RN
Your body is trying to stop you from choking to death. That is the whole of it.
The pharyngeal reflex — the gag — exists because the same passage carries both food and air, and a reflex that ejects anything arriving in the wrong place at the wrong moment is what keeps that arrangement survivable. It fires on contact with the soft palate, the back of the tongue and the throat wall, and it is not asking your opinion.
That is the mechanism the entire genre is built on overriding, which is worth understanding properly before deciding anything about it.
The reflex varies enormously, and it means nothing about you
The threshold is wildly different between people and it is largely just how you are built. Some people have almost none and discover this by accident. Some gag at a toothbrush. Most sit somewhere in between, and the trigger point sits at a different place along the tongue for different people.
Two consequences follow, both of which the videos obscure.
First, a strong gag reflex is not squeamishness, inexperience, or a lack of enthusiasm. It is anatomy, and framing it as something to be overcome by willingness puts an unpleasant kind of pressure on a person for a trait they did not choose.
Second, the reflex does habituate somewhat with repeated exposure in some people — which is the grain of truth inside the "training" framing — but it does not vanish, it does not habituate on a schedule, and it never stops being a protective mechanism. Someone who has suppressed it has not removed the risk it was there to manage. They have removed the warning.
What is actually happening in there
Past the reflex there are three real things going on.
You cannot breathe. While the airway is occluded, air is not moving. That is fine for a short interval and it is the reason every version of this that goes well is built around intervals rather than duration. The endurance framing — how long, how deep — is the part borrowed from a competitive-sport metaphor that does not belong here.
Vomiting is a live possibility, and it is the reason for two practical rules: not on a full stomach, and not when either person has been drinking heavily. Vomit and a suppressed protective reflex are a genuinely bad combination, because material can end up in the airway.
The soft tissue takes the impact. Hoarseness afterwards, a raw throat, jaw ache and the odd broken blood vessel are common and settle. Anything that does not settle within a few days — persistent hoarseness, pain on swallowing, difficulty swallowing — is worth a doctor rather than a wait. Oral sex also transmits infections, which is unrelated to depth but belongs in the same paragraph because it is the part people skip.
The thing the camera does not show
A scene that looks like one continuous feat is generally none of those things.
It is shot in takes with cuts between them. The people in it had a conversation beforehand about exactly what was going to happen. The performer prepared, often by not eating. There is frequently a signal agreed in advance, and the person holding the camera knows what it looks like. And the angle that makes it possible — head tilted back so that the mouth and throat form something closer to a straight line, usually with the head hanging off an edge — is chosen for mechanics, then framed to look spontaneous.
Everything that made it work is edited out, because none of it is what the clip is selling. What survives is the appearance of something effortless and unplanned, and people then try to reproduce the appearance without the substructure.
The one arrangement that is not optional
Where the receiving partner is not setting the pace — hands on the head, thrusting, the version the genre calls face-fucking — the practice has a specific requirement, and it is not a suggestion.
Speech is impossible. The person who needs to stop it cannot say so. That means a physical signal, agreed before anything starts, that means stop immediately — a double tap on the thigh or arm is the usual one — and an absolute rule that it is obeyed on the first attempt without discussion. It is also worth agreeing on what happens if the hands are pinned, which is why holding someone's arms during this is a bad idea.
This single arrangement is the difference between a rough thing two people are doing and something nobody can call off. It costs one sentence beforehand.
Which is also the reason the surprise version — a hand landing on the back of someone's head mid-act, going deeper than was discussed because it seemed like the moment — is the one variant with no defence. The person cannot object, cannot breathe, and did not agree. That it is a recurring beat in the genre does not make it a technique. It makes it the thing to have specifically ruled out.
If someone wants to try it
Slowly, and with the receiving partner in charge of the movement. Angle first, depth much later — the head-back position does most of the work and effort does very little. Plenty of saliva. Stop at nausea rather than through it. Short intervals with breathing between them. Nothing in the mouth that has just come out of anywhere else. And no hands on the head unless that was agreed as a separate thing.
And the obvious one: plenty of people do not want this, do not enjoy it, and are not missing anything. It is one act among many and it is not a level anyone is required to reach.
Why there is no list of 2020 videos here
Because that list was made of copies posted by third parties, none of which can be verified now or could have been then; because the year stamp makes a ranking obsolete by design; and because one of the entries was sold explicitly on the premise that the woman in it had been tricked into it, which is not a genre, it is a description of something happening to someone.
The genre's founding film is worth a line on the same point. The 1972 feature that gave the act its name was for years the industry's biggest crossover success — and the performer at its centre later stated publicly, in a memoir and in testimony, that she had been coerced throughout the making of it. Her account is part of the record of this subject, it was disputed at the time by people with reasons to dispute it, and it is the reason this particular act arrived in public consciousness attached to a question about consent rather than about technique.
That question is still the useful one. The technique is a few paragraphs. The agreement is the whole thing.