Smothering

What is smothering?

Smothering is closing off the mouth and nose with a body, a hand or something soft like a pillow. Forensically it counts as suffocation and not strangulation: nothing in the neck is squeezed shut, only the entrance of the airway is covered.

What smothering looks like in practice

Mostly it is short, soft and undramatic. A thigh across your face, a hand loosely over your mouth, a pillow that stays put for a few counts. Little force is involved; what it does is leave you unable to do anything for a moment. The form you come across most is facesitting, and in the variant called queening the covering is the point.

In all those forms you miss one thing: you cannot talk. A safeword you have to say out loud does not work here by definition, so the stop signal is a gesture or it is not there.

Why smothering is not strangulation

Two mechanisms, and the distinction is not academic.

In strangulation the blood supply to the brain is squeezed off, and that works in seconds. In smothering the neck stays free and only the air is held back, so the warnings about the blood vessels in the neck under breath control do not apply here.

That does not mean there is time to spare. Prinsen and colleagues cite in Forensic Science International the standard work Forensic Pathology by DiMaio and DiMaio: a slowed heartbeat can occur after as little as thirty seconds and the ECG flattens after about ninety seconds, faster if someone resists and burns a lot of oxygen doing so.

That same article is honest about the figures you come across everywhere on this. The times circulating online, they trace to three non-medical books and to what they literally call “web and dark web sources”. In other words: the numbers people base themselves on are unsupported, and that in itself is a reason to handle this carefully and professionally.

Why people do smothering

For the weight and the dark.

What women tell me about this almost never concerns air hunger. It is about being covered: warm, heavy, no sight, no sound, and someone above who decides how long that lasts. A completely different experience from a hand around your throat, even though they sit on the same checklist.

• For the one lying underneath, the outside world drops away all at once, and that payoff is there before anything happens to your breathing.
• For the one sitting on top, it is an exercise in counting; the temptation is to wait for a reaction, and that reaction is exactly the problem here.
• For two people together, this is often the first subject where “I’ll be able to tell” out loud proves not enough.

Smothering gives you no less risk than the rest of this corner, only a different kind.

Why you see nothing afterward

That comes from the medical literature, and it is the core of this page.

The rule of thumb there is that smothering leaves little or no injury as long as the one who undergoes it does not resist. What grazes and pinpoint bleeds can be found come from the struggling and not from the smothering itself, and it is clearer with hands than with a pillow.

Turn that around. The visible marks of smothering come from the resistance. In a scene, resistance is exactly what has been arranged away beforehand: you lie still because that is the agreement. The circumstance that, in the literature, determines that nothing is to be seen, is here created on purpose.

Prinsen and colleagues accordingly call smothering with a soft object, in one breath, the most used and the hardest to establish form. For a scene that means only one thing: you cannot read off afterward how far it went, and you cannot steer by it during either. That is exactly why this asks for a careful, experienced approach.

How hard is hard

Less hard than you think, and that is no reassurance.

At Lowlands in 2016, Prinsen and colleagues had 181 festival visitors smother a dummy with a pillow, with a force meter under the head. The threshold was 150 newton, about fifteen kilos. That value came from one pretest on one healthy man of 1.74 meters and 70 kilos, who lowered a metal rod as soon as he could not breathe; the researchers call it rather arbitrary themselves, and different for the elderly and children.

Anyone who had drunk more pressed harder, as did anyone who had used drugs and anyone who was taller. It also worked best with both hands on the head and the center of gravity straight above it: exactly the position in which you no longer feel how much you are doing.

Alcohol is therefore on two sides of this subject. It makes the one on top press harder and the one underneath slower, and it is precisely people slowed by drink or medication who count in this literature as the typical victims.

What strikes me about this

I’m Victor, a gigolo, at home in BDSM for more than twenty-five years and trained as a psychotherapist. Breath restriction is on my yes-list; smothering is the part of it I am strictest about.

Women who want this almost always start with the feeling of being covered and never with air hunger. That is useful, because you get that feeling already from a position that leaves the nose free. And it goes wrong on time, not on force: someone loses count and thinks afterward that it was “a few seconds”.

That is why I count out loud. Not romantic, but checkable, and you hear at once how long it really lasts.

What you can do yourself

• Agree on a stop signal that works without a voice and practice it while nothing is wrong yet: two taps, or dropping an object like the test subject with his metal rod.
• Leave the nose free if you want to keep it light. You get the feeling of being covered without the airway closing.
• Count out loud, and agree beforehand how far you count. No one judges afterward how long something lasted.
• Don’t drink if smothering is on the program. Anyone who has drunk presses harder without noticing, and gets up slower themselves.
• Don’t count on seeing it. Pinpoint bleeds and grazes go with resistance, and resistance is exactly what is not there in a scene.

More reading on smothering

On this site the broad explanation is on breath control, with the prevalence figures and the two mechanisms side by side. Facesitting covers the position smothering occurs in most, and the hidden dangers of breath and choke play is about what goes wrong in practice. Beyond that: the research by Prinsen and colleagues is online under a CC BY license and surprisingly readable.

Where this fits on this site

Smothering is something I do, within what we agree beforehand and with a signal that works without a voice. How such an evening is built up and what we set down in advance is on the BDSM date.

Sources

• Lethal smothering with a pillow. How 181 music festival visitors tried to kill a dummy. Prinsen, van Dijke, Horeman-Franse, van de Berg & Loeve, Forensic Science International 316, article 110521, November 2020 (DOI 10.1016/j.forsciint.2020.110521, PMID 33120318; author names, journal, volume and article number checked against Crossref). Open access under CC BY, full text read. Gives the description of smothering as suffocation by closing off the airway; the point that smothering with a soft object is both the most used and the hardest to establish form, with marks that are usually subtle; the experiment at Lowlands in Biddinghuizen in 2016 with 181 participants and a fixed impulse of 45 seconds by 150 newton; the origin of that threshold in one pretest on one healthy man of 1.74 meters and 70 kilos who lowered a metal rod as soon as he could not breathe, with the authors’ own note that the threshold is “rather arbitrary” and may lie differently for the elderly, children and people with asthma or allergy; the finding that higher alcohol consumption, drug use and body height went together with more force, and that both hands on the head with the center of gravity above it was most effective. From their reference to DiMaio & DiMaio, Forensic Pathology (CRC Press, 2001), come the bradycardia after thirty seconds and the flattening ECG after about ninety seconds. From the same text also comes the point that the times circulating on this lean on three non-medical books and on “web and dark web sources”.

Related terms

Smothering is a form of breath control; there you will find the figures on how common breath restriction is and what oxygen shortage does to brain tissue.

• Breath control. The overarching practice, with the two mechanisms side by side.
• Facesitting. The position smothering occurs in most, with the furniture that goes with it.
• Queening. The variant where the covering itself is the point.
• Breath reduction. Squeezing the breathing without closing it off, and why partial does not mean dosed.
• Asphyxiophilia. The clinical name for arousal that comes from the oxygen shortage itself.
• Edgeplay. The corner this falls under, with the arrangements that go with it.