Nothing makes Ali Rose feel more alive than being suffocated during sex. She is aroused by strong, rough hands constricting her diminutive neck to the point where only wisps of air escape her rose tinted lips, and broken veins surface on her pale skin. She likes her men to take charge and not be afraid when she asks them squeeze harder. Rose knows she’s addicted but she can’t imagine not integrating asphyxiation with sex.

Individuals practicing asphyxiation with any sex act prefer to use the words “breath play” – a much more subtle term to describe their hobby. Erotic asphyxiation is the act of strangling one’s sexual partner to enhance their experience, while autoerotic asphyxiation, or AeA, is inflicting the act on oneself to increase arousal, usually during masturbation and something Bondage Domination Submission and Sadomasochism (BDSM) author Jay Wiseman opposes.

Wiseman’s round face is reminiscent of a favorite uncle or jolly grandfather. His large spectacles sit on the roof of his nose, magnifying his eyes. He hardly resembles the stereotype associated with BDSM but it’s his forte and his career. Although Wiseman is completely anti-erotic and anti-autoerotic asphyxiation, he is ironically known as the “Breath Play Man” and his prominence in the fetish community has landed him the job of the key expert witness in prosecution cases concerning erotic asphyxiation. He is often the person parents and friends contact when they lose a loved one to autoerotic asphyxiation.

“What they’re trying to do is to invent a phrase, 'pass out a little bit,' they’re trying to get a little, enhance the experience. This kind of thing is essentially impossible because they get groggy and they pass out,” says Wiseman, who is constantly milked for knowledge about asphyxiation by both members and non-members of the fetish community.

Wiseman speculates individuals experimenting with breath play are under the impression that decreasing their oxygen intake during a sexual act increases their arousal levels due to the overproduction of endorphins during the body’s near state of asphyxia.

“It’s daring and risky and has some allure. Doing something dangerous makes it a turn on, I mean there are people out there who are having sex while driving their car,” he says.

There are no solid numbers tracking the deaths from sexual asphyxiation. According to Wiseman, these are just not mandated reported deaths.

“This is a great deal of controversy, and we get case reports from time to time, but nobody really knows. Autoerotic, this is harder because a lot of these deaths are misclassified as suicide,” he says.

Rose agrees with the dangers of sexual asphyxiation, but being a participant in the act itself, she believes that education will help wane deaths caused by breathy play.

“I understand [Wiseman’s] statements that it simply shouldn’t be done, but the fact is that people are going to do it, and they should at least educate themselves,” says Rose.

Her style is edgy with a pinch of cuteness, hardly the image of someone into kinky sex, but somehow it matches her bubbly personality. She is open about her sexual escapades to her sister, and she’s pretty sure that her father knows more than he’s leading on, but she’s comfortable with it because she believes that she is responsible when she asphyxiates herself during sex or masturbation.

Rose doesn’t use a plastic bag or smother her face in a pillow. She prefers to tie a rope around her long neck because she likes to see the marks on her pale skin, which she covers with a scarf or a sweater the next day to hide from strangers.

She understands the danger she puts herself in, but she’s read all of Wiseman’s essays on breath play and encourages her boyfriend to take CPR classes, just in case.

“I think I’m secure enough with the safety precautions I take that I wouldn’t have to stop,” says Rose, expressing that AeA is not just for the pleasure, it’s also her stress reliever. “I have depression and a lot of the things I do are my attempts to get out of my head…not breathing, is just a way of cutting off everything for a little bit. I just want a couple of moments to slow everything down.”

Tara Michaels is also an active participant in erotic asphyxiation, and to protect her career, her last name has been changed. She had her first experience when she was in her mid 20s.

Michaels describes herself as always being hypersexual, having her first bondage fantasy when she was only 6 years old, so it was no surprise to her when she enjoyed rough sex and having a belt looped around her swanlike neck.

“It’s like you are the fucking phoenix and you’re coming back into life. That’s what it’s like. And you don’t think it’s going to kill you and when you come back to it, you’re blissed out and you’re like whoa,” she describes.

A former ambulance crewman, 56-year-old Wiseman does several presentations on the danger of erotic and autoerotic asphyxiation at BDSM conferences. But Wiseman isn’t stupid. He knows that no matter how many times he tries to educate others about breath play, people are still going to do what pleases them, but he is satisfied with the idea that those who read his books and essays take something from it.

“I’ve had people write to me and tell me they read my essays. They tell me that I use to choke my girlfriend and after reading what you wrote, I’m not sure I’m going to do it anymore," Wiseman says. "I have no doubt (that) because of what I’ve written people are choosing not to do this."