I’m very sex positive and my partners have been too, so I don’t really have this issue, but I think porn has really affected both heterosexual men and women’s perception of sex. You hear it from the female perspective a lot where men just start hitting or choking them during sex, but there’s a cultural undercurrent of the opposite experience where women will try and take a guys hand to her throat and apply pressure because for some reason asking to be choked is weird but that isn’t. Both men and women are seeing rough sex portrayed in porn and assuming that’s the sex everyone wants/is having. In reality, it’s dangerous to do breathplay with an inexperienced partner and that’s not something you just spring on them. I think sex is still a taboo subject and people need to get more comfortable speaking about it. I think the idea of enthusiastic consent and how it incorporates into foreplay is often the deciding factor in how an encounter goes, but often neither party knows how to engage in it.
Yes, those are exactly the things that should be happening.
I think the aversion to it is often that it’s not incorporated into the foreplay itself. For more serious things it should be completely separate so that there’s no question what is part of the the play and not, but imho for casual sex there’s less of a need to have a sit down discussion about it. I’m a woman though, so I get that it’s easier for me to say than for a man to say. It sucks because a lot of that onus is put on the person coded as masc/dom in more casual settings, but that’s just the reality of it. I think if more masc/dom coded people incorporated it into their casual sex it’d be less taboo much faster. I don’t think femme/sub coded people are going to be able to push it and still feel like they’re inhabiting the space they want to, so I don’t know if we’ll see a lot of cultural movement unless heterosexual men start to champion this idea of incorporating consent into foreplay.