On Choking and Revenge

-K Wilde

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It’s 2 a.m. I’m in a stranger’s apartment—though, oddly, he doesn’t feel strange. [AA1] That sense of eerie familiarity won’t click until weeks later. The balcony door is open, and from outside, the sounds of laughter, clinking bottles, and the gentle exhale of a joint drift in with the salty Caribbean air.

I’m lying naked on his bed. He lays out three bills in front of me—not for the reason you think (though the visual is deliciously suggestive). We’re about to do a line, and he wants me to choose which bill we’ll roll.

A crisp fifty dollars. A 500 Dominican peso note. A Romanian bill.

“Romania,” I say without hesitation.

The powder gets lined up on the small of my back, right at the dip on my lower back. I feel still. Languid. Strangely at peace. That kind of peace only real revenge brings. The man I just left—who I thought was the love of my life—had cheated on me in Romania. So yes, having someone else do a line off of my body with a Romanian bill felt like divine retribution.

I stayed holed up in that guy’s apartment for days. We drank wine in bed, chain-smoked over white linen, took long showers. We talked about everything from kitesurfing to Sartre to what it was like for him growing up Latino in Reagan’s America.

He was older. Much older. And married, I later learned. With two painfully cute kids. But honestly, I didn’t care. He was the first man to ever give me an orgasm. For that, I worshipped him.

He was textbook: wildly successful, dangerously handsome, emotionally unavailable, passionate, dominant, toxic as hell. The kind of man who lies to you—and you let him.

Weeks later, he flew back to Central America to see me again, this time in a different country. He rented an Airbnb with skyline views of San José. We fucked almost the entire first night. And just before dawn, he pushed into me again. I was wrecked—shaking, soaked, aching. His hands in my hair. His mouth on my neck.

Then: he spits down my back and presses his bare body into mine, wet and slick. Grabs a fistful of hair, rasps into my ear, “You’re mine. You belong to me.”

Suddenly I knew why he felt so familiar. He was my ex, just twenty years older. Still a cheater. Still ridiculously gorgeous.

I fell asleep in his arms, sore and delirious, wondering what the hell was wrong with me; how a feminist like me could find something so possessive, so domineering, so male so unbearably hot.

But here’s the thing: You don’t really know religion until you’ve been fucked by a man who doesn’t believe in god.

I’ve had two long relationships—both with narcissists, and I don’t throw that word around lightly.

One would cry if I made decisions without his approval—like going vegan, getting a tattoo, or god forbid, giving up coffee for a week. Toward the end, I despised him.

The other? A serial cheater. A smooth liar. Beautiful, magnetic, impossible to forget. He was the first to put his hands around my throat in bed. The first to whisper “you belong to me” while squeezing the breath from my lungs. The first to do a line off the small of my back.

After him, I tried to coax every fling and one-night stand into doing the same. But they always fucked it up. Couldn’t get the pressure right. Couldn’t fake the danger. I’d cry afterward—not out of fear, but frustration. They weren’t him. And that realisation made me feel even more pathetic.

This isn’t a redemption story. I’m not here to work through guilt or shame or claim I’m trying to "heal." I’m just… curious.

Curious why I crave being claimed sexually, why I want to be dominated, undone, made to feel something primal—when, in the daylight, men tell me I’m too dominant. Too sharp. Too much. The kind of woman who scares them. The kind who’ll never get married.

So why do I like being choked? And why—let’s be real—is this such a common thing?

Why do men like choking women? What is this strange interplay between sex and power? What does it say about our society, about how women are taught to please and men are taught to take? Are our desires even our own—or are they just porn-soaked projections of patriarchal bullshit? Maybe some of it is internalised misogyny. But here’s the truth: even if I know that, even if I understand that intellectually and politically… I still want it.

I still want the hands. The pressure. The ownership—real or performative. And maybe the power is mine after all. Because when the moaning stops and the cum is wiped off my stomach and he rolls over, limp and half-drunk on his own ego, I return to myself. I am whole again. I belong to no one but my own damn whim. I said I was his. I lied. He believed me. That’s power.

Is it fucked up? Sure.

But tell me—what woman past adolescence doesn’t carry some quiet, simmering desire for revenge?

I’m curious, confused. I’m 24 and I don’t know anything. I’m still figuring it out, still untangling what’s mine from what’s been taught, what turns me on from what tears me apart. Maybe desire was never meant to be clean. Being a woman in this world means holding space for both the ache and the appetite.

Whoever you are, wherever you’re reading this—I hope you have the kind of sex that wrecks you in the best way, and I hope you never, ever apologise for wanting it.