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Rough sex is appearing in songs, TV shows and in sexual encounters between young people. But research suggests many women participating in it don't want to.
Experts from fields across medical, justice and psychology will meet in Wellington on Friday to discuss a rising concern: the normalisation of strangulation and rough sex in New Zealand.
"Rough sex seems to be experiencing a bit of a cultural moment," says Dr Samantha Keene, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington.
"The term has seeped into our everyday vernacular, and it's increasingly portrayed throughout popular culture."
But strangulation comes with serious risks, and research suggests that many women participating in it don't want to - but feel pressured to take part.
And emerging research suggests that repeated such incidents may result in brain damage.
Keene says that the conversation around rough sex and strangulation became part of the national public conversation during the trial for the murder of British backpacker Grace Millane, who was killed in 2018. The murderer's defence lawyers used the so-called 'rough sex defence'.
Keene describes the defence as "a set of strategies or narratives that might be employed to suggest that what happened during an alleged sexually violent incident was not rape, or not sexual assault, instead it was just rough sex".
"I think what I'm concerned about is that the introduction of this idea that rough sex is something that some women want - and I'm sure that it is - we need to make sure that it isn't morphing into the dangerous assumption that that is what all women want during sex."
She says that rough sex is hard to define because it can mean different things to different people - and that this in itself can make things more complicated.
"It could be during a progressive sexual activity that someone might feel pressured to continue on with that behaviour, you might not physically be able to say stop or say no if, for example, your breathing was impeded."
Nicola Gavey is a professor of psychology at Auckland University who has been researching how rough sex is becoming normalised.
"One of the things that I've been finding ... is that there is this kind of idea now that that is kind of a normal part of sex, various aggressive acts but including choking, slapping sometimes, definitely stuff like hair pulling or pinning people down.
"What's been really clear in the research is a lot of women having a lot of concerns about the way that it becomes almost an excuse or kind of provides a rationalisation for men's aggression toward them, and a number of women for example talk about 'it's as though a man is acting out sort of a pornographic script'."
The conference is this Friday, hosted by Medical Sexual Assault Clinicians Aotearoa (MEDSAC) and Victoria University of Wellington.
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