The frequency of men on OLD, Reddit and social media normalizing 'choking' shocked me a lot lately. I analyzed it and talked about it with friends. It seems that it's not very widespread in my country and absolutely not something men would even 'joke' about.

It made me think about the translation as well. In English, you can say 'to strangle' and 'to choke'. The latter seems to be normalized and sexualized. In my language, we translate 'to strangle' to 'to strangle' and 'to choke' to 'to strangle/suffocate'. Both have very negative connotations. It would be very scary for a man to say either one to a women.

I did notice that LVM in my country who try to cover up their toxic behavior use a lot of English words of words from other languages (most people in my country speak several), because it kind of softens the blow.

I feel that men try to use language to distract form their toxic behavior: 'a little bit of choking' instead of ' I want to strangle you', 'breath play' instead of 'suffocation', 'you're so sensitive/you can't take a joke' instead of 'you can't take insults' and so on.

They really use language to their advantage. What are some examples you encountered? I would also be very grateful for the more 'uncommon' ones, since it's good to spread the word! The more we know, the more women can protect themselves from covert toxic behavior.