Have had a fair number of these, usually fatal-- why it works is because of several factors, physiologial, psychological and pathological-- physiologically, the cord serves to reduce oxygenation to the brain, thus having an intoxicating effect, releasing endorphins, and prolonging the orgasm, pschologically, because of the feeling of power that comes from you controlling your fate (although, it usually doesn’t work out that way) and pathologically because the cases I’ve seen have all been young men, who had several suicidal gestures in their known history. So the pathology works out to whether they live or die they are fufilling their own desparate need for some measure of control in their life.
I guess this is related to This column?
There have been a number of such cases which end up in the courts, when the next of kin challenge the deceased’s insurance company for denying coverage. Was it suicide? Was it an accident? I read a New York case from the late 1980s when I was in law school; the deceased’s wife eventually collected.
Pretty embarrassing to have all the details hashed out in court, though, I would think.
IIRC, the cartoonist Vaughn Bode died in this manner, as well as INXS’s Michael Hutchence. Hell of a way to go: pud in your hand and blue in the face …
You’re right. Here’s the Wiki article on it: Erotic asphyxiation - Wikipedia
A friend of mine in college died this way; I had fixed him up with my roommate some months before, and they were a couple at the time he died.
Imagine my shock to find out how he died, months after the fact, when my roommate let it slip that the coroner’s death certificate read “accidental suicide.” I asked exactly how one could kill oneself accidentally? so she told me - after which I almost wished she hadn’t. But probably not as much as she wished she hadn’t had to explain their relationship and the manner of his death to the Catholic priest who performed the funeral mass.
But how do we know it’s usually fatal? I’m not saying it’s not, not to mention incredibly stupid, but how do we know how common it is? Seems to me it’s only the dead ones we’d find out about. Most people doing it wouldn’t talk about it.
betenoir, I think I’d put it on par with running across a major highway against a red light. Does that “usually” result in being hit? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Playing the odds when death is a significant risk seems unreasonable.
There’s no way to determine what percent of cases are fatal, since there’s no way of accurately determining how many people indulge in this, nor how often. And the families will cover up the cause of death. So there’s no way of determining the denominator (number of people doing this per year) nor the numerator (number of deaths due to this each year.) And, of course, the risk varies with whether there’s a partner to help in case of trouble, with the person’s own medical history, with the exact mechanism used, etc.
The point is that there’s a significant risk – Cecil, back in 1988, said over 50 cases a year in the U.S.; Wikipedia says between 250 and 1000 cases (no citation at present.) That’s enough to say that it’s a dangerous practice, even if the “risk factor” is low.
No kidding. My wife used to process federal government paperwork for writing off defaulted student loans due to things like bankruptcy, death, etc. And part of her job was collecting the documentation to back up the paperwork. She didn’t understand why one family was so resistant to providing a copy of the deceased debtor’s death certificate–until she finally did get them to send it …