What if shibari is just wishful thinking?
Reflections on shibari, being a rope bottom, and being tied up - and hating my reasons for enjoying it
[Content notice: some psychologically heavy stuff, vulgarity, sex-adjacent. Skip if you’re not in the mood for it]
Rope bottoms are damaged. Riggers are enablers. Shibari / kinbaku1 is a socially sanctioned form of wish fulfillment for emotionally stunted children. It has a foreign name and is poorly understood by the mainstream, so it’s culturally protected - and nobody wants to look ignorant or uptight by kink-shaming. It’s technically impressive. It often involves years of dedicated practice, and laudable communication skills. But it’s wish fulfillment nonetheless.
Ok, those were harsh words. And the title of this essay is a bit facetious. These are judgmental statements. And like all such statements, they reflect more on the fears of the person saying them than anything else.2
Like many folks, I enjoy being roughed around in bed3 - so shibari classes were a logical thing to look into. Besides, by the time something has made it onto the Instagram page of your local pole-dancing class, or into shitty bestsellers at Indigo4, it doesn’t really qualify as edgy anymore. (Is there anyone who doesn’t have a pair of handcuffs in the bedside table these days?)
The completely unanticipated thing that struck me in the very first class was this: holy shit, my partner has to do all of the work. I just literally stand (or sit, or lie) here and do nothing. It’s incredibly selfish and lopsided.5
If you need a quick primer on why someone might enjoy being a shibari rope bottom (read: the person being tied up), let me try to explain it in 30 seconds. The world is full of people who will hurt you. (Some do it intentionally, but most do it by accident because they are a bit dumb. Like all of us.) Thus you spend a great deal of energy constantly defending yourself. (There are infinite ways of doing this: making alot of money, being a workaholic, playing a role that you think others want you to play, being cynical about everything, avoiding deep emotions and genuine intimacy…the list goes on.)
This is why you’re an anxious, risk-avoidant wreck who is scared of doing things that might not succeed. This is why you can never fully put yourself out there. The idea of losing control terrifies you. Being tied up by a partner that you trust allows the fiction of having two things that you’ll never find at the same time in real life: the relief of completely letting go, with the reassurance that you’re not going to get hurt.
Manic pixie dream boys
Make no mistake: the rigger (read: person doing the tying) might be the one moving your body around and executing all the ties, but they’re actually the one bending over backwards with the crushing responsibility of another adult’s physical and emotional well-being. Rope bottoms may be loathe to admit it to themselves, but they actually hold all the power in a shibari scene - much in the same way that a crying baby holds all the power on an airplane.
Rigging is a demanding, selfless act of charity. It takes a staggering amount of deliberate practice to learn the knots and skills required to safely tie a person up, without disrupting the flow and mood of the interaction. (Imagine a skiier who can calmly zip through a black diamond glade, or a chef who can rapidly dispatch a fish without even looking at the knife.) A good rigger maintains an elaborately constructed illusion of confidence and ease, all while working through one of the most complex shape-rotating and spatial reasoning problems that man has ever conceived.
On top of all this, they are to treat your physical and emotional comfort as a priority at all times. They are expected to maintain a calm facade, while in reality being relentlessly vigilant for threats to your safety.
If the rope bottom is female and the rigger is male, as the vast majority of such pairs are, then you can think of a rigger as the heteronormative female analogue for Cool Girl6 : a strong, thoroughly capable man with no emotional needs of his own. He’ll perfectly anticipate your needs, perfectly execute every task without getting tired, and will drop everything - including his own desires - if you do so much as utter a (safe) word or make a certain gesture, in order to make things right for you.7
On top of all this, he's able to hide how much you’re actually pulling the strings. He presents all of this as his own will, which frees you from all accountability. The crowning piece of hypocrisy in rope bondage is that the bottom gets exactly what they want, the way that they want it, while contributing minimal or no work to the process. Things are being done to you, not by you. And your partner has to help you maintain the delusion that they are acting out their deepest desires - not yours.
It's the ultimate female fantasy that only exists in Harlequin romance novels.
It's fucking ridiculous.
Why are we tiptoeing around the word “damaged”?
It’s no coincidence that shibari, along with many other BDSM practices, are frequently framed as effective ways to process emotional and sexual trauma. It’s also no coincidence that many of the dynamics between a dominant and submissive partner look alarmingly similar to how a parent might manage emotional safety in a scared child (being calm and in control, maintaining physical contact, being hypervigilant about their fear of abandonment, etc).
A less compassionate way of saying all this is that bottoms and subs might be damaged people who are subconsciously seeking re-parenting from their partners.8 This is something that I can’t say out loud in polite company, even as an opinion about myself. This is also something that people have said to me in confidence, and that I have to admit I find myself agreeing with.
I understand perfectly well why being a rope bottom is appealing. In what other circumstance in life can you willingly surrender all control to someone who not only refrains from abusing that power to fuck you over, but can be completely trusted to take care of your emotional needs in the process?
The very fact that many rope bottoms find being tied up to be a safe, reassuring way to to bond with their partner betrays why navigating vulnerability and intimacy feels so difficult and terrifying in real life. The real world is full of selfish, imperfect people who can and will fuck up. For many, those fuck-ups start coming your way early in life. Sometimes the best we can hope for from our partner is simply that their intentions are in the right place. More than this, and you’re asking a great deal from a human being who is struggling just as much as you are.
The level of technical and emotional acrobatics being done by a rigger to maintain emotional and physical safety in a rope scene is utterly absurd. It’s a level of self-effacement and selfless care for another that most parents don’t even manage to achieve.
It’s a form of wish fulfillment that I deeply, deeply understand the desperate desire to grasp for.9 It’s also completely unreasonable to expect from an actual human being.
#145
The difference between these two terms is subtle and explained poorly in most articles - I think this is the best one I have found yet.
They say the things that bother you the most in others are also the things you hate the most about yourself, and I noticed myself becoming incredibly irritated towards the other rope bottoms that I encountered in our classes. I was annoyed by the way they just went limp and closed their eyes and became completely pathetic and useless. The train of thought went something like this: you're doing literally none of the work, and yet this whole thing is about your comfort, and your body, and having us all look at you having a good time. You you you you you. What makes you think that you deserve all this care and attention? You're not even that great.
Guess who I’m really talking to?
The most commonly cited statistic is a 62% preference from an OkCupid study that has since been removed from Medium from some reason. But it’s not too hard to find other sources
Just so we are being unambiguously clear: 50 Shades is complete garbage. There is a scene in it when Christian hits Ana too hard and she gets upset and starts crying. This is both of them literally doing everything wrong. If your partner doesn’t know how hard they can hit you, because you haven’t discussed it beforehand, and you let them do it anyway, and then you get upset and cry about it afterwards, you’ve both fucked up real, real bad.
Perhaps my failure to realize this at any time before signing up betrays just how self-centered and clueless I can be.
Or the manic pixie dream girl. Or the bouncy fake-D-cup blonde on PornHub, whose sole joy in life is having a cock shoved down her throat, and has zero emotional needs or desires of her own. Whatever is your taste.
An example of this from the previous class: the instructor was giving us lessons on how to safely get a bound person down to the ground, and back up again. The argument is that this requires care because they’ve lost use of their arms and hands, which are what we usually rely on when our bodies are about to topple over. A rope bottom who has to worry about whether or not they are about to faceplant into the floor is not a rope bottom who can fully let go and be mentally “in” the scene.
This is an excellent example of a rigger having to go out of their way to take over responsibility for a set of tasks that a human being can absolutely learn how to handle safely on their own, if they can’t do so already. I.e figure skating lessons will teach you, early on, how to fall and get back up safely. You actively suppress the instinct to break a fall using your hands, wrists, or elbows - because that’s a great way to break a bone. You are taught to “roll” into the fall, and allow a fleshy part of yourself (butt, shoulder muscle, etc) to absorb as much of the impact as possible. You are taught to reposition yourself into a kneel, center your gravity over one foot, push up into a one legged squat, and then transfer some weight to the other foot once you feel stable enough to do so.
I’m not saying that all rope bottoms should be left to stand up or get themselves to the ground on their own. My point is that humans can be coached to make themselves as capable as possible in inherently risky situations (i.e. when balancing on two thin metal blades over a patch of ice). I’m saying that the norms of shibari encode a certain set of beliefs about what each role should and shouldn’t be capable of, and who should bear responsibility for what. It is this ceding and transfer of responsibility that both makes shibari enjoyable and comforting for a rope bottom, and also makes it an incredibly self-indulgent and unrealistic escape from the real world.
I suppose this perspective may come across as insensitive, similar to my perspective that BPD might be a psychological concept that does more harm than good. If I were a neurotypical straight white male psychologist with no mental health struggles, I may have been canceled for saying things like this by now. And maybe for good reason. If you’re a person who has genuine trouble managing your emotions, being told that you’re demonstrating the emotional competence of a toddler probably won’t help, even if it’s true. The best way to calm down a person who is demonstrating the emotional capabilities of a 3 year old is to treat them like one.
There are also some studies that counter the “bottoms are damaged people” argument by showing that people who engage in BDSM practices are actually psychologically healthier than so-called “vanilla” folks. This is like saying that someone who struggles with depression is more emotionally healthy than someone who has generally lived a happy and carefree life because they are so much more aware of their own emotions and have had so much more practice processing difficult things. Ask anyone who actually experiences depression if this is a definition of “health” that they enjoy, and if they ever wish they could just snap their fingers and become more like the “normal” folks.
Some people will say that I clearly haven’t processed my own shame and apprehension around the whole thing, and that I shouldn’t extend these conclusions to anyone else. Very well. I write about depression and suicidal ideation on this blog, and I make no claims that they are the feelings of anyone other than myself. Sometimes people read them and find the perspective helpful because I am shining a flashlight into a dark corner of the basement that normally doesn’t get any illumination, even if it doesn’t look exactly like their particular dark corner.
Oh well. You can’t bend over backwards to please everyone. Or anyone. (Unless you’re the rigger, that is.)