It doesn't and shouldn't be life threatening. It's the feeling of light-headedness that enhances everything else that also surrounds that kink. You're actually not supposed to choke your windpipe but instead squeeze the sides of the neck to slow down but not stop blood flow. If done right and for short amounts of time it shouldn't be life threatening at all. Of course with like everything else there's a lot of people who don't know/don't care about the proper way to do it and end up just chocking their windpipe and stopping their breathing, which is extremely dangerous.

My partner is super shy about it. She said she fantasizes about being taken advantage of, but obviously she would hate it irl. It's a role play thing; there's lots of, "you okay? Do you need me to stop? Etc...", and then right back into the dirty talk. It doesn't have to be an asphyxiation/ lightheaded thing either. It's a lot like getting whipped, having your hair pulled, getting bit/ scratched, etc...

I think a lot of it has to do with how women and sex are depicted in the media, and that creates fetishes growing up. Some people also like certain parts of the body. I noticed most people who like to get choked, like hands.

Are you expecting some kind of rational answer? A fetish or kink is basically defined by the sexual desire for something irrational. You can ask how that desire feels to possess or how one goes about playing out that desire in a safe consentual way... but you can't really ask why, why doesn't really come into it. It is sex, all of it is weird.

Tricking the body to release it's natural pain killers which also feels really good.

Because the brain weirdly likes it. Oxygen deprivation can lead to a felling of being high or being more aware.

So here's my theory on masochistic kinks in general.

• Sexual pleasure can be an escape from pain or negative emotions
• Using sexual pleasure to escape from some pain, via the mechanism known as "classical conditioning" makes that pain a trigger for the sexual response. It creates an (at least one-way) association from the pain to the sexual release.
• Anticipation of sexual release triggers preparation for it, ie arousal

So I'm gonna talk about some dark shit here. Let's say a woman is about to be killed by a mugger in an alley. He's beating the shit out of her because he's a sadist and the mugging is just an excuse to himself, to get violent with people. She, or that monster part of her that comes out when her life is threatened, to protect her, decides to try and reframe the situation as sexual in order to maybe survive. So she seduces him. It works. He stops being violent with her. It's like, it's an act but she knows it has to be convincing enough to save her life so she gets into it, to be convincing.

It's just fire together, wire together stuff. Painful, ugly, shameful, or disturbing experiences get associated with later sexual "reward" (in the technical, operant conditioning sense of the word), and that gets reinforced through repeated activation if the person indulges in it.

TL;DR:

• Some pain or a negative emotion experience precedes sexual release in time
• Preceding in time creates classically-conditioned association. Pain now activates sexual pathways
• One thing that creates consistent preceding-in-time relationship is using sex as escape from negative emotions
• One example (given above) is woman who escapes being killed by having sex with attacker
• Another would be a guy who is humiliated and it's unbearable so he jerks off just to feel something positive

This might help.