Opinion

My Comments On The Article In Flare About Breath Play.

I (Pierre) was working on a long translation for an article from the magazine "Flare" about breathe control (The shocking trend that will leave you breathless) and during a discussion with the "lady from another continent", I sent her a copy of the article. She sent me two texts with her notes and opinion about the subject.

The first text is about the article itself:

By "The Lady From Another Continent"

With regards to the article

Medical and psychological articles focus on age (pre-adolescents to middle age), gender (focused on males), and transvestism and bondage as concurrent paraphilic activities.

This article gives an overview of the character-type of some of the people encountered who engage in breath play. The following quotes suggest the medical and psychological community needs to seriously expand their research focus:

"dapper, bearded 26-year-old with the wicked sense of humour"

"Lila, a 31-year-old HR coordinator from Toronto"

"Jesse*, a stocky, bespectacled artist with a string of successful local shows"

"a 32-year-old communications director"

"a newspaper columnist"

The portion of the article that addresses "defying traditional gender roles" is also just as important.

These characteristics tell us that people who engage in breath play are well adjusted, intelligent, high functioning people who have access to information about breath play and are thus somewhat informed participants. They do not necessarily have co-occurring fetishes/kinks, and they definitely do not consider their form of sexual play as a paraphilia.

The article also addresses my favorite topic: consent and negotiation.

"millennials are also less likely to care whether their partners are even into it"

"Twenty-eight-year-old copy editor Marin* remembers how her burly 25-year-old hockey player paramour would lock his massive hand around her throat, and she would struggle to pull it away. "He would keep trying to do it, like it was part of a game and half the fun was in me fighting back," she tells me. "It was hard to communicate that I didn't like it." He wasn't the only guy who tried to choke her; Marin still squints a little in discomfort remembering a mild-mannered TA she fooled around with in university, who surprised her during sex one night by choking her with the belt from his bathrobe."

(I thought, Isn't this something people talk about first-to make sure that the other person wants to be choked? )

"getting explicit consent is especially important for extreme acts"

" actual consent and checking in as you go along seem the most reasonable answer, as well as committing to speaking up if you're not into something (and gracefully taking no for an answer)-"

Then it touches on the cautions of practicing breath play

"Many sex experts, including widely read sex columnist Dan Savage, are adamant that any form of choking is a potentially fatal act and should be verboten (forbidden), even between "good, giving and game" couples. "

(* Here would have been a nice place to add another favorite topic of mine: S.S.C *)

Adult peer pressure

" The first time it happened, she decided she would go with it for a moment ("because if he's really into it, then why not?)"

(* This is definitely a case of compromising one's safety and sanity to please someone else.*)

"I didn't escape unscathed, either. One sweltering July day, I sighed in annoyance as I slithered into a chambray oxford shirt, its collar popped to (unsuccessfully) hide the angry purple fingerprints splayed across my neck from a brief assignation with. My friend Severine*, a 27-year-old stylist, was horrified at my partner's behaviour. A year-and-a- half later, however, the chic Severine, always on trend, asked her own boyfriend to choke her."

"Choking, it seems, has become the new third base."

"Blurred Lines - Men who like it, women who don't, men who don't like it but do it anyway for the women who do-"

""asphyxiation is the last thing we need on our long checklist of peer pressures. "

Porn

I absolutely agree with these words "porn and other media have skewed society's perceptions of sex.

"People tend to have these unrealistic expectations of what a man is supposed to be, what a woman is supposed to be, what love is supposed to be or what sex is supposed to be"

But this isn't new; erotica is as old as age itself and has had both positive and negative effects on those who view it. Younger and younger people are being exposed and have easy access to pornography and they are unable to grasp it as fiction and fantasy and use this as a basis for their sex education and determining their perceptions about sex and sexuality. Let's not even go to misogyny.

"What was formerly extreme is now routine."

There is more pornography depicting physical aggression such as spitting, slapping, hair pulling, gagging, etc. than before. A few years ago some ladies and I were talking about boyfriends who had "bootlegged, illegal porn vids" that we would (at that time) have considered extreme which now readily available and considered as "soft". Heavens knows what is considered as "hardcore" these days.

Let's look at "mommy porn" - Once again, I raise the question of peer pressure and the need to meet high demands for what is considered "in". These days almost everyone is into BDSM. Ask them and they've surely read 50 shades. Everyone who is crazy about it wants to play out the characters in real life. I ask: are they really into BDSM or are they following the fad. And if they're using 50 shades as a template for their BDSM they're on the wrong path. The lack of negotiation and consent in the story is scary enough!

Wants and needs

"Women are more assertive when it comes to what they want in bed,"

"But what if the man isn't into it?"

"Many modern women want a prince in public and a misogynistic sexual predator in the bedroom."

(Pierre, we've had this exact conversation about men! )

Psychopathology

The article states that Twinge suggests that those who "lack empathy and find it difficult to take someone else's perspective… are more likely to be interested in physical domination during sex and to disregard how it affects their partner."

If I read this correctly, she has suggested a link between "chokee" behavior and Narcissism. This is actually refreshing for me considering that most existing research and literature focuses on erotic asphyxia as a paraphilia and is usually based on retrospective autoerotic fatalities. Remember I wrote earlier It is an interesting subject: are young adults more risky than before? Is it related to stresses of life and a need for control over something dangerous to bring about a sense of control in daily life? Could it be linked to risky sexual behavior associated with adult ADHD? There's just so much to explore!

And one could ask a very important question: why study breath play solely as an element of abnormal psychology and not as a facet of sexuality?

The BIG question: WHERE's the human connection?

"if a simple connection between humans has been discarded in favour of lunging for the carotid at first flush, squeezing and squeezing, grasping at meaning but finding yourself empty-handed."

If this is the case, I think these people have lost the plot altogether :(

More comments about the article in Flare on breath play!

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