Separated at Birth? (Pt. 3)

The eastern tradition, being steeped in its own myth systems and of a more contemplative orientation generally (as opposed to idealized (in the Platonic sense) or rule-driven, like in the west of at least the last several millennia), does not deviate, I think, from the general outline I’ve given thus far. In the east submission is essentially a feminine, Dionysian narrative, but the tradition in bondage in the east proceeds less from an intuition of sex as a biological imperative and more as a means of transcendence. We may look to the Kama Sutra for a conspectus of the eastern belief in the mystical virtue of the erotic, but erotic bondage gives us a unique kind of on-demand system for inducing transcendent states. The Japanese in particular have developed an architectonic for bondage that is observant of several eastern modes of mystical attainment - notably yoga, the hatha variation of which imparts several asanas to the standard kinbaku kamae. I won’t go so far as to insist that Japanese bondage is single-mindedly about seeking communion with the godhead, but I do believe that impulse to be one of the foundational stimuli for its emergence from the contemplatively derived martial disciplines preceding it, and one of its principle distinctions from western bondage.

One observes in stock kinbaku imagery a manner of submission, a going into the experience, as it were, that is far less characteristic of the western idiom, which itself traditionally emphasizes the resistance of the person being tied. The western “damsel’s” situation is being imposed from without; the agency of her helplessness is external and she usually goes along only reluctantly. She is, in a broader narrative sense, not responsible for her tribulations - she is a victim. One need not go far into either ancient or modern myth systems in the west to see the subjugation of the mortal individual to willful cosmic forces, often personified, which act pointedly on mortal posterity. The problem of predestination versus free will comes up so reliably in the west because we insist upon thinking of our existence as individuated selves, free agents in other words. There is very little impetus to endorse willing submission in western thought systems; it defies a long and acculturated tradition of separation - from God and from each other. Submission in the west is, I would suggest, a radical and even subversive act. If you’re going to give in, best not to be too obvious about it.

The idea of the monad, or the unbroken continuity between apparently individuated phenomena is axiomatic to Buddhist thought since at least the time of Bodhidharma (about 500AD), and well developed in other eastern traditions. Consider the Hindu idea of the veil of Maya, before which we labor with the problem of duality. Behind the veil, there is no separation and duality is revealed to be an illusion. Whereas the separation from ultimate principles (the “fall from grace”) is believed to be a fact in western ontologies, eastern disciplines stress only the illusion of separation overlaying the fact of unity. To the eastern mind, the same energy flows through all apparently individuated things, as, for example, revealed in the meridian systems of oriental medicine. Open, boxy, and irregular kinbaku architecture intentionally plays with these meridians, with the crossing and rearrangement of energies and the possibility thereby of a look into ultimate principles. That it becomes in the making highly erotic only compounds its force and potentials. The classic M-jo in the Japanese tradition thus goes quite willingly into her restraint and, while not necessarily embracing her suffering, accepts it as consistent with the pain of illusion such as we know on this side of the veil. Although the Shinto tradition wedded to Zen does not say much about the antecedent Hindu concept of Maya, it does predicate satori as the endpoint of suffering wherein the truth of unity is made manifest to the spirit.

Of course, all of this is available to the western bondage practitioner too, and it could easily be said that the rope top is performing a kind of priestly function in any case. The overwhelming emphasis on resistance to being restrained in the popular conception of bondage in the west, as opposed to ready yielding characterizing the eastern conception, is, I think, consistent with much larger mytho-poetic, and hence social, constructs inhering in both. It may be difficult to describe what the salient differences are between eastern and western traditions in bondage (I mean, hands get tied behind the back in both cases), but it becomes easier when we couch our interest more broadly in the two world views.

Separated at Birth? (Pt. 2)

I mimicked the Klaw style (there being no real technique) for a little while before stumbling upon John “Willie” Coutts and his Gwendolyn drawings. In Willie I think western bondage finds its first true prophet. Willie’s style was not only founded on the same sort of artfully sculpted 40s - 50s Monroe curves as Klaw, but he laced those curves impossibly tightly, drawing in the waist, pulling back the elbows, pushing out the breast, lifting and separating, as it were, and elongating with stiff, angular posing and sky-high heels. In addition, Willie was shameless in his use of overwhelming and distorting gags, which displace visual and aural cues to the wearer’s personality revealed in facial and verbal gesture. I see this as enhancing the quality of mystery associated with woman, the mystery of creation, of begetting, and the messy business of generating life (a thesis elaborated here). Willie’s work was all about the reduction of the individual, particular woman, and the elevation of capital W Woman. In the pages of his Bizarre magazine, he was wont to allow occasionally that the imposition of vigorous, calculated bondage was the only cure for that hopeless intimidation felt by modern man confronted with the withering power of Woman. If he were read in philosophy (and I doubt he was – he was first an intuitive and second a drunk), Willie would probably have agreed with Nietzsche’s association of woman with the chaotic, fecund and creative Greek god Dionysus, who was balanced by the tempering, masculine-associated regulatory and managerial Apollo.

There are many theories on how and why bondage, and in particular its identifiable stylings, both eastern and western, gains formal status in the 20th century. Some posit that while photography played a large role in the break out into popular consciousness, binding for erotic effect has a far older history. The consensus view among aficionados seems to be that the Japanese vernacular, emerging from 15th century martial hojojitsu into what we in the west call shibari or kinbaku today, dates in its erotic manifestation to the early 19th century, but there evidence to this effect is largely apocryphal. Following Itoh Seiyu's drawings from SM-inflected kabuki dramas, the form seems fairly well-evolved when erotic kinbaku images start showing up in Japan around the late 1920s and early 1930s, right about the same time the delicate SM drawings of Carlo, Herric and Rene Giffey that influenced Willie came out in the Parisian pulps of the era. Willie may also have stumbled upon Japanese bondage imagery while exiled in Australia, but his letters tell us that in 1937 it was Carlo’s work that first came to his attention while living in Sydney†.

I’d like to speculate here that the emergence of bondage as erotic on a wider scale in both east and west inheres in the culturally parallel rush to modernity. Europe and America were already deeply involved in the shrinking of distance and the building of metropolises by the turn of the 20th c., and the Japanese had mounted their own juggernaut into modernity upon Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 appearance in Edo (now Tokyo) Bay and the concomitant demise of the Shogunate. With the primary evils of death, pestilence and even discomfort in retreat, humans are no less biological despite the Apollonian lever being applied to capricious Dionysian nature; taming her, predicting her behaviors, defending against her unceasing demand that humans reproduce themselves - one of the greatest practical and metaphorical examples of this overcoming of nature is the birth control pill. Besieged, our essential biology adopts a guerrilla strategy (perversity) since the civilized, sanitary and organized world legislates only a meager freedom to the biological idea of nature. My western mind sees bondage as I think Willie got it, as a splendid and artful presentation to the several senses of Woman, capital W woman, the principle of creation, available and vulnerable, but also revealed in utterly unambiguous mythic form, and emphasizing mythic tensions. That’s the power of myth to my thinking: it gets us to perform on our biological imperatives.

To be continued.

† The Art of John Willie; Sophisticated Bondage. Monograph, edited by Stefano Piselli, Eric Stanton, et al. Glittering Images, 1989.

Separated at Birth?

(Excerpted from a 2002 public lecture / demonstration)

Thank you all for coming, and thanks also to A. for the invitation to speak tonight, and for the request months ago to get her up off the ground.

A. and I have been playing on and off with rope for several years, and have only recently made the move into suspension. We hope to show you a little trick we’ve practiced later on - a single leg inverted suspension - among the more difficult suspended poses to both rig safely and to hold for even a small length of time. I’ll make a few points in so doing about safely managing the technical aspects of such a scene, but frankly, suspended bondage, like rock climbing, is a high risk activity under the best of circumstances, so I’m obliged to apply a disclaimer here and say that I don’t intend to teach you a thing about tying somebody and hanging them up. Not a thing. Suspension bondage is best learned slowly and steadily over time with a tough, understanding partner and competent instruction; not, in my opinion, by means of public demonstrations such as you are to see here tonight.

My intent is to show you what’s possible and perhaps what you can do with what’s possible, rather than impart specific information on how it’s possible. The technique and dynamic between A. and myself are, as you might imagine, unique to us, and in any case, we may not pull off what we intend tonight, so anything you see here is very likely completely useless to the success of your own rope scenes. That said, please don’t hesitate to ask questions afterward about what you will have seen me do (or not do) tonight. Also, I’d be happy to talk later about the little précis I’d like to present now.

This presentation is about to take a philosophical turn, perhaps for the worse, and I’ll be interested to see how many are standing at the end of it. At the very least you’re about to learn that I’m kinky for more than just rope. Suspension, while not unique to eastern bondage and its aesthetic, is highly identified with it. The working properties of hemp and jute rope, which are common in eastern practice, facilitate picking partners up in order to enhance their helplessness. None of those considerations preclude enacting the delicate airborne forms common to Japanese-style bondage in the western style, but such crossover is seldom seen, a factor in leading observers to speak of wide differences between east and west. I’d like to take the first part of this presentation to put across a few ideas I have about that difference.

There is quite a lot of discussion of how or if east meets west on various online groups where rope geeks like myself hang out, and I’ll be drawing a bit here from other’s ruminations on the subject, but the upshot of what I’m about to say is pretty much my own and I’m by no means done thinking about it. If you disagree, and I hope you’ll be critical, I would appreciate hearing about it.

Foregoing even a cursory consideration of gender identity and its attendant politics, I make the following observations from the standpoint of the one identity about which I can speak with any authority, that being my own. All of the assertions that I’m about to make proceed from that basic prejudice, and I hope you’ll all forgive where I run afoul of any other prejudices in the room.

Having played with gender queer, classic queer and straight partners of both genders, my central orientation has consistently sought out an essential straight feminine trait; that which is hormonally responsive to me as a straight male and unconditioned by orientation or gender. Of course, on many occasions that hormonal energy has been absent, but such vacancies do not necessarily result in disappointing scenes, and often only further affirm my own proclivity. I like to recall that even among those people I’ve tied who were not necessarily kinky, who were perhaps just doing a modeling job, or in a transitional phase into which rope fit or helped, that expressions of that “eternal feminine” which captivates me could (and often did) come out.

I began my formal explorations in bondage well over twenty years ago with the person who is still my primary partner and my wife. I recall quite clearly the early compulsion to envelop and overwhelm her, and to have the result of that be the emphasizing of her sexual availability. Although I backed away from the impulse initially, it was not too long after those inchoate stirrings that rope entered our lives. Even in my first crude and ineffectual efforts to get her restrained, I saw her in a wholly new light, wherein her curves revealed themselves ever more fully and her yielding was ever more apparent. That I was at times somewhat oblivious to the yielding part may have helped me concentrate on pure technique with greater alacrity, but suffice it say that the actual application of rope was all about visually dramatizing the soft, giving, ovoid and fleshly charms that make her to me woman with a capital W.

Although I was aware of bondage porn by that time, I prissily steered a wide path around it for years despite its ready availability close to home. Thus, the only information I had to go on at that time (or, really, wished to go on), this being the early 1980s, were Irving Klaw’s extraordinary pictures of Bettie Page and her cohort often ineptly tied for his Movie Star News. My wife will remember the pilgrimage she and I took to the tatty storefront, meeting Irving’s sister Paula, who ran the shop at that time, and our coming away with a catalog of the tiny images which MSN would sell to customers as prints. Having turned my nose up at Bondage Life, Lyden, HOM and the other image peddlers, those vague, tiny Klaw images were my first tutorial in tying up comely lasses.

Fine Art 105

Well, all right.

I've been on a bit of a tear about political miscrescence lately, and perhaps struggling a bit to bring these into line with the subject of this journal. This has been noted to me by more than one correspondent in recent weeks.

"...well and good, but I don't usually think to go to RSE as I read the Times, and it's good that you try but it doesn't work the other way round any better."

I appreciate that LS, so I'll stick scrupulously to rope this week. Well, that and maybe a dash of fine art.

Many people have commented over the months on the little image to the right of this post - "Puzzle Piece". That was a photo that was planned to happen with a particular photographer a lot sooner than it actually did, but what came into being in its stead are several excellent artistic and personal connections I now enjoy, including with my co-conspirator in "Puzzle Piece", the real subject of that image, of whom you see a little more than half (to guard her identity). However, the photographer, Michele Serchuk, and I had worked together before and come up with some beautiful and unlikely successes in unusually difficult locations. It seems the last thing Michele and I will ever do is shoot anything under well-controlled circumstances, but much good in my life has come of the initial impetus to get dirty in front of her lens.

I was already well-acquainted with Michele's work when I heard from a then-new friend I'd met at BondCon (back when that event was being held in NYC) and with whom I'd played several times, that Michele was interested in photographing us doing what we were still figuring out we liked to do together. The location would be a crumbling truck garage in the meatpacking district (now desperately chic, but then prelapsarian); suspension points would be what one could scrounge, and motor oil was guaranteed to be pretty much on everything. Several of these images have become calling cards of mine since, and this next one evinces especially well the spirit I like to bring to all such proceedings:

Michele shoots medium format on very high speed film (ASA 4000+) to get the splendid granular detailing (always poorly reproduced on the Web) using available light. The picture above was made with the help of a small clearstory admitting southern light - I could barely see anything myself and discovered thereby for the first time that tying in the dark is good fun.

The images below were made in a stairwell with what came in through a single skylight. There are many better examples available at her website. In the meantime, however, the following are shots from that first session for which I preserve some serious affinity.


With thanks to my dear LH.

Fine Art 101

First among the bits I'll put up of my work with other artists is credited to Barbara Nitke. Today's are from her advertising portfolio. I am in a few of these (we have given me the designation "Macground" since I am mostly just presence), but my in-frame co-conspirator and the person to whom you will be giving most of your attention is model and actress Ming Jin. Her devastating make up is by Khush Singh. This set was inspired by the film Lust, Caution, and we shot against the most elegant cargo elevator in NYC.


Barbara and I have been working collaboratively for years on several of her portfolios, and whenever she envisions rope being included as an element in her pieces, no matter how little, we link up. We often seem to end up with more bondage than might have been originally intended (and I frankly can't tell in the end who among us (models included) is responsible for failing to rein it in) but the results have been uniformly fabulous.

Barbara is not a practitioner of rope, but she is a long-time student of BDSM who intuitively understands the same thing I do about its efficacy in collapsing perceptions of space and difference between partners in a scene. Her last book, Kiss of Fire, is is a great chronicle of BDSM in NYC before it came above ground, and reveals Barbara's talent for capturing the spiritually humane, some have even said religious, import of BDSM.


I may say more about these and other of Barbara's pictures I'll post here, but for the time being I'll just let the images do the talking (and the first thing they'll tell you in no uncertain terms is that Barbara owns the copyrights).


Well, I will add that what you're looking at are the raw images, un-retouched by Barbara's considerable expertise in that department. Of the very few images that will actually enter her portfolio these may or may not be among the elect. From this particular shoot, however, these are among my favorites and representative of my continuing interest in Barbara's project.