I don’t remember it very well, not even the fear. In exchange for allowing a man to tie me up where I sat on the ground, over the span of about sixty minutes, I was paid $200 (some of which went back to the dungeon as rent). My client didn’t make eye contact with me, didn’t even speak. He did tip, generously. If only they could all be like that.
Bondage, broadly speaking, is a somewhat new pleasure for me. After that client, I never again bottomed in a paid rope scene. While I’ve dabbled in other kinds of bondage over the years, I’ve never sought out rope recreationally, either. This is primarily because there are significant risks with rope bondage, and since I didn’t think I would enjoy getting tied up and suspended in the air, those risks seemed like more trouble than they were worth1.
Rope bondage’s reputation, earned or not, precedes it into the straight world. Unlike piercing or fisting, rope bondage has proven easier to co-opt and commodify than other leather activities. With their terror of actual transgression, straight players have been known to desexualize activities like rope bondage with so-called sensuality, a mere shadow of the erotic it’s intended to replace. When it is incorporated into straight sexuality2 as wellness, naughtiness, or some other flavor of respectable reinscription, rope is no longer the sex act. It is a predecessor to it or involved with it, an ornament or an approach, but it has been displaced by heteronormativity—downgraded from fetish to kink.
I hasten to remind you that I’m the furthest thing from a rope expert. This is just stuff I’ve observed in and out of the scene, and from talking to rope players that I know socially. It’s also extrapolation, because, as I expanded on at some length with my validity series, leathersex is, like most other queer-coded subcultures, especially ripe for commodification right now.
As with other activities that are typically classified as BDSM, certain popular modes of rope share a great deal with ancient practices that emphasize breath work, mindfulness, and endurance. A version of rope bondage has been assimilated into Wellness™ like meditation or whatever starvation cult they’re shilling as a diet these days—although maybe polework’s gentrification by racist & whorephobic fitness cosplayers is a better comparison here. In fact, many straight people who come to rope through Wellness™, or what amounts to what my grandmother might have once called a “marital aid,” are unaware that rope bondage hurts, or that it’s supposed to (or so my leather associate, leatherdyke and rigger Daemonumx, tells me). It’s not just straight people, of course: scrub just a little, and beneath the nonspecific spirituality with which some white players greasepaint their practice, you’ll find Orientalism, racism, and fetishization masquerading as profundity, preference, and mystique.
Perhaps my biggest barrier to rope, however, was in its aesthetics. The scene’s slow-burning baroque intimidated me. Other forms of torture can be subtle, sure, but rope, like other bondage, prizes form as highly as function, if not higher. Me, I’m more of a function girl: a utility knife and whatever’s around the house works just fine. Recently, a leatherman I know commented on the “clinical” approach I take to my scenes, and he was correct on more than one level, including the one having to do with flair. I’m not one for pageantry, extravagance, or hedonism, and while many players are, and god bless them for it, I resist their inclinations, which feel like static, distraction. Clear cuts in a scriptless world are one of the main reasons SM is so appealing to me, and rope is knotty.
But a few weeks ago, when Daemonumx asked the gc if anyone wanted get tied, Jade encouraged me to give it a shot. So I did. More on that later.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022).
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Which I might argue is distinct from heterosexuality. Maybe.
David Davis