The Cut - Was Casual Sex Always This Bad?

The first time it happened to Hannah, it lasted “just a few seconds.” Without warning, the man she’d met on a dating app and was now having casual sex with grabbed her neck and squeezed gently. Flustered, she swatted his hand away and tried to wipe the gesture from her mind. A year later, it happened again: Another dating-app match wrapped his fingers around her neck. Then this past May, a third time, when a man she’d just started seeing wordlessly placed a hand on her throat while they were hooking up. “Then I said ‘no,’ and he took it off,” she remembers. Each time, Hannah said, she had a basic conversation around sexual desires and preferences with these men before anything physical took place. But the partners never brought up choking outright, let alone asked her permission to do so.

Hope you enjoyed the long weekend! Here’s some stuff you might have missed: A British archer at the Paralympics medaled while seven months pregnant, Molly Fischer delightfully profiled Ina Garten for the New Yorker, Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld a ban on social media platform X, Spaniards are looking for love at the grocery story, Costco’s first membership price hike in 7 years went into effect, and the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition released some of this year’s contenders.

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