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When Is A Hand On The Throat Just A Hand On The Throat?
re: my complicated relationship with HBO's The Idol
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It was a Saturday night in June and the air hung heavy with mist. My friends and I handed our IDs over to a mild-mannered bouncer with a kind smile, dutifully bought our $10 non-alcoholic beverages, and settled into the front row of one of Hollywood’s finest fully nude strip clubs.
The lighting: red and pink. The music: thumping. The clientele: overwhelmingly male, wearing baseball hats, and sitting alone. It was 11pm and the night was just beginning. My friends and I filtered into the front row and sat with our elbows on the bar, looking admiringly up at the dancers spinning on the poles.
It has long been my belief that if you want your year to be blessed with good fortune, you should begin it by showering semi- or fully-naked women with lots of cash, and ringing in my solar return this year was no different. Call it witchcraft, but this equation has always brought me happy returns in life.
It’s not hard to get singled out when you’re a group of clean and friendly girls and non-binary people (and one handsome and respectful man) in the front row of a strip club, and tonight was no exception. One of my best friends, J, always causes a feeding frenzy among dancers — she is supermodel tall and beautiful, but this is paired adorably with a deadpan sense of humor, husky voice, pigeon toes, and wire-rim glasses she very much needs in order to see. She’s an easy mark, because anyone can see that she is both very excited, yet also extremely nervous about conducting herself appropriately in front of the dancers. At Jumbo’s Clown Room, an indie burlesque bar in Thai Town where the magic is inevitable and the dancers can tend towards the confrontational, J will lean into the stage after every dance and thank the dancers for their time.
In the front row of the fully nude club, my friends and I watched amused as J received the focused attention of one dancer after another. One placed her Pleasers on J’s shoulders and gyrated to the music, pulling her thong to the side with a humble eye roll. Another grabbed J’s hand and ran it over her soft and subtly glittery left buttock and encouraged her to spank. And still another motorboated J until her trademark glasses bore smudges. She came away slack-jawed and dreamy, commenting after each that she was in love as I poured singles onto the stage on her behalf and couldn’t catch my breath from giggling.
But when ‘West Coast’ by Lana Del Rey came on, the tee-hee-ing stopped and we all stared transfixed as yet another dancer took the stage. She wore shiny black boots laced up to her mid-calf, and her long hair grazed a tramp stamp that, guessing by her age, was meant as a winky homage to the tattoos of the 90’s. The lights began to strobe as the chorus hit. She struck a spatchcock pose on the pole and spun, her neck soft, arms limp and hair flowing. It was one of those transcendent moments when you’re humbled in front of the human body, when everything slows and you’re happy to have one yourself.
But even she wasn’t immune to teasing my friend J. She climbed off the stage with a wry smile on, and straddled her. She wasn’t playing for laughs though, and I watched in shuttering split seconds under the strobe light as she moved her hand slowly up J’s body, finally landing it to softly enclose her fingers around J’s throat.
We went nuts like fans at a [insert sports game here] when [something really impressive] happens. We were raptured. We were all in love. I stared at my Dom next to me and gave a little shrug.
That night, back in our hotel room, around 1am, I moved His hand into that very position on my own throat, and officially came out of my soft-choking retirement.
As a BDSM writer and Sub About Town, I’ve always shied away from discussing choking publicly. Let me just say before we go any further that there is a big difference between a hand placed on the throat and actually restricting someone’s blood or airflow. Porn is often blamed for mainstreaming this practice, but because it is a visual medium it is usually hard to tell where on that spectrum a specific choke lands. The danger is individuals choking each other with more aggression than is safe based on what they’ve seen in the media, and sex educators have been, rightly, very alarmed about this. Because I am neither a top nor a safety educator, I’ve felt hesitant to address this hot button issue, feeling I have nothing new to offer and could be adding gasoline to the choking fire if I do anything other than roundly condemn it.
But there was a bit of a choking confluence last weekend that has lured me out of hiding. In addition to my friends and I feeling God in that Hollywood strip club, The Choke also got some prominent screen time in Sam Levinson’s latest sendup of his wet dream of the hypersexual, disaffected Gen-Z girl archetype, The Idol.
The pilot tracks a very frantic day in the life of young pop star Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, as she navigates her Britney slash Miley-esque apotheosis from teen star to sexually empowered woman. As she poses for an album cover and rehearses a sometimes sexy, sometimes humorously lewd dance to her new single, her team hustles around her dealing with a leaked selfie of Jocelyn with cum on her face. The head of Live Nation, played by Eli Roth, arrives in a panic — “How are 14-year-old girls going to buy a ticket for [her tour] when she’s frosted like a pop tart?”
The single, ‘World Class Sinner / I’m A Freak,’ boasts lyrics that are between a pastiche and a parody of image-shifting pop songs for young female stars, and it of course leverages BDSM themes as part of the game:
'Cause I know that you don't really know how to handle it
So get down on your knees and get ready to become my bitchI'm just a freak, yeah
You know I want it bad
And we can meet, yeah
But I don't need to know your name
You can pull my hair
Touch me anywhere
Whip and chains
I'm just a freak, yeah
So show me why you came
A generous read of the show sees this juxtaposition of the hypersexual song with the PR crisis of the photographic evidence of Jocelyn’s sex life as a commentary on the impossible position of being a public persona and a young woman in the digital age. Sex sells, but only when it’s an allusion. Actual cum makes you radioactive. Despite the, admittedly smart though often accidentally camp, observations the episode is making about the music industry’s Madonna/whore complex, I can’t help but see the ghoulish older male fantasy in the way both this show and Euphoria frame these heavy-lidded, nihilistic young women: nothing matters to them! They want to be sexual to prove they’re adults! And the implied, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel!
The first choke we see is after Jocelyn spends the night out at a club with her friends and meets Tedros, played by The Weeknd. As they make out in a stairwell about 30 minutes after meeting each other, he’s giving Svengali Rasputin rat tail realness, and she’s serving disaffected tragic hypersexuality. Tedros and Jocelyn have an instant connection but the chemistry is absolutely zero so it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to take away from this — does she have a dysfunctional relationship to sex and she would hook up with anyone put in front of her? Is there some kind of Canadian pheromone witchcraft woven into his rat tail? Unclear. Regardless, their stairwell tryst in the back of his club is cut short, and the next thing we see is Jocelyn at home alone on her couch. She smiles, then traces one hand down her body as the other reaches for her throat.
The masturbation scene lasts about a minute and a half to a soundtrack of dark and moody synths and strings. As she undulates, her grip on her throat becomes tighter. We hear her breathing hitch and catch. The camera angle suggests we as the viewer are sitting beside her on the couch, letting our eyes rove over her body. Although she is alone, this moment feels performative. It’s the first time I’ve seen solo breath play portrayed on TV, but somehow it just didn’t feel solo. It’s hard to see Jocelyn doing this without feeling all the context the show is trying to build about how mentally ill and damaged she is. Even though she begins and ends the experience smiling, even though the pilot literally features a clip from Basic Instinct to really hit you over the head with the idea that she’s a Badass Femme Fatale who’s totally in control, it’s hard not to look at this young, vulnerable woman and feel worried for her.
The worry ratchets up to 11 when she invites The Weeknd — excuse me, Tetris — over to her house late at night. He appears at the top of her driveway on foot (did he walk?), then creepily wanders through her home making himself a drink, smelling her couch, then finally doing a bump of coke in the mirror and rehearsing his greeting to her — “hello, angel. Hello angel. Hello… angel.” She plays him her new sexy single and he gives her a line about how she sings like she doesn’t know how to fuck. He then takes her silk robe off of her and drapes it over her hair, saying “you are too locked up in your head… you need to block out the world.”
He helps her out with this, friendly neighborhood skeezy nightclub owner that he is, by covering her head and face with the robe and tying the strap around her neck. You can see her open mouth straining for breath through the fabric and getting (some) air, and the panic increases until he finally cuts a hole for her mouth with his (Dirty? Coke encrusted?) pocketknife. “Now you can sing.” Roll credits.
Here’s the thing — I’m not against Jocelyn learning how to fuck! That sounds great! Who among us hasn’t had fabric or Saran Wrap or a hood put over our heads! Sometimes that’s just a hot date! The question isn’t whether the concept of sex or breath play itself is fun, the question is whether he’s the one to teach her, and how the atmosphere of her vulnerability plus his general sleazy arriving-on-foot-to-smell-your-couch vibe is the way to do it.
And The Idol isn’t The Weeknd’s first rodeo with atmospheric and unspecific portrayals of choking. His (admittedly fun and catchy) single Take My Breath details a sexual encounter that goes far beyond a hand on the throat, and seemingly describes a partner of his who… wants to die?
Suddenly, baby says
Take my breath away
And make it last forever, babe
Do it now or never, babe
…
You pull me close, I feel the heat between your thighs
You're way too young to end your life,
Girl, I don't wanna be the one who pays the price
He goes on to affirm that “her fantasy is okay with me” but, call me crazy, affirming your approval of your partner’s dangerous kink isn’t enough to make it safe! I don’t want to be a buzzkill, here. I know a pop song or music video or even an HBO show is not exactly built to lay down the basics of informed consent, negotiation, and the safety practices that take choking from dangerous and reckless to risk-aware edge play. At the same time, the choking portrayals in The Idol come minutes after they literally lock the intimacy coordinator in the bathroom!! Because what a buzzkill, right? Don’t harsh The Weeknd’s vibe! We wanna see some nipples!
We know that art often uses BDSM imagery to titillate. So why am I, a kinkster, not personally aroused by this portrayal? I’m a sucker for dark wave synth pop, moody lighting, and pretty ladies dancing (see also: celebrating many consecutive birthdays in strip clubs). I even am enjoying a lot of this show, Stan that I am for literally every actor in Jocelyn’s entourage. It’s fun! It’s exciting! But the sex, for me, is not hitting. And as an impact bottom, I would know what hits!
The easy answer as to why I’m not moist would be that I know that proper choking requires more safety measures than grabbing someone’s robe off of them and throwing it over their head. But I think the more complicated answer is it’s just kind of… un-earned. I see the tidy metaphor of how choking out this young woman is what we as a society do to our pop stars. But it’s hard to get revved up when I feel like this woman’s body is placed before us as a prop to confer edgy art boy street cred on the show’s creators. Her throat is just window dressing on their electro pop erections. It’s not speaking to me as an authentic representation of breath play or even kink. What it’s doing is replicating the male gaze conditions of a vanilla Surprise Choke.
In her 2022 book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, author and journalist Christine Emba breaks down the poor bargain (some) cis straight women get from casual sex. After the advent of sex-positive feminism, our default mode in mainstream culture is to frame sex as empowering, and having lots of it as a key to adulthood and freedom (see also: the gross male showrunners who profit off of selling this ideology to the masses). Emba talks to a slew of experts and the conclusion of each chapter is a different flavor of “fucking without feelings doesn’t feel good.”
In Emba’s paradigm, straight women often put up with bad sexual behavior from men because they want a relationship and are willing to shoulder these bad times as part and parcel of dating. As one woman she interviewed said, “sex is just like ‘okay, you sealed the deal. You gave the man what he wants.’ Then you can at least have an excuse to lay there and cuddle.” More than illustrating in vivid detail the orgasm gap for straight women, Emba is out to question the role of ‘consent’ as conferring legitimacy on sex acts, and sex in general. “Just because a particular sex act, or even lifestyle, was chosen,” she writes, “doesn’t mean that it was come by independently… Sex is less private than we think it is — a good reason to think more clearly about the norms we are wittingly or unwittingly putting into place.”
I think of this book here because Emba also devoted an entire chapter to BDSM and The Surprise Choke, entitled ‘Some Desires Are Worse Than Others.’ The Surprise Choke, in case you have been off the dating scene in the last ten years and don’t know anyone single, refers to the phenomenon of a sex partner choking you by surprise. Surprise! It’s a relative stranger’s hands around your throat! While I wish I could say this was something only men are doing, I myself have been Surprise Choked by at least two genders. Equality!
Anyway, the chapter itself attempts to roll back the “conversational yield sign” employed by the stock phrase of “between two consenting adults.” If a sex act is between consenting adults, typically we hesitate to criticize it. Emba challenges that hesitation, saying that “it should not be hard to express our own discomfort and discuss the broader implications of various preferences and practices, whether it’s the psychological underpinnings of BDSM, or the downsides of casual sex… in any arena other than the sexual it would be clear that these desires reinforce oppressive structures and stereotypes, and that by breathing more life into them we are likely to make society worse for all.”
She goes on to use a few media portrayals of kink to support the argument that kink is damaging, including think-piece-favorite Normal People and its depressing depiction of BDSM, and whatever was going on between Hannah and Adam in season one of Girls. “Certain sex acts,” she says, “can have lasting psychological impacts; they can be an affront to our human dignity; they can also be symptomatic of issues that might be better dealt with outside of the bedroom.”
You can probably see from the above why my copy of Rethinking Sex is filled with angry post-it notes. I obviously disagree in the extreme that BDSM is making society worse for all or is an affront to human dignity. Beyond being just good old-fashioned adult fun, kink can also give incredible catharsis to people of all genders who have suffered all kinds of trauma. Further, the safety structures of risk-aware kink can gift its participants with their first real and embodied experiences with consent. But when my righteous anger subsides, all I can feel for Emba’s perspective is pity. Pity that sex for some has been so devoid of pleasure that it can be hard to imagine or defend the pleasure of others, no matter the flavor it comes in.
But here’s the thing. As a thirty year old woman with a number of disappointing sexual experiences under my own belt, I look at tender twenty-four year old Lily-Rose Depp’s little mouth struggling to breathe through that fabric, and I too want to cancel breath play and — come to think of it — sex in general while we’re at it. But as a depraved sub myself, who at the very same age was throwing myself headlong into BDSM scenarios both safe and unsafe, I think a more nuanced approach is called for.
The problem with Normal People and Girls and now The Idol is not the kink. In Normal People, the problem is Marianne using kink as a form of self harm. In Girls, we see that Hannah is putting up with bullshit from Adam ‘for the story,’ which, again, is kinda self-harmy (and I think intentionally played this way to make a point, but I’m a Girls apologist what can I say). The issues in The Idol are softer, but letting a stranger into your house in the middle of the night shortly after being released from in-patient mental health treatment is not not a bit self-destructive. And the solo breath play, to me, reads as an older man’s infomercial to young women in favor of the “empowerment” of kink. The context around it leaves me with an empty feeling, like the moment is only there to communicate Jocelyn’s brokenness to the viewer.
That said, we are human beings whose bodies produce fun chemicals when stuff happens to them. When our blood flow is temporarily restricted, it can be very intoxicating. When we mess around with humiliation and degradation, it can get our hearts racing. But with BDSM, as with any mind-altering substance human beings crave, the safety or lack thereof is entirely dependent on set and setting.
Choking, for me, has vacillated radically in meaning throughout my time on the scene. When I was twenty-three and hate-dating a guy in a relationship (unethical non monogamy throwback) I used his (consensual!) choking to punish myself for my own shame. I’ve also had non-consensual experiences with choking that have left me bruised and the act itself tainted. But the other night when I asked (read: begged) my husband and Dom of six years to do it, I was glowing from within with desire, love, and that special type of curated transgression so many of us kinksters crave.
For others, their set and setting may look completely different from mine. It may look like pick up play in a dungeon rather than the confines of a long-term relationship. Different brains, different paths to enjoyment.
Because of this, I think a few years ago I would have watched The Idol, broken down the reasons why these scenes don’t conform to the BDSM consent ideal, then gone on to defend all kink that falls within that paradigm as 100% empowering. This is natural in alternative sexuality communities. We often chase the illusion of approval from mainstream society by means of respectability — “look, we’re safe and good because it’s all consensual and empowering!” But respectability is a deal with the devil. It halts our own interrogation of the shades of enjoyment or harm beyond the question of consent.
So that’s why I’m calling for a choking-neutral discourse. A neutral outlook on all kinks may serve us well both within the kink community and without. We know that The Surprise Choke is wrong and dangerous. But that doesn’t mean that the act itself is always plagued by an underpinning of violence, or is an affront to human dignity, or is going to leave a lasting psychological impact. Sometimes a hand on the throat is just a hand on the throat, and to regard it as such is the parity to vanilla society we in the kink community so crave.
Just as not all missionary sex is created equal, so too choking carries its own context, weight, and relative enjoyment. Just as you can’t step into the same river (of piss?) twice because you’re not the same kinkster and it’s not the same piss, you also cannot judge kinks as though they play out the same way in all situations. Sometimes a choke is problematic, sometimes it’s the crescendo of the best night in a strip club you’ve ever had. Sometimes it’s the instrument of your own self loathing, others it’s a euphoric, spiritual connection to the wonders of your own body (and a bridge to a screaming orgasm you worry is going to get you kicked out of a hotel). And sometimes it’s a sensationalized moment in TV that leads to the destruction of a very chic silk robe.
As for media representations of choking and our fear that they might inspire this behavior in people out in the real world, surprisingly I don’t think halting any and all shady portrayals of kink is the answer. Art is meant to depict complicated stuff. Art will be edgy. And if the Surprise Chokers of the world are not smart enough to deduce that just because you see something on HBO, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should just do it to random strangers without checking in with them first, stripping those murky depictions from the media probably won’t do much to stop them from exercising their bad judgment in other ways.
However, wouldn’t it be great one day to tune into an HBO show and see some kink representation that was, even a little bit, rooted in the reality of risk-aware practice? Wouldn’t it be great to see a character playing with pain or their own edges without it meaning they are broken?
So Sam Levinson and The Weeknd, if you’re really in this to arouse women who love to get choked, I’d be happy to connect you with an exotic dancer who could teach you a thing or two about set and setting.
Now excuse me while I go try to get that god damned song out of my head.
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