FEMINIST PULSE
Sonia Exelby, a 32-year-old woman from Portchester, a coastal village in southern England, was a beloved member of her utterly devastated family. They described her as gentle and kind to a fault. But in a strange sequence of events, she flew to Florida last October to meet a man she had previously arranged with online. It is believed that she was in a state of profound crisis as she planned all this. The man she met killed her, and has been charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping. Evidence retrieved from her computer indicated she was ‘suicidal and travelling to the US to be possibly sexually abused, tortured and murdered by unknown individuals’, the US detectives noted.
Having been adopted at age one, Sonia suffered from severe mental health issues all through her adolescent and teenage years. She entered an extreme pornography chatroom under the username already yours, where she met her murderer – Dwayne Hall – operating under the alias Alpha Sadist. Struggling with severe depression and suicidal ideation, Sonia was groomed to meet him in Florida, agreeing to pay him $4,000 to be tortured.
This tragedy extends beyond Sonia being a victim of poor choices. A man went looking for a woman already coached to mistake danger for intimacy – and found one. The kind of misogynistic culture that enables men, that grooms women like her, did not begin with him, and it will certainly not end with his trial. It has invested centuries in teaching women that their own suffering, self-erasure, and physical harm are the currency of being wanted, and one to aspire to. Sonia was born a victim of this very culture, long before she became the victim of her murderer.
Sadism, Masochism, and the Men Who Coined the Terms
The two words that are widely used in different contexts originally entered the clinical vocabulary because of two men. Sadism comes from the French writer Marquis de Sade, who went at length about inflicting suffering on women for his own gratification. Masochism, on the other hand, comes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who fantasised about women inflicting pain and suffering on him. And oddly, it is the second term that migrated, almost entirely, onto women not as something inflicted on them, but as something believed to be innate in them.
Freud gave this shift its clinical seal of legitimacy in 1924 with his theory “feminine masochism”: the idea that pain-seeking was integral to womanhood entirely, an erotic destiny women possess. Karen Horney, the brilliant German psychoanalyst, pushed back on Freud’s misogynistic theory that what looked like an innate feminine trait was in fact modelled by the position women were forced to occupy in a society. Radical feminists after her went further still: masochism in women is the trait that sadism requires of its target population, and so it manufactures that trait at every opportunity that it can.
Self-Inflicted Suffering as Female Virtue
For millennia, patriarchal beauty standards forced women to endure physical agony and permanent deformity; some examples include China’s footbinding and Europe’s corsetry. Both practices were eroticised and deemed the peak of femininity, refinement, elitism and marriageability.
Medieval and early modern Christian Europe also produced a tradition of women masochists. Among them, the most famous was Catherine of Siena. They starved themselves, wore cilices (hairshirts), and flagellated their own bodies, all sanctioned and celebrated by the epitomised patriarch: the Church; and revered as the pinnacle of female holiness and devotion. While male sanctity sought service and intellect, female sanctity, disproportionately, was demanded through the deliberate, acute destruction of the body.
The throughline across all forms of suffering mentioned: the suffering was self-administered, defended by the women who practised it, and consumed – often as beauty, as fidelity, as sanctity – by men. That template was modernised, never erased.
The Modern Industrial Suffering
Choking: from the avant-garde platter of Sacher-Masoch
What was once known to be a marginal paraphilia is now, according to the data, closer to being called a norm among young women. Surveys conducted in the US find that over 30% of women aged 18-29 have been choked or strangled by a partner during sex. Campus-representative surveys put lifetime prevalence of choking among female students at 58%, of which 14.5% had their first experience between the ages of twelve and seventeen.
Debby Herbenick’s work – the most cited in the field – traces this trend directly to pornography’s infiltration into mainstream sexual culture: choking and other painful sexual practices have moved from the fringes of “adult content” into music videos, teen media, and social media, delivered directly into young people’s lives before they have the vocabulary to understand it. Clinically, there is nothing safe about this practice; choking restricts blood flow and airflow to the brain, and those subjected to it report altered consciousness – dizziness, blurred vision, disorientation, even blackout. Five pounds of pressure is enough to cause loss of consciousness. There is a reason: choking is one of the most lethal ways of submission in martial arts like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Surely, the person being choked to submission is not thrilled about tapping out.
Latest on the Menu: Chest Binding
A sad but active practice among a generation of girls and young women moving through gender ideology communities online: chest binding. The medical consequences of binding are clear, and far from reassuring: across multiple studies, 97% of people who bind report at least one negative physical symptom. The most common effects are back pain, chest pain, overheating and shortness of breath, with a smaller proportion of women reporting scarring and even rib fractures. Clinicians confirm binding restricts lung expansion for the entire time the binder is worn, and warn against continuous or unsupervised use (among girls), duct taping, double-layering, and binding during sleep or exercise. Such precautions exist because girls have injured themselves doing all of these things.
What is most similar here is not the injury but the narrative that normalises it. Online binding guides do not tell girls to stop when it hurts; they tell them how to keep going despite it; forums that explain which pain is normal, which pain to “push through,” which symptoms mean take a short break rather than take the binder off entirely. Pain is filtered through acceptable and unacceptable categories by the practice itself, and enduring the acceptable kind becomes proof of commitment, strong desire, or authenticity. This is the exact semantics footbinding ran on: mothers did not describe the daily rebinding as cruelty, but as the necessary discomfort of becoming “marriageable”. Winds change, tides change – a century of suffering later, reframed, aspirational, delusional longing for pain does not change.
Juxtaposed with footbinding and the corset, the larger pattern is palpable: a girl restricting her own body, sustained through pain, defended by her “identity”, while the bigger practice is created and upheld by the (online) “LGBTQIA+” community around her. The mechanism no longer requires a single man in the room to qualify as manufactured – a system that feeds the appetite and then supplies the product functions the same way globally that a lone sadist once did interpersonally.
Sex Cults – Sadism with a Hierarchy
NXIVM is the clearest documented case of sexual violence of masochistic nature at a scale par none. Under the cover of a “self-help organisation”, its inner circle was tasked with recruiting women into a secret hierarchy in which they were hot-iron branded with their recruiter’s initials, starved, sleep-deprived, and required to provide “collateral” (deliberately compromising material used to gaslight and enforce compliance), all funnelled ultimately toward providing sexual access to the group’s male leader. This large-scale recruitment worked by manufacturing scarcity and hostility: women were made to compete for the approval of the men above them, isolated from every other form of relationship that might interrupt the process, and told throughout that what was happening to them was “empowerment, discipline, or sisterhood”.
This outrageous form of abuse is engineered masochism: same as choking and binding, compressed into an organisational chart with one man at the top of it, with multiple sadists along the way.
Back to Sonia
At the furthest edge of this spectrum lies devotee and amputation-fetish economies, in which women are groomed, then solicited, and in rare documented cases paid, to simulate or pursue chopping off a limb for a paying audience. It is a nauseating economic system that has found a way to monetise a woman’s self-erasure in its most literal sense. They do this by offering money or attention as the incentive, and abusive methods like pornography and cult structures offer arousal or belonging. The buyer, in each version of this economy, remains the same: men with an appetite for female suffering that the market readily supplies on demand.
None of this could be offered as a way to fathom what happened to Sonia Exelby, and it would be obscene to make her a symbol for a culture she wasn’t fully cognizant of before signing up. But it is worth pointing out that she was moving through the lanes arriving at the same destination: a monstrous, predatory endgame that feeds on this manufactured depravity in women. A culture that has spent a millennium rewarding women for invisibilising, restricting, binding, starving, and hurting themselves, calling it beauty, virtue, devotion, identity, empowerment or liberation, depending on the century.
A radical abolitionist position has never been that women need “better” information, more safety guidance, or wiser choices within this ever-expanding menu. Footbound women were not “saved” by better shoes. Nor were Corseted women with looser lacing. The feminist objective is to demand the dismantling of the industries, cults, and cultures that manufacture the voracious appetite for female suffering in the first place – be it pornographic, religious, therapeutic, or ideological alike – rather than the macabre attempts at teaching women to survive inside it.