Posted by mikezillion at February 14th, 2008

I know this is a bit off-topic, but bear with me. It turns out that there is an epidemic of teenagers and pre-teens actually choking themselves and each other with bungee cords, ropes, belts, or anything else handy. They say that the effect when the choking cuts off is a dreamlike state.
Now the Center for Disease Control has issued a warning to parents for telltale signs. Apparently some 82 confirmed youth deaths have been linked to this practice.
This makes me wonder about the practice of auto-erotic asphyxiation; a similar practice in which men cut off the blood supply to the brain at the point of orgasm to achieve a more powerful sensation. There are close to 1,000 deaths annually from this. It’s not the sort of thing that I imagine folks discover too often on their own. It has to be learned from somewhere. Probably more folks know about it now thanks to the Internet than ever before. Just the way kids are learning from their peers online and offline to strangle themselves for the temporary high that results from blood loss to the brain.
The question in my mind is one of censorship. Folks try to censor porn all the time, arguing that it is an unhealthy expression of sexual deviance since it takes sexuality out of the context of a committed monogamous heterosexual lifestyle. But only the most extreme voices (like the late Andrea Dworkin) argue that porn is harmful in and of itself. More rational minds agree that porn should at the very least not be made available to minors.
But is it legitimate to try to control the sources of information which spread the technique of self-strangulation? What about simply trying to control the spread of that information to minors? And what about the argument that teaching kids not to strangle themselves is just an invitation for them to try it in order to see what the fuss is about?
I would be interested to hear more opinions about this.