Rope bottoming reflections after the EURIX Round Table - vol.2 The community

Disclaimer: All conclusions and thoughts that I share here are filtered through my interpretation of the words of the participants. Even when I quote the others, I do it based on my memory and understanding. The participants consented to me writing an account of our discussion, however they did not authorize this text. Therefore, I take full responsibility for what is written below. However, I want to acknowledge that it wouldn’t exist without the input of all the participants of the round table and I am really grateful to them for showing up and sharing so openly and richly.

This is the second article that resulted from a round table discussion which I moderated during the last EURIX in the Fall of ‘19 and in which Anna Bones and Saara Rei were my main interviewees. The first one was triggered by our discussion but also contained a lot of my own insights and was centred around the topics of empowerment and authenticity of rope bottoms. In this one, I gathered the topics that were circling around being part of a community and how it impacts our practice.

Rope bondage is an activity that is deeply personal and internal, but at the same time, it is often practised within a community. Many people tie with more than one person. We attend rope jams, workshops and rope festivals to meet and learn from fellow rope enthusiasts or to find new partners. We also connect virtually through discussion groups, forums and by following people who inspire us online.

Performing an intimate act of bondage in the presence (physical or conceptual) of other people is a delicate matter and it often leads to frictions. Some of them we talked about during our discussion and I describe here. We also touched upon how rapidly the rope community in Europe is growing and changing and how the roles of the bottom and the top are changing as well. Finally, we also mentioned how being a part of a community can be a source of strength and growth and how we can use this gift to our advantage.

There is a lot of unnecessary normativity in rope bottoming lately

There seem to be a lot of discussions about how to be a ‘better bottom’ recently. I must admit that I am probably one of the bottoms who contributes to perpetuating this notion. And while I don’t think that there is something essentially wrong in thinking about ways to get better at something, focusing on the improvement too much can lead to losing pleasure and meaning from the activity. And even worse than that, it can also lead to unnecessary competition and judgemental attitudes within a community.

I think that the most important thing to ask yourself when you notice an ambition for self-improvement is what your drive behind wanting to get better is? If your drive is internal, for example, you want to become more authentic in your bottoming, you want to deepen your and your rigger’s experiences in ropes or you want to internalize the activity for it to become more natural, then it should be safe to pursue your goal of improvement. Even then, though, you should keep yourself in check, because you might still get lost in the pursuit of the goal and miss out on the experiences that you’ve had on the path leading to it (been there, done that).

The real danger creeps in, however, when your drivers for self-improvement are external. For example, when you feel like you should become a ‘better bottom’ because all the other bottoms are improving. When you feel like you are not good enough already. Or when you want to improve because you think that only then you will get tied by a certain person or your pictures will get a lot of ‘likes’.

Basically, whenever instead of wanting to become a better version of yourself, you want to become better than somebody else, you run into trouble.

Because there will always be people around you who are better than you at each of the things that you are working on. And you can’t do anything about it. Usually, it won’t be one person who is better on all fronts, but separate people who are better at separate things, but that won’t make a difference for your well-being (it does make a difference, though, if you think about it). And this kind of thinking will lead to constant dissatisfaction and feeling of inadequacy (once again, been there, done that).

Competition can sometimes be beneficial, but I feel like especially in rope bottoming it is rather counterproductive. One of the very important threads during the round table was the fact that rope bottoming is an extremely individual and internal activity and how the core of it is being authentic to yourself and having an honest expression. If you keep on comparing yourself to others and competing with them, you begin to mould yourself in their image instead of focusing on finding your individual way of bottoming.

At some point, Saara Rei indicated that it seems to her like especially nowadays, because of the abundance of rope on social media and its growing popularity, we fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to other bottoms more often. When you only see people tying ‘live’ (as during the times when she was starting to get tied at Schwelle7), you only are confronted with other bottoming expressions during live rope events and even then not so much as you are mostly busy yourself.

Currently, we can be bombarded with beautiful bottoms hanging in impossible suspensions 24/7 if we wish. And it gets hard not to compare yourself with them. It gets hard to resist the wish to switch places with them. It gets hard to stop dreaming to be like them instead of developing being ourselves. But only the latter can bring us joy.

Let’s stop with the demeaning categorization of bottoms as simply ‘active’ or ‘passive’

There are many different ways to bottom for rope, as we’ve established already, but recently only two opposing camps in bottoming are being recognized, ‘active’ or ‘passive’. And there seems to be a lot of division between the two.

What was interesting to observe during the round table was the pressure to belong to one of the groups that many of the bottoms felt. And it was not because they necessarily identified with one of the notions, but simply because they couldn't escape being squeezed into one of the two boxes. And once you belong to one, you can’t help but resent the other, because each side feels oppressed by the opposite camp.

I, myself, got a label of a ‘passive’ bottom in my community, which for a long time I treated as offensive. Especially because my community consists mostly of ‘active’ bottoms, I ‘grew up’ in rope feeling like I was the less enlightened one, wanting to follow and surrender and not interested in learning how to manage my body actively in ropes. I was hearing all the time that a good bottom should be aware and active in managing their body in ropes and that the pinnacle of bottoming skills is being able to actively co-create the tie with the rigger and give them technical feedback on how to improve it.

How great was my surprise, when I heard from Anna Bones and other more ‘active’ bottoms (or at least the bottoms who are not that much into Naka-style or semenawa) that they, on the other hand, feel oppressed by the kinbaku modelling recently and that they feel like in the current narrative being able to let go and surrender in ropes is The Way in rope modelling and anything else is seen as simplistic and lacking spirit.

As it turns out, putting each other in boxes makes us all feel oppressed. And we failed to see any advantages of the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ division. It is too broad to benefit from belonging to either of the groups and too general for anyone to truly identify with it. So I think that it is time to drop it and find a better and closer to real way to define each other’s styles so that we can actually benefit from identifying with a certain style and sharing experiences with other bottoms who do.

There is no bottoming without the tops

The one thing that I was a bit sad about, was how little riggers have joined the round table discussion. I think that as much as models need to be considered and heard when talking about tying, riggers’ contribution is important when talking about getting tied as well.

And I think that as much as the importance of models' feedback in riggers' education is getting more recognition lately, hearing riggers’ voices during rope bottoming discussions is still a rarity. I hope that it is going to change soon because for me it is very important to know what riggers value in me as a model, and what they value in models in general. In the end, it is them who I want to get tied by.

Additionally, even if they wouldn’t want to give input into our discussion, simply hearing about modelling experiences is a huge learning for the riggers. When I teach in workshops and share my experiences after a demo, it is often riggers who come to me afterwards and thank me for the insight that I provided to them. And here, when given an opportunity to hear so much about modelling experiences, they did not show up.

At the same time, I also know that some people do not want riggers to participate in modelling discussions. And I understand. I understand why some people see a danger in inviting them in. I understand that they are seen as the ones who are often in positions of power and we don’t want them to dictate how we, ‘the weaker ones’, should feel and behave in ropes. Rope world is still dominated by men tying women and the history of men dictating women how they should be, and indoctrinating them, is long and painful. We do not want to repeat that in rope. We do not want to feel like others impose on us the behaviours that would make us desired. We want to be ourselves and be desired for that.

I, however, do not necessarily think that there is something wrong with wanting to give a pleasurable experience to your partner and hearing from them what would allow one to achieve that. As long as this want is not imposed on us and as long as it is reciprocal, listening to your partner and taking them into account is what makes for a great connection and beautiful scenes.

If we want the recognition for creating the scene together then we also need to acknowledge our impact on the experience of our partner and care for it to some degree. But we must care because we truly feel it and not because this is what other people (especially the more powerful ones) think we should be doing.

Being part of a community of real people is where the magic happens

Towards the end of our discussion, Saara Rei expressed how for her being a part of a community is very important. How it helped her to grow and develop. How it made her feel not alone in her ‘strange’ likings and how it can also help in going through difficult times. And in such emotionally charged activity as rope bondage, difficult times come sooner or later.

I completely agree with her. No matter how much I complain about the rope community sometimes, being able to talk with other people about our shared passion, exchange with rope bottoms about our experiences and share about how tying makes us feel, might be the most growth-inducing experiences that I’ve had.

Hearing other people’s perspectives opens my mind and heart. Knowing that there are more people like me makes me feel understood and as I belong somewhere. And in the face of a crisis, having a community of people around me who have been through similar struggles is an invaluable source of support and wisdom.

I feel like the internet is sometimes giving us a false sense of community. We feel like we can meet and share virtually, but I am not sure if such meetings are even a fraction as valuable as talking live. We feel like we can solve community problems through online discussions but I feel that such discussions are missing so much context that it is rarely leading to any real understanding.

I understand that what we do is rare and that it might be hard to meet like-minded people in our vicinity. The internet makes people far away seem close and accessible. But still, each time I spend some time doing rope in a group of real people, I come back inspired and feeling connected, even if the way that some of them do rope is different from mine. And after an online discussion, I don’t feel that. I don’t feel close to the others and like a part of something, even if it seems like we share a similar vision.

I do share a lot online and because of that, I can feel how imperfect tool that is. How easy it is to become misinterpreted or misunderstood. How easy it is for me to appear as someone who I am not.

I haven’t been discouraged by it so far, because for me writing about rope and BDSM is a way to put my thoughts in order and to extract knowledge or insights from them. But I’ve never felt like what I write can really make me understood by the readers. I do not feel like I can get close to someone who I know only virtually. Rather, consuming online content is for me a way to get inspired to conduct my own research. It is often a spark igniting a discussion but never a source of real understanding of another person.

I think that in rope bondage, the community is crucial, but we must beware of the traps of normativity and judgement. We are doing something unorthodox and risky. There is no established practice, no norms or textbooks. Sure, currently we begin to form some common practices, but they are still preliminary and a consensus about the merit of some of them is only beginning to form. The only true source of wisdom that we can have is our own experiences and the experiences of other people who are doing rope longer than ourselves.

I try to use the wisdom of the community as much as possible, but always in a combination with critical thinking. That is because I don’t feel like we’ve reached a critical mass of people tying to come to any definite conclusions. We are still in a period of research. And when it comes to rope bottoming, I feel like the research is only just starting.

That is why I think that it is crucial to talk about it and investigate. To share experiences and lessons learned. Not to find the ultimate truths, but to gather more points in the data set. We need more data and to get it we need space and willingness to share and collaborate with other rope bottoms. We need bottoms who are willing to join the investigation and to think critically about their experiences, who are open to hear opinions that are conflicting with their own and treat it not as a critique but just as a valid parallel view. We need a space in which people feel safe to share their experiences and not feel judged. But at the same time, we also need to be resilient to judgement because it inevitably comes sooner or later. Finally, we also need tops who won’t be afraid to share with us their views on modelling because there is a lot of wisdom to be learned from them. And by inviting them to the discussion we make space for them to think about our contribution.

Maybe it's just me but I feel like bottoming should be more appreciated and recognized, not just for the beauty of the models but also their depth, their resilience, the strength of their body and mind and anything for what the bottom can be appreciated. To find the things that we contribute we need to make a conscious effort to see them. To look at a rope scene with fresh eyes and notice what it is that the bottom brings to it. To not only look at what the rope brings out in the model but also at what the model allows it to bring out. And even more importantly, what does the model bring out of the rigger.

Meeting in a community of other bottoms and discussing it is one of the ways to see these things anew.

In my last article inspired by the round table, I will try to touch upon exactly this topic. What are some of the things that the bottoms can do to make the scene unforgettable? What can we do on our side to cater to our experiences? I've asked the participants what are the best scenes that they remember and what was their mindset during these scenes. And the answers that I got were more than intriguing.