Page 32 - Bondage Basics: Naughty Knots and Risque Restraints

In World War II, there existed something of a cultural exchange between the forces of Vargas was also popularizing fetish art with his Vargas Girls series, which portrayed
Japan and Germany, which somewhat incredulously led to the Western style of rope
bondage becoming known in Japan. The Western style was more strictly based on
aesthetics, and the fusion of this style with the Eastern style was christened shibari, with
America arguably being the world’s largest audience for development of rope bondage
today. Cultural cross-pollination happens with movies, theater, music, and dance all the
time, and rope bondage is simply another wonderful art form that shares many of the
same features of intent and aesthetics and has taken root and flourished with influence
coming from both Japan and the Western world. Shibari created a dynamic and exciting
style that is vibrant and fluidly evolving.
These days, the terms kinbaku and shibari are often used interchangeably, as it is wrongly
assumed that they refer to the same thing. In fact, shibari more properly refers to the
artistic practice of rope tying for aesthetic purposes, while kinbaku remains the correct
term for artistic and sexual rope bondage.
Western Rope Bondage
The history of rope bondage in the western world is a lot less prominent than in the
east. The first mention of rope bondage in any kind of erotic sense was in the
Nibelungenlied, a thirteenth-century epic poem most likely from Austria. In the story,
Brunhilde, the Warrior Queen of Iceland, is bound and raped by her husband and
another, after which she sinks into submission to her husband and never again possesses
any of her legendary strength and guile. Okay, I can tell you aren’t really listening, and
I don’t blame you; it’s pretty dry in the beginning. But what is important to know is that
in the early 1900s, an appreciation for bondage and fetish imagery was finally brought
to the Western world by John Willie, an Englishman who founded and published Bizarre
magazine as a vehicle for his erotic artwork. Around the 1940s, Peruvian painter Alberto
Modern rope bondage is a mix of many styles. „
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sensual, erotic images of women in full-body stockings wielding whips and in other
delightfully sinful roles. Vargas is arguably the father of modern pinup, and his works
are just as scintillating today as they were back then.
It wasn’t until the time of the gorgeous, luscious game changer Bettie Page, however,
that BDSM art came to prominence in the west. American photographer Irving Klaw
turned Bettie into the first bondage model by having her pose for fetish and BDSM-
themed images, which he then sold through mail orders. Incidentally, it appears that
Irving’s sister, who was his assistant, was the one doing most of the tying up, making this
landmark woman the first to be publically tied by another woman. Bettie’s dark beauty
and the playful-yet-sexual style of these images have made the model an enduring icon
for pinup and fetish art over the decades since the ’50s, and she still inspires bondage
models and rope artists all over the world, as well as famous figures like burlesque
dancer Dita von Teese.
The discussion of rope bondage throughout Western history has been much more
problematic than its presentation in Eastern history; the marital rape of Brunhilde is
certainly not a great platform from which to build a healthy understanding of the role of
rope in modern BDSM. This mainstream misunderstanding of rope in BDSM has continued
for years. In the 1950s, the French author Anne Desclos, working under a pseudonym,
wrote a letter to her lover in the form of an erotic novel. In the novel, the protagonist, O,
is brought into the world of BDSM by her dom lover Rene, and it is an exhilarating, thrilling
novel in every sense of the word. However, at the end, by achieving full submission, it is
implied that O has ceased to be anything but a sexual object, having lost herself entirely,
which has caused the book to be hotly debated in the world of BDSM. Isn’t this the
opposite of what a true submissive seeks to achieve? A submissive seeks to become their
true self through submission, not to cease being themselves entirely, so perhaps O should
have felt herself truly at one with herself in her role as slave instead of having lost herself
within the role. For me, rope bondage is a means by which I become more of the person
that I am—and this is exactly why it is so beautiful.
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