A Most Serious Matter Concerning Sex

Help! I Can’t Find the Tea Under All of This Choking

EDITORIAL | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX

Written by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Editor

Kia ora e te whānau, and welcome to the dungeon. In last year’s Sex Issue editorial, I harped on about what the average everyday vanilla civilian could learn from the BDSM/kink community. How, you may reasonably ask, could activities so alarming to the respectable imagination possibly improve one’s relationship with intimacy? Allow me to explain.

Many BDSM communities have developed a rather remarkable number of rules and practices to ensure that participants are consenting throughout the sexual act, or “scene”. There is aftercare: the practice of checking in with one another after a scene, offering comfort and attention once the intensity has subsided. There are safewords: agreed-upon words or signals which allow a participant to communicate that they wish to stop or change what is happening. 

In other words, compared with the rather laissez-faire approach to safety which can accompany ordinary “vanilla” sex, there is an awful lot of thought given to making sure everyone involved is comfortable and consenting. So you can imagine my abject horror at some of the headlines I’ve been reading over the last year: 

“Changing sexual norms among young people a growing concern”

- RNZ, March 2026

“Sex is getting rougher in NZ: therapist warns of physical, psychological dangers”

 - One News, August 2026 

“Relationship and sex ed guidelines removed by Education Ministry”

- One News, March 2025

“‘Incredibly concerning’: One in eight teens report unwanted sexual experiences - study”- RNZ, December 2025

In other depressing news, Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa reported in May this year that “sexual strangulation” is becoming “increasingly common among rangatahi”, warning of potentially serious long-term health consequences. The organisation points to the growing normalisation of choking through pornography and social media, and the concerning possibility that young people may be experimenting with it without understanding the risks or knowing how to negotiate consent. Furthermore, a 2024 study of more than 4,700 Australian adults found that sexual strangulation had become a “normalised” sexual practice, with 57% of participants reporting that they had been choked during sex. This is decidedly NOT what I meant last year when I said we should introduce more BDSM into the mainstream.

To be clear, I have no moral qualms with sexual strangulation, or any other freak shit performed by consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. I do, however, have a problem with extreme sexual acts becoming normalised while safety measures are left by the wayside. There are young people for whom the consequences are considerably more serious than an awkward encounter with a person who has watched too much pornography. 

A 2025 University of Auckland study, reported by Radio New Zealand under one of the rather chilling headlines I mentioned earlier, found that 12.4% of secondary school students had experienced unwanted sexual contact or been made to do sexual things they did not want to do. The study surveyed more than 7,000 young people aged 12 to 19. 

For girls, the figure was 19%. For boys, 5.7%. Among transgender and non-binary students, it was almost one in three.

In March, a parliamentary Justice Committee report found that some young people were arriving at emergency departments with injuries sustained during sex, without necessarily recognising that what had happened to them could constitute sexual assault. The report described a “fine line” between rough sex and sexual assault, while noting that practices such as choking and strangulation were becoming increasingly common. The idea that a person could leave a sexual encounter injured and still wonder whether they have any right to call what happened to them assault is deeply upsetting. 

Look, the problem isn’t pornography. That’s been around since before humans learned perspective drawing. One issue is that pornography now operates within an online attention economy, where novelty is king. The easiest way to keep someone watching is to offer them something they haven’t seen before – and, once they’re desensitised to that, something even more extreme. But the fundamental problem isn’t the pornography itself, but the fact that we’re not offering alternative, comprehensive, pleasure- and consent-focused sexual education.

I’m not sure about you, dear reader, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “I had an excellent and comprehensive sex education”. What usually happens in sex ed class is a whole lot of fearmongering about pregnancy and STIs. And as sex educator Jonny Hunt puts it, “Focusing only on risk is like teaching a cooking class and only talking about salmonella and food poisoning.” 

If we’re lucky, our sex ed includes a lot about tea preparation: the now-famous metaphor in which sex is compared to offering someone a cup of tea. They want tea? Make them tea. They don’t want tea? Don’t make them tea. They change their mind halfway through? For God’s sake, put the kettle down.

I’d say it’s a perfectly serviceable introduction to the basic principles of consent. But it does not adequately prepare young people for the complexities and subtleties of sex – particularly when the acts in question have moved considerably beyond the vanilla. The metaphor teaches us when to ask for consent, not how to negotiate what we are consenting to. And that becomes rather important when the “tea” involves strangulation, choking, or other forms of rough sex. After all, I am not sure “Would you like a cup of tea?” quite covers “Would you like me to restrict the blood flow to your brain?”

I will venture to conclude, dear reader, that young people have not suddenly become reckless, depraved little perverts. They have simply been handed woefully inadequate tools to navigate an increasingly complicated sexual world. Until we give young people comprehensive sexuality education that focuses not only on avoiding pregnancy, STIs and sexual violence, but on communication, consent, boundaries, pleasure and healthy relationships, we risk leaving them to learn from whatever the Pornhub algorithm puts in front of them. And frankly, I would rather they learn about sex from a qualified educator than from a video titled “Rough sex in both holes ended with anal creampie” (a real video title I found on the home page of Pornhub).

So, as I close this letter and bid you farewell, I shall leave you with one final plea: we must teach young people how to have good sex, not merely how to avoid bad sex. We need to do better, because I would rather not discover in next year's RNZ headline that sexual violence has decided to buck the broader decline in violent crime in Aotearoa. 

Yours, with utmost concern and considerably less sexiness than I had hoped,

Tashi (she/her)

Editor of Debate

P.S. If you would like to do some further reading, I’d recommend these books, as they’ve helped me in my own sexual life: 

Sex Ed: A Guide for Adults by Ruby Rare

Come As You Are and Come Together by Emily Nagoski 

You Could Be Having Better Sex by Nicole McNichols

Visit sexualwellbeing.org.nz for heaps of good information.