'After the court was told that he’d slapped women, made them lie in icy water, covered their faces with bleach-soaked cloths, held one at gunpoint and rammed mobile phone down another’s throat, Andy Anokye said it was only a sex game. He called it “catch me, rape me”, and said while “prudes” might find it unpalatable, this “was the sex I enjoy and the sex some women enjoyed too”.
The more his five victims wept, the more Anokye (a musician known as Solo 45), was turned on. His sexual kink, he told Bristol crown court before he was jailed for 24 years, is “dacryphilia”: he is aroused by women’s tears.
These days, who isn’t? Type “choke” or “rough sex” into Pornhub and one click away are thousands of clips showing naked women with men’s hands grasping windpipes, wild-eyed, puce-faced, mascara streaming down cheeks. Consensual or coerced? PornHub has featured “teen crying and getting slapped around” videos of trafficked girls. Anokye thought the women he abused were “fake crying”, but didn’t care either way. Neither do millions who watch porn.
The narrative of mainstream pornography has shifted far from naughty pizza delivery boys. It involves slaps, pulled hair and, increasingly, a hand around the throat. Porn’s defenders who claim it’s mere fantasy might explain why 38 per cent of British women under 40 report being choked, hit or spat on in otherwise ordinary sexual encounters. Anokye didn’t think he was a sadist; he just liked slapping and thought it “pretty common in this day and age”.
Porn-raised young men are led to believe that physical abuse is not just permissible but what girls want. Young women, ever eager to please, yearn to be popular and desirable. So they’d better not “kink shame” a guy who wants to try what he saw online. Even if it hurts. After all, from high heels to waxing, femininity is predicated on no pain, no gain. So why not sex too. Forget your own pleasure: does he think you’re hot? “Choke me, Daddy” read T-shirts available on Etsy in pink. “Treat me like a princess and choke me,” says a birthday card. Teenage girls on Tumblr post come-on photos with their own hands around their throats. Be a cool girl: not one of Andy Anokye’s prudes.
The latest Netflix hit is a Polish series called 365 Days about a woman who is kidnapped and violently sexually assaulted for a year by a “dominant” mafia boss. In a TikTok video watched by 33 million users, a young woman shows the aftermath of viewing 365 Days with her boyfriend: her arms, thighs, and torso are covered in livid bruises. She beams and winks at the camera. Whether these injuries are real or not, the message is it’s sexy to like rough stuff.
Meanwhile Cosmopolitan, in its list of ten racy things to try during lockdown, included “breath-play” ie depriving someone of oxygen during sex by means of strangulation. Cosmo removed this highly dangerous notion after an outcry by women’s groups including We Can’t Consent To This. Their campaign drew attention to a worldwide growth in deaths of women after men claimed that a rough-sex game had simply “gone wrong”.
Sixty British women have died this way, including Grace Millane, 22, killed in New Zealand by a man who said she’d asked him to strangle her. He was convicted of murder. Many others were not, including the killer of Natalie Connolly, of Worcestershire, whose partner John Broadhurst told police that although he’d left her overnight at the bottom of stairs with blunt-force head injuries and had sprayed her body with bleach to erase blood stains, she’d died through consensual sex. His 44-month sentence for manslaughter became a catalyst for change, ending with Alex Chalk, the justice minister, agreeing in June to ban the “rough-sex defence” in the forthcoming domestic abuse bill.
The assault conviction of Charlie Elphicke, the former MP, for trying to kiss young women and grope their breasts has been rightly celebrated. So why does the rise in unwanted, porn-fuelled slaps and hands to the throat during casual hook-up sex go unchallenged? Because the so-called “sex positive” feminism that is preached to young women brokers no criticism of porn or the sex trade. Rather, it says, these are empowering.
Yet watching the BBC drama I May Destroy You, I wondered if the tide is turning. Discussion of this series has focused on how Arabella (played by Michaela Coel, the show’s creator) seeks vengeance after her drink is spiked in a bar by a man who rapes her. Yet from Coel’s rich, multi-thread story, a strong theme emerges: casual hook-up culture with its porn-fed narrative about what constitutes excitement and pleasure is in fact soulless, grim and perilous.
Arabella’s friend boasts that she’s picked up two separate men for a threesome, the epitome of cool-girl sex, until she realises the pair conspired. The fantasy was theirs not hers. A Grindr-obsessed gay man is sexually assaulted in a random hook-up. Cumulatively, a message evolves: get wasted in a bar, render yourself incapable of judgment and the sex you have is likely to end up non-consensual.
In an Economist podcast, Coel, who was drugged and assaulted herself, utters that most old-fashioned word: “responsibility”. She is critical of a “two-dimensional view, where there is a victim and a criminal, and the criminal did everything and you did nothing, everything happened to you” as “such a powerless way of seeing life”.
Women should regain the power to uncouple their desires from a porn-soaked culture that cares nothing for their pleasure, or even their safety. But instead fetishises their tears.
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