So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

> I’ve noticed that many people struggle to simply let things go

Because it's not always about their entertainment. I know churches that post info about events only on WhatsApp groups, if you don't use it - you're screwed. I know kindergardens which use Facebook Messenger groups to send announcements to their parents' children - if you don't use it, you will miss important info.

For most people, letting go such things is very impractical. One can try to persuade for a better way to do something - but then you become the problem.

A. There is zero safe threshold for choking.

B. Choking is inherently, obviously, dangerous.

C. Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%.

D. Brain damage is measurable in anyone who has been choked.

E. As such, pornography does, in fact, have blame for encouraging this kind of experimentation.

F. If "fighting words" and "misinformation" shouldn't be free speech, who is to say pornography does not incite risk, when other things can?

OpenAI uses AI to scan your ChatGPT conversations to determine your age. And even though I've been using ChatGPT for mostly work-related stuff, it has identified me, a man in my 40s, as under 18 and demanded government ID to prove my age. No thank you.

> Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%.

Big giant citation needed on that one. How would it ever have been near 0%?

First, I’d like to point out that we don’t make other media illegal or age gated with privacy-compromising tactics because it depicts harmful things. There’s no age verification gate for watching movies and TV that depict murder and other serious crimes. You can watch Gaston drink beer and fall to his death and the Beast bleed in a kids movie rated G.

Watching NFL football, boxing, and UFC fighting isn’t illegal even those sports conclusively cause brain damage.

Pornography is singled out because it’s taboo and for no other reason. People won’t politically defend it because nobody can publicly admit that they like watching it, even though most people consume it.

Over 90% of men and over 60% of women in the last month. [1]

Second, what I see missing from your links is really solid studied link to an increase in choking injuries directly caused by changes in pornography trends and viewership. Were these kinks just underreported in the past? Heck, I read 4 of your linked articles and none of them actually compared the rate of choking injury over time, they just sort of pointed it out as something that exists and jumped to blaming pornography.

I am perfectly willing to accept your hypothesis but I don’t think we’ve been anywhere near scientific enough about evaluating it, and even if that was the case, we don’t really treat pornography the same as other media just like I mentioned.

We need a lot more information. Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with sexual pleasure and believe it’s stigmatized way too much. I also believe that normalizing sexual pleasure helps people talk about consent and avoids issues like doing a sexual act when you don’t enjoy it.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/

> Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%

Bullshit. Men and women have been dying of autoerotic asphyxiation long before the internet. And we only hear about the ones that fuck up badly enough to make the news.

I'm puzzled by this phenomenon myself, but there is apparently a significant minority of women who enjoy getting choked in bed:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9

This doesn't excuse people who choke without consent, but there's something going on here waaaay more complex than "see it in porn, do it". Humans are weird.