Word words words or; Kinky Kinbaku vs Shibari “Healing” (2022)

You can listen to this musing here, or read it below.

I’m in Brazil, mostly for vacation, living in a tropical eco-village on the coastline of Bahia. There is a small sex-positive festival happening here in a couple of days, and of course, I’m teaching some rope bondage. But what kind of bondage? Japanese? Swedish? It’s a practice, and a legacy, that I learned in Japan, then brought to Sweden, and now I’m moving it to Brazil. Swedish and Japanese culture is similar in many ways but also vastly different, and Brazilian culture is vastly different yet again. (I think I’ve only been here for a week so far)

The bondage I learned to love in Japan grew out of perversion and taboo, and my favourite European teachers kept that spirit, and so do I in my private bedroom practice. Then I work professionally in the field of tantra, conscious kink and alternative therapies. This calls for a colossal adaptation in terms of consent and a strange mixture of rationality and spirituality. When I try to explain to someone in Tokyo’s red-light district that I teach bondage in European (and now Brazilian) spiritual communities, they look perplexed. They might tell how they turn their statues of Shinto deities away from a rope bondage scene, as the practice is considered unholy and dirty. But then the heteronormative gender roles of Japan where “maledom” (male domination) isn’t a kink but everyday life, and “femdom” is a popular perversion. This, obviously doesn’t work in Scandinavia. Instead, the words “sadisto” and “masochisto” are much more used, as the power dynamic is already assumed. And then, in terms of alternative therapy, everything is again thrown upside-down as there is a money transaction involved, and the goal is no longer mutual pleasure. Rope bondage, as a practice, has traveled with me for many years, and it changes all the time depending on context. But then we have the words that describe the practice. This musing I want to dedicate to those words.

I’ll start with trying to paint the picture around the Japanese legacy.

Rope bondage; I like this word because it has a minimal legacy and no connection to Japan, therapy or tantra. Sometimes I say human bondage instead to move the focus from the material to interaction. However, calling it knot bondage would be a step in the other direction. Human bondage / rope bondage / knot bondage.

Japanese bondage; adds a reference to a legacy. In material (jute), style (double-folded ropes, gotes etc.) and collection of fantasies schoolboy/girl, secretary/office worker, and geishas. But it also connects to a set of influential people, like Akechi Denki (1940 – 2005), Eikichi Osada (1925-2001), Hakuri Yukimura (1948-2016) and Ito Seiu (1882-1961). I decided to go for the dead ones to avoid categorizing the living. And a way of documenting kink in photography and magazines, with Kitan Club maybe being the best example, and a place of practicing rope connected to sexuality, SM and the red light district in Tokyo och Osaka. The source for this information is nawapedia.net.

Shibari; is Japanese for tying things. Like shoes and packages, but also people. Kind of similar to Japanese bondage but sometimes gets confused with “an ancient art form practised by the samurai”, but this, to me, is bullshit. There is Hojo-Jutsu, the Japanese practice of capturing prisoners from the Edo period (1600-1800), but that is not SM and not sexual. I think this interpretation is a European thing, trying to make things more exotic and mystical. So in Europe, the word Shibari came to mean all sorts of things. All from aerial acrobatics and yoga with some bondage to something heavily focused on patterns and knots or something completely de-sexualized. And it’s a double-edged sword; on the one hand, it makes bondage more accessible, but on the other hand, it creates misunderstandings that, in the worst case, ends up in consent issues and abuse. So I try to avoid the word, but I’m often forced to use it in Europe to remain in their frame of reference. So many times, I get the question, “Ah, so you mean shibari?” and what should I answer?

Kinbaku; is Japanese for tying people with some kind of intimate intention. (Japanse is not a very precise language). I like the word Kinbaku because it didn’t get diluted in Europe in the same way as Shibari did. So people who say that they practice kinbaku tends to honour the Japanese legacy better, in my experience—keeping it sexual and kinky.

Semenawa, Aibunawa and many many more Japanese words; aims to boil down Kinbaku and Shibari to more specific styles. I usually don’t bother using them, and I’m far from the expert here, except I personally like workshops labelled Semenawa in the spirit of the living master Akira Naka because of their technical and aesthetic challenge.

Okay, I’m done trying to define Japanese bondage. Next up is tantric ropes, conscious kink bondage, and European/American bondage.

Conscious kink (bondage or not); is the word to make BDSM more hippie/hipster and accessible in general. Focusing more on experiences, self-development, consent and trauma awareness, and less on leather culture and technical skills. So, in general, there is more feeling and less learning. Sometimes conscious kink contains some kind of Japanese bondage, but what kind doesn’t usually matter because once people go deeper, they tend to change the name to Shibari or Kinbaku. I like the word, as it is an excellent gateway for newbies to approach BDSM and rope bondage.

Tantric ropes; is the term I started to use because I want to teach rope bondage in various tantric communities. It’s similar to conscious kink but specifically with rope as the tool. It focuses on playing with polarities in a ritual setting where the experience some kind of mystery and not everything is rationally explained. It honours the sexual aspect of Kinbaku but is simultaneously inspired by an Osho quote that the lowest form of sexuality lies in the flesh, the middle in the heart, and the highest in the divine. Obviously, I like this term. If you want to know more about it, see my school of tantric ropes project and this musing on tantra in general.

European and American bondage; is a very vague term. Maybe it is the Betty Page and damsel in destress narrative with shiny cotton ropes or juxtaposition of freedom through restriction as dance choreography, or the bondage happening in the old-school leather BDSM scene. As there is no apparent legacy compared to Japanese bondage, I avoid using the words.

Now, let’s throw therapy into the mix.

Bodywork; is the idea of approaching an issue, need or desire through the body instead of the mind. Often questioning the Descartian separation of the mind and the body altogether. I like this word as it creates a good separation from talking and thinking based therapies, like cognitive behavioural therapy.

Therapy; is a treatment of an issue rather than the pursuit of pleasure, perversion, or self-discovery. I often say that BDSM play sessions can have a therapeutic effect, but the goal is not therapeutic. While a therapy session can be pleasurable, but the goal is not pleasure. It also defines a therapeutic relationship, where the exchange is money for service rather than mutual desire. I like this word very much as it separates personal and therapeutic relationships. You can read more about this in my text about power, abuse and therapy.

Healing; is, in theory, what happens in the client of therapy. But in my experience, the word is often greatly misused as something cathartic or magical that an initiated master does to a less-knowing receiver. In my experience, a traumatized person knows their trauma much better than I do, and if they don’t, it’s better that they read up beforehand. So I try to avoid using this word.

Therapeutic rope bondage; is then using rope bondage as a bodywork therapy. And therefore, utterly different from Japanese bondage. 

That being said, I offer both therapeutic rope bondage sessions and paid Kinbaku sessions, and I have a personal perverted and sexual practice. But the three are very different things. A great example is a conversation I had a few months ago before leaving for Brazil.

They: Hey Andy, I heard it’s possible to get tied by you without paying money. Is it true, and how does it work?

Me: Well, in theory, yes. Instead of paying money for a professional service, you give your body, mind and soul to my perverted desires. Is that what you want?