hard sex

In recent days, the dichotomy between rough sex and violence against women has been much discussed.

It is a false discussion.

No matter how many times we women have to talk about our capacity for pleasure and fantasy, we end up mixing unwanted violence with non-normative practices.

There is talk of the bad influence of porn.

There is discussion about whether the famous testimonies recently published in an investigation in this newspaper against Carlos Vermut involved sexual violence.

But the focus is usually on the theoretical, and not on what happens.

Asphyxiation can be considered an erotic discipline.

Like any erotic discipline, it has to start from a consensus.

We've talked about this ad nauseum.

Perhaps what we have to start putting at the center of the debate is what exactly happens when we ignore that premise: what is consented to, what is desired, what the two (or more) parties put into the sexual act.

Elvira Lindo pointed out a few days ago to the heart of the matter: it is not sadism that is at stake in this case, but rather the unwanted and the violence used.

It is not puritanical to shed light on this issue, quite the opposite.

We must not only talk about non-normative sexual practices, but also stop stigmatizing women who enjoy them.

Because the consequences of not doing so can determine much more than we think.

Not long ago, an investigation by

The Guardian

raised the alarm about strangulation as one of the main causes of death among women by their sexual partners.

Although it is documented that strangling a woman is usually one of the main violent antecedents before murder at the hands of a partner, it is still considered a minor offense in many countries.

According to the report on fatal victims of gender violence in 2020 in Spain, 80% of murders due to sexist violence occur in the home of the aggressor, or the cohabiting partner.

Although only 15% of the main cause of death is asphyxiation, air deprivation by the abuser is usually present in the majority of autopsies performed.

The novelty that we find in the story of how violence is exercised and who the focus is on does not change, or at least not in an apparent way.

In those cases in which a victim of gender violence lives to tell about it, her version is questioned.

Public opinion does so and, in the event that a complaint is made and there is a trial, it is the duty of the defense lawyer to try to demonstrate that the injuries presented do not respond to a violent act on the part of his client, or that these injuries were deliberately desired. some way.

Perversion appears when the victim cannot defend himself, that is, when he has died.

In recent years, the thesis that it was rough sex that got out of hand has begun to be used as a mitigating circumstance in cases in which the woman has been asphyxiated—whether or not it was the main cause of death.

Erotic asphyxiation has emerged from alternative practices and is part not only of

mainstream

pornography , but of any forum on contemporary sex.

In many cases, if the woman died, particularly if she was young, and liked non-strictly conventional sex, this is used against her to reduce the penalty of her death at the hands of her sexual partner.

In the United Kingdom, the chilling case of the young Natalie Connolly was a precedent.

After having a sexual relationship with millionaire John Broadhurst, he beat her so badly that she suffered more than 40 injuries and internal bleeding.

He received a three-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

That she liked rough sex was an aggravating factor.

For her, not for him.

At what point does a woman liking sex, of any kind, become a mitigating factor for an abuser?

Neoconservative discourse insists that contemporary feminists are puritans and want to set limits on the sexual imagination.

That's why every controversy—being a bitch or not in a song, for example—becomes a national debate.

But the focus is not on violence or how it is visualized, or even how it is internalized and disseminated.

Women who speak out about equal rights are not puritans, they are not even asked about sexual practices, but rather they are expected to be outraged, again and again, by a volatile controversy.

Even so, it is insisted, time and again, that we are in one of the most censorious eras in history, there is talk in the media of “stoning” or “public execution” of those investigated for sexual assault but violence against women remains a constant.

Debates about sexual consent are presented without paying enough attention to how accustomed we are in all social classes to violence against women.

What follows here, in front of us, is not pleasure, nor rough sex, but the masking of violence.

And what is worse, the stale social consequence that is imposed.

A religious consequence: practicing sex, that is, sin punishes.

And always to the woman.

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