear “luvvy” towards others.