Overview, Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes

1. A Question of Community formulates a critique against common teaching styles in rope and propose an alternative.
2. A Question of Gender (and a tango rant) addresses my experience of how gender norms structure the possibilities of learning and teaching being in ropes (I think about this through comparing ropes with tango).
3. What I Think I Do When I Teach and What I Would Like to Do sums up some present thoughts and wishes concerning my teaching practice in relation to ropes. This post also contains reflections on the teaching skills of some people who inspired me to think about rope bottoming so far, thus enabling this series of posts.
4. Communication in Suspension – on communication skills from a rope-bottoming perspective.
5. Breathing in Suspension – on breathing skills from a rope-bottoming perspective.
6. Muscle and Position Work in Suspension – on muscle and position work from a rope-bottoming perspective.

6. Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes – Muscle and Position Work in Suspension

I hear people saying that you have to be particularly strong, light, young or flexible for being suspended. My experiences with the rope community as well as the pictures of rope practice that people post online prove to me on a regular basis that this is just bogus. I have a lot less rope suspension experiences than many people who are almost twice my age or weight, or are half my strength, or have a much more limited flexibility than me. For sure, there are things that some bodies can do and others not, but if the goal of being in rope is to feel good rather than to produce a certain physical position, it is maybe not so important whether or not a rope bottom can do a full split. And anyways, if you have a body that doesn’t allow you to let’s say put your arms behind your back because of longterm injuries, there are a thousand other ways you could get tied. However, there also other kinds of physical and mental blocks than injuries, and many of them can change with a bit of practice if that is what you want.

TRAINING OUTSIDE OF ROPES
If your goal is to increase your physical capabilities in ropes, other kinds of training can definitely be useful, but non necessarily the same training for everybody.
– Core strength is very useful almost no matter who you are, but take care to give both the frontside and the backside of the body some love. I know people who hurt their backs because they have too strong stomach muscles or vice versa.
– If you are very stiff, doing different types of yoga or stretching can be good. But stretching is a complicated matter. Even the experts don’t agree. After discussions online and with fellow dancers, this is what I would consider a non controversial opinion:

• Listen to your body. Being in a stretch should feel less and less painful, not the opposite. And it should happen rather quickly – if the strain or effort doesn’t recede after half a minute, you are under risk of creating scar tissue that will make you less flexible, not more.
• A stretch is not per se a relaxing practice. Just like an elastic band, the muscle keeps pulling together when you stretch it (they call it the stretch reflex), and will contract when you let go of the stretch. Thus, to try and resolve an issue of stiffness and pain through stretching is not always a good idea. If that is what you are after, try mobilizing with more softness and ease.
• When you stretch with a maximum relaxation in the muscles, you put stress on the connective tissues (the tendons, fascia, and ligaments). There, you don’t have sensory nerves in the same way as in the muscles. This means that you have less possibility to recognize when you do things that can be harmful to you, and you have to be extra careful not to stretch your joints out of place. If you do, you raise the risk of permanent injuries. A typical example of what is not a good idea would be to stretch in ways that pull the knee joint out of its position. The knee joint has more flexibility than a door hinge, but it is actually constructed to fold, not to rotate (whereas for example the hip joint is made to rotate). When you hear yoga or ballet teachers telling you to fold your knee so that it points over your big toe (not inside or outside of it) this is what it is about. Examples of stretch practices where you aim for connective tissues would be yin yoga (you work with a cold body, often letting body weight pull you gradually deeper into stretches) and bikram/hot yoga (you work in such a warm environment that it makes your muscles become soft and wobbly). Especially bikram can be a very pushy practice, where you are told to transgress your own limits rather than being aware of them. If you are into that, make sure you know why you want to do it and how you can protect yourself.
• If you are naturally very flexible in some or all of your joints, risks are that you are hypermobile. You can hurt yourself permanently if you hang in your joints and work on the maximum of your flexibility, even though you feel no pain right now. If you suspect that you are hypermobile in some or several joints, check it up with someone who knows (like a good chiropractor or body therapist) and maybe get some personal advice on how you can train and stretch safely. To to build strength around the joints so that you can hold them in place with the help of your muscles can be one way.

– When it comes to good warm-ups for rope work, there is no specific point in doing stretches or core unless you fancy that. Anything that gets you a little bit warm in muscles and articulations and makes you aware of your present state of body is equally good: jump, roll, dance, box. What you should most of all be interested in warming is your sense of how you (body and mind) are that specific day and hour. Where are you strong? Where are you sensitive? But there are also more technical benefits. When you move, you get the muscles going so that they can protect your articulations. You also often kick some adrenaline and endorfine into the system, which can enhance the experience of being in ropes.

GENERAL ADVICE ON MUSCLE WORK IN SUSPENSION
I think there is much more to say about this, but this is what I think I know:
– Generally, you want to find a way to streamline your body with the ropes, make the force of the body follow the force of the ropes, rather than pushing against them – that will only make it harder. This is not the same thing as relaxing into the ropes. Maybe the image of diving is useful here. When you dive, you want your body to make the least possible resistance against the water. If you push against it or relax completely, the motion is stopped. So active but streamlined muscles is a good idea, especially for the parts of your body that effect your breathing a lot. With arms and legs you can try more pushing if you want to go for a little swim and create motion, rotation and so on.
– If you are up and floating and have a what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-moment, try out how you can move in the suspension, what lines you can support on or direct your weight against without the help of the person who tied you, what muscle groups you can activate and how they change the pressure and breathing in your body. Generally, you can do a lot of things with core, but also with feet, neck, hips…
– If you are in a suspension where you can move a bit, vary between tension and relaxation, don’t get stuck in tensing one muscle group unless you are completely sure that you are depending on that.
– If a position is extremely restricting and does not allow for movement, don’t struggle, just breath and streamline for all that you are worth.

SPECIFIC ADVICE ON MUSCLE WORK IN SUSPENSION
I only have two examples of this so far, but I am looking forward to developing more in the future!

Facedown
Keep breathing? How? I have got a lot of weight on my lungs here…
– Keep your chin up, your throat exposed. It will keep your airways open.
– Relax your belly and lower back. It will make more space in the lower part of your lungs and allows your diaphragm to work propery. However, it will also direct more pressure towards your lower back. If this becomes tiring, try alternating between that and activating lower back and belly, lifting the body up a bit with core and maybe pushing from feet/legs.
And what about the streamlining?
– Start to open your chest already when you are getting tied – don’t let your shoulders hang inwards but tuck them back in a position that follows the ropes. You don’t have to arch back maximum, just give it a clear direction. Once you are up, your position will depend a bit on how your body works. My shoulders don’t move backwards so much, so for me it is a good idea to relax the arms, let the shoulders follow the ropes towards my back and strive forward with my chest. I don’t lock my arms with the thumbs – I keep one hand inside and one hand outside. If, on the other hand, you have very flexible shoulders, it can be good to regulate to what degree your arms follow the ropes backwards. Try being muscularly active in your scapular area (so, it is not the same thing as arms pushing against the ropes.  but note that scapular activity can inflict on your capacity of using the back of your lungs) or controlling the position by locking the arms with the thumbs a bit. Also, you might need help with finding a TK that doesn’t push too hard on your joints.

Upside down
– Breathing: again, keep your chin up (or down, as it were) and expose the throat. You can of course vary this, but if you get dizzy, don’t try to push upwards with your head and chin, look at the floor instead.
– Weight distribution: Don’t relax completely. It will most likely make the ropes more painful and most of all it will pull a lot on your joints. Create torsion and a light tension where you can: In knee joints, hip joints, spine or shoulders (opening them and arching back can help both weight distribution and breathing). You don’t have to use force, but look for what positions you can be in that are muscularly active.

This is all I have for now.
I hope this series of posts can spark good inspiration, discussion and rope!

5. Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes – Breathing in Suspension

Useful on the floor too
It’s a great idea to keep breathing while in suspension. Especially when things get difficult. When I started suspending myself, I went for the ujjayi yoga breathing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQA_VQcJLv4), which worked quite well – long controlled breaths where the supply of oxygen is slow and steady. For some reason, I forgot this when others started suspended me. Now I realize tying myself is not so different from being tied. The person tying can facilitate for me by doing a solid rope work, but it is still me, not them, who is up there. So I need to keep breathing for myself.

There are several ways of breathing in suspension that can help you getting through a rough position. How you should breath depends on what you are doing. I wouldn’t claim to be particularly skilled in this – most things about breathing I picked up from interviewing Gorgone and Gestalta – but I still want to share what I have.
– If you have troubles breathing but no troubles with the ropes, chances are that you are tensing muscles in the belly or the solar plexus area that stops you from breathing. Might be that you need to tense some muscles to be comfortable in the position, but you also need oxygen, so try to find what muscles you can actually relax.

– If you have a problem with the ropes, check in with your breathing. If you find a deep, controlled breath and your problem is still there, that is a good sign you might have to change something that is not yourself.
– Some simple ways of controlling your breath can be:
* to breath in through the nose and out through the mouth
* to count seconds while you breath and try to make each breath equally long
* to make a little pause between each inhalation and exhalation
* to visualize that you send the inhalation out into all you limbs and joints
* to try and make the stream of air entering and exiting you very even

– Depending on what position you are in, and how the ropes are restricting your breathing, think of what would be the best way of sending the air through your lungs.
*breath with your belly, let the belly out when you inhale and tuck it in when you exhale
*Breath with the front of your chest, let the chest rise when you inhale and sink when you exhale
*Breath with the sides of your chest, let your rib cage expand to the sides when you breath
*Breath with your back, try to expand your lungs in the direction of your back
– Here’s a set of breathing exercises from yoga if you want a more specific guidance to widening your breathing repertory:
http://www.doyogawithme.com/yoga_breathing

– Watch out with the breath of fire ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsEZylK8sDA ) and other quick breathing patterns. Breathing pace often spontaneously increases when you are in strong pain, and it can help, but it can also make you dizzy.

4: Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes – Communication in Suspension

Useful on the floor too
It can be difficult to give feedback that asks for stopping or changing. You might enjoy being in the ropes so much you don’t want to get out. You might be scared that the person tying will get hurt or feel guilty if you say stop. You might have difficulties finding a way of phrasing what you need so that the person tying understands. If pain, breathing difficulties or dizziness is something that you enjoy to explore, you also have to be able to distinguish feedback about that from the kind of feedback that means you need a change. That is quite a challenge. Here are some tips that can be helpful:

Be precise about how much time is left until you need to be out of the ropes. Examples:
– I need to get out immediately. Consider cutting the ropes. (Note: cutting is not always the fastest option. Your rigger should have an idea of what cutting would imply, not just cut blindly because you tell them.)
– I will need to get out within 5 minutes, so start untying.
– I’m in no hurry, but I want to gradually start the way out of this.
– I can be in this position another couple of minutes, then I need a major change of weight distribution.

Be precise about what your situation is and what needs to be done. Use verbs to describe both what is happening to you and what you want the person tying to do. Examples:
– I can’t close my hand. I need to get weight off my lower arm now. Can you lift me out of this position?
– My foot hurts. It is not dangerous, but it would be more comfortable if you moved the knot on the rope away from the ankle.
– My upper wrap is sliding. Can you give more of my weight to the hip rope so that I can balance on it?
– I am curious about increasing the inclination of this suspension. Can you raise my legs more?
– I would love to try and take more weight on my chest. Not sure it is functioning, but can you try slacking the line to the arms?

Be aware of the risk that your rigger might be too confused to know what is your left and right – this is a problem many people have even when standing next to each other on the street. Try out other means of directing attention to different body parts. Consider emphasizing speech with for example looking, wiggling the toe or nodding the head (if you can). Consider alternative spatial specifications, such as:
– Closest to the floor
– Closest to the ceiling
– Closest to you
– Closest to the wall

Discuss with the person tying you what kind of non verbal signs are possible between you, and if there are any responses that your body gives automatically that indicates that the person tying should be more alert.
– Intentional: non verbal safe words and other non verbal communication tools is a good thing for me, since I become a bit slow with speech in certain head spaces. To clap out martial arts style is usually not an option when in suspension, but someone checking on your hands and you squeezing them back to show that you are ok is a quite common one. It is completely possible to invent whatever you are in need of here here, as long as you agree and don’t rely solely on one sign- it can be quite complex to overview a whole suspension, so if your sign is to point your feet or open your eyes in a specific way, make sure to do it so that your rigger is aware and don’t rely solely on one non verbal safe word for the whole scene. Wether you use it or not: to invent some kind of common language is a great exercise for learning more about each others skills and communication styles.
– Non intentional: sometimes riggers who know the person they tie with very well talk about looking for certain signs in the body of the person they are tying: fluttering hands, cold sweat, shallow breathing or blue fingers can be indications that someone needs to be in a more restful position soon even though they are not expressing it verbally. But people are very different when it comes to physical reactions. Try to observe what happens to you in situations of strong physical stress, so that you can pass the information on to the people who are tying you.

Be prepared to deal with strong emotions and sensations. To do rope, not least suspensions, can be both painful and in other ways physically demanding. It can also invite strong feelings of vulnerability, anger, horniness, happiness, closeness or disconnection. Since the experience of suspending someone and the experience of being suspended are so extremely different in terms of physical impact and sense of responsibility, you and the one you have been tying with might indeed be in very different emotional places once you get out of the rope. There is no one single formula for how to deal with this, but some thoughts I find useful for the present are:
– Don’t give too much verbal emotional feedback, especially not while you are still in the ropes. You are in a physical situation that demands your concentration, and if you raise a complex emotional question while you are in it, you take a risk. Note, this is not the same thing as not putting limits! If you need to get out of the ropes for psychological reasons, you can of course say “I’m not feeling well, take me down”, but don’t start a long conversation about it until you are physically free. Focus on what you are doing in the moment.
– You might lose your voice control a bit, both if you have a strong emotional reaction and if you are in extreme pain or have a difficulty breathing. If that happens, you might want to be extra precise with what you actually want to say, so that your voice level doesn’t overpower your statement (no matter if it is “I like this” or “get me out of here quickly”).
– Be attentive and careful with new and unknown emotions or sensations in the ropes. If you never felt dizzy in the ropes before, maybe don’t stay in the dizziness so long the first time. Expand your field of manageable emotions gradually.
– Try not to panic without very good reason. If you tell the person you are tying with to untie and the person does so, it is only a matter of time until you are out.
– If the one tying you panics (quite a common reaction if they are frightened that you might not be ok), stick to looking after your body and take responsibility for that before you take responsibility for the emotions of the other. If it happens to be that you are actually quite ok, you can tell them that and remind them that they don’t need to hurry. If not – again, try not to panic.
– Do you have a problem finding good answers to general questions such as “how are you feeling?” and “are you ok?” while you are deeply focused on handling being in suspension? You are not alone. But people tying you are probably curious about these things, so it can be useful to find a strategy for how to answer that when nothing really comes to your mind. Maybe let it be about your breathing, since that is an important key to keeping focus? I’m going to try that in the future, but I am also happy for other advices.
– PS. This one is on my wishing list, not developed to a satisfying degree of concreteness. Someone talked to me about the necessity of knowing and being able to regulate what kind of emotional bond you want and need to establish to the person you are tying with, at least in the moment of the scene, in order for the experience to be both safe and meaningful. I think this is both crucial and very complex to me. I will hopefully get back with hands-on advice in the matter within the span of my life time.

3. Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes – What I Think I Do When I Teach and What I Would Like to Do

I hope this reflection on my attempts of teaching ropes can inspire someone else who teaches or who would like to teach to take a closer look on what they are doing and what they would like to do.

INTRODUCTIONS TO ROPE
I started teaching rope last year here in Stockholm by giving a couple of workshops in Wish (women, trans* and intergender night club) and setting up a women, trans* and intergender separatist rope jam once a month. Over the years, I received some curious questions about rope from my queer community friends, so I did it partly for them, but also for me – I wanted a frame in which to explore rope the way I personally like in an environment that would be safe for me and where I could set the rules and conditions I would have wished for myself when I started. What follows here is an account of some aspects that have been important to me in these introductions to rope, and a little about what I wish I could have done better.

• Experiencing from the inside

I have been busy with the sensory aspect of rope – pressure, friction, giving/taking weight with or without ropes, the different layers of skin, fat and muscles in the body that are put in motion through the rope. I have wanted to supply tools to improvise with ropes and make meaningful sensory discoveries also for those who are absolute beginners and who feel to insecure to even tie a shoe knot. I have been trying to make the body and the physical interaction more important than rope patterns, also working with movement meditation, massage, muscle tone and balance. I have enjoyed this – I think it is a good way of developing a sense for if you like ropes or not and what you could do with it. However, it does not make people develop their tying skills so much – even if I show a basic knot or two, people need time to practice in order to find the self assurance to tie it in a situation where they also are responsible for the person they are tying with. I would like to give people a clear incitement to practice while also maintaining a more integral perspective on physical activity in ropes.

• Facilitating switching

I have tried to structure my introductions to rope in a way that facilitates switching. Of course, I don’t force people who don’t want to tie to tie or vice versa, but when I do warm-ups without ropes, I aim to say “now switch roles” reasonably often when it comes to who touches/receives touch, who takes/receives weight from someone off balance, who opens/closes their eyes and so forth. This is not only because I think there is a risk people end up in certain positions by default rather than by desire, but also because I think it is easier to understand what the other person is dealing with if you have a feel for both positions in an exchange.

At some points, I have encountered groups where a majority wants to get tied by others and are not at all interested in tying, not even themselves. I have been wondering how I can approach these groups in ways that activate them and gives them something of what they are looking for. Since they don’t come for a rope bottoming class, but for getting tied up, we have a problem. Maybe I should either announce a different kind of class, or start asking people to hook up with someone who ties if they don’t want to switch at all. Or I should invest time in fostering more rope tops in the queer scene.

Another thought I have about switching – though it does not apply so much to the queer groups I have been working with – is the culture of switching or not switching partners in rope cooperations. Since rope work demands a certain level of trust, it is completely understandable that people often want to work with someone they know well, especially on advanced levels. However, I think there can really be learning benefits in trying out the same thing with different people. I would thus like to find good forms for proposing partner switching within a pedagogic frame.

• Caring for safety and trust

– It has felt very important to me to establish a culture where its perfectly normal to leave or to say stop, and where people always say something about their desires and limits before they initiate something. I think this is crucial, but it would be nice to find more ways of not always being so verbal about it, but instead intentionally establishing this kind of respectful communication through a consistent practice.
– If I meet beginners, I always say something about what kind of physical risks there are with bondage and what one can do to prevent injury. Here, the challenge is to not scare the shit out of people. On one hand I would feel guilty if people hooked up with someone who suspended them in a club without knowing that they can get nerve damage, on the other hand I think the alarmist discourse of rope bondage is not necessarily adequate at all occasions.
– In the separatist groups where many people might have a trans history or ongoing trans processes, I make space for stating preferred pronouns in presentation rounds. The people who don’t have so much experience with thinking actively about what pronoun they use and why can get a bit confused, but they usually get the point fairly quickly. However, it is a concern for me if and how I could take these politics of gender with me into more cis dominated spaces. If everyone seems very obvious in their gender identity and never thought of it as something that needs further explanation, pronoun rounds just don’t work. There are several things I always do anyways, such as not using gendered pronouns (and especially not gendering the positions of being tied or tying in a generic way, which is quite common otherwise: “when I do this to a model, she has to do this”) unless I am pretty sure I use the right pronoun. Another thing I do sometimes when I have the energy is to out myself as queer. It would be nice to have even more tactics when it comes to dealing with gender politics, though.

TEACHING COOPERATION
I continued teaching ropes in the company of BergBorg during the spring of 2014. We developed two half-day workshops on the theme of cooperation between the two roles in rope couples. We presented them first here in Stockholm, then at Eurix 2014 in Schwelle 7, Berlin. The workshops both use improvisatory floor work, and demand an intermediate experience with ropes. The intention in both workshops is to address the respective activities of tying and getting tied. One of the workshops focuses on physical cooperation, and especially how the bodies can work to get down to the floor together and move on the floor together. We use a lot of basic movement analysis from contact improvisation and martial arts. The other workshop focuses on language and fantasy as a part of cooperating in rope. We try to explore what is in our heads when we are tying or getting tied and what that make us capable of doing and feeling together. We use different games and scores. In both workshops:

– We try to demonstrate and name different things that both the person tying and the person getting tied is actively doing in order to make the tying possible and interesting.
– We ask both the people tying and the people getting tied to describe their physical and mental activity.
– We play with changing the conditions that make the dynamic between the one tying and the one getting tied in different ways.

I could say a lot more about these workshops – I think they are really great, I enjoy teaching them and I hope we will do more workshops in the future. But what I most of all want to say is that it is very useful to have a partner in crime when it comes to setting alternative norms for interaction. Teaching alone does not completely allow for becoming the majority unless you have a very generous group. Being two is already massive if you are in it together. How would it be to be three?

In the future, I would love to develop workshops that could appeal also to the people who think they want to practice mainly suspension and classical forms. It would be nice to find and give tools to approach also that from a slightly different angle, and allow for a more in depth discovery of not only the pattern but also the activities of cooperation between the one who ties and the one who is getting tied in suspension.

PEOPLE WHO INSPIRED ME
Before I throw myself into describing physical activities that I think is useful to facilitate being in ropes, I want to say a few words on who taught me what I think I know for the time being.

First of all, I have had a mutual and very intense almost three year long process of inventing an amazing and ever changing rope practice with Bergborg, who is one of my closest persons in life and a regular rope partner ever since we met. Without our common encounter with rope and our conversations about it, ropes would have been another thing entirely for me. The things I have learned in that relationship and rope practice cannot be summed up here, but it is still important beyond measure to me.

This said, I will from now on stick to mentioning the people who tried to teach me something about being in ropes from a more traditional teacher’s position.

The question of what an experienced rope bottom actually know sort of clicked for me when I was having a knowledge exchange with Bergborg and Butterfly Bondage in the autumn of 2013. The first BB was suspending me and the second one was guiding the both of us through the suspension. She told me basic things, like to activate my abdominal muscles in a specific lift, and when I panicked because I couldn’t feel my hands, she told me to breath and take it easy, and that I could still move my fingers the right way. This set off a wish in me to explore rope bottoming from a less emotional and more technical perspective. I got the distinct feeling that there was something I could learn that was not only about getting myself in the right mood for being tied up and to trying to give the right instructions for the somewhat slack wrap tension that usually works for lifting me in a TK.

When I think back, Dasniya Sommer and Frances d’Ath actually gave me some clues on this already back in 2012, and I have been revisiting their classes at several points also after that because I think they have a very open, caring and inventive approach to both ropes and students. Actually, Dasniya was the one who wisely told me that it is a good idea to stop before you are completely exhausted in the ropes, since you have to last on your way out, too. I think this is a super important advice that stopped my macho endure-all-attitude from kicking in in these early days of rope practice. I also think Dasniya and Frances have a rather hands-on approach to the physicality of being in rope, without necessarily talking so much about it. Since their classes are usefully combined with yoga as a warm-up, there is an approach to breathing, core work and and pain management already on the floor.

The first time I came to a rope event explicitly looking for ways to not only tie/get tied up, but also ways to actively be in ropes was Eurix 2014. There I met MarikaRope, who recently opened Resonance13, a movement studio with the ambition of making more events specifically for and about rope bottoming, using inspiration from for example aerial acrobatics. During Eurix, I attended her movement class, which was a lot about core stability, stretching and mobilizing the spine. I enjoyed this a lot, not least because I was dying for a workout. Rope can be so slow sometimes. I also like that it gave me an occasion to think of how physical practice on the floor can become meaningful in relation ropes.

Since I had this longing to pick up more knowledge about rope bottoming, I also attended a couple of model discussions, one of them ending in a very hands-on experiment that I will soon get back to. However, I first want to say something about model discussions.

I would love to see more model exchange in practice rather than theory, but also, I want discussions and panels about modeling to be more structured. I want someone having a plan and taking responsibility for not letting the conversion drift. As long as that is not happening, a lot of the time will disappear into anecdotes about traumatic nerve damage and about what riggers should and should not do. It is completely understandable that people have a need to discuss those things, but then maybe a collective write up on accidents would be a more appropriate format, or a course on rigger safety and communication. If we want models to really learn something from model talks, then someone needs to know what they want to teach and keep focus on that, especially since we have this tilt towards giving riggers priority in the rope community.

This said, I was writing frenetically during these model discussions, trying to distinguish and gather all things that could work as applicable knowledge. And I think I learned a lot. The following two posts in this series about learning and teaching being in ropes – Communication in Suspension and Breathing in Suspension – are pretty much based on what people said during these discussion (and a bit on things I figured out for myself). I think what I wrote down comes a lot from Gorgone, Gestalta, MarikaRopes and RedSabbath, but most likely also from other voices in the crowd.

About the hands-on part: I asked to be coached by Gorgone and Gestalta in two positions that I have different problems maintaining sometimes – face down because my hands fall asleep and head down because I get dizzy. Gorgone tied me, and she and Gestalta observed me in the suspension and told me what I could do to maintain the positions more efficiently. I will get back to my physical epiphanies in the later post about muscle and position work, but I also want to share some reflections about learning and teaching being ropes starting from the social conditions for this experiment:
– We had a little discussion on whether someone else than the models giving feedback should tie me or not. I didn’t want to, and I think there was something useful in getting feedback from someone who knew exactly what they had tied, so there was no question of what the ropes did. Also, to get tied by someone who knows very well what it feels like to be in a good suspension is for me quite reassuring. However, I think there would be benefits with the other solution as well. Having someone who is not your rigger giving feedback on your position is more time efficient in a traditional class situation, and it is a good way of avoiding discussions between people tying and people getting tied in sensible situations. I know from tango classes that it can be a big relief having someone from outside telling what your problem is. That is what teachers are for. If you and your partner are not super experienced, you might both make assumptions that are faulty, and then you begin working in the wrong direction. And on the occasions that you know that the feedback from your partner is true, you might still not always be able to handle it. Maybe other people have more easy-going personalities than me, but to have someone that is pretty much on your own experience level correcting you can be difficult sometimes. And in none switching rope couples it is often even more asymmetric. To take advice from someone who knows even less than you about what you do is a real challenge. That is why teachers rock.
– There is no question whatsoever that there are rope bottoms out there fully capable of giving useful advice to other rope bottoms beyond the level of basic safety. Gorgone and Gestalta had very precise ideas of what I could do to make things easier once I was up in the ropes, and still I had a feeling that we were just scratching the surface. It was like finally getting the long overdue suspension intro for rope bottoms that I should have been given back in 2012.
– A couple of people told me afterwards they thought it was brave of me to ask for help to work out something that I was scared of when others were watching. The thing is, I was not scared. I was just eager to learn. Maybe there was something I did that made people jump to the wrong conclusion – maybe I did a scared face or whatever – but my suspicion is rather that it is so uncommon that models ask for help to practice something and get help with working it out that the mere fact of me asking to do that invites for the interpretation that these positions must have been troubling me a lot.
– I again thought of how much more models help riggers than vice versa. In classes that are really only about how to tie a pattern, models hang around and wait for getting tied, calmly and nicely. Sometimes this dynamic is so explicit the rigger pays for the class and the model is getting paid to work. While that kind of market is getting out of style in Europe, riggers are still absent to a quite high degree from the little amount of explicitly framed model work that actually does happen, including self-suspension classes. Also when riggers are there and try to help, they sometimes do it from a perspective that comes only from their own rope practice and knowledges, not really from understanding rope bottoming as the set of complex skills that it is, independent of the rigging. I  could make several examples of this, but let me stick with a fairly polite one: In the middle of our hands-on experiment, a rigger passed by without much previous understanding of the situation and proposed that instead of actively trying to identify what I can do to make things easier for myself while I am suspended face down, I could just have someone suspending me daily in a less and less steep inclination until I was horizontally face down, and then I would have learned how to work with my body from the experience. That would indeed be helpful in the sense that someone would put a lot of their time at my disposal, but it is still not what I would consider an advice coming from a clear understanding of the activity of being in ropes. I truly believe in the power of practice, and maybe I would even like to be in a more or less steep suspension for ten days in a row – but just like when I rig, I want to have a developed and speakable language for my activities. A TK for suspension can also be invented from only experience – that is how this shibari stuff developed in the first place I imagine – but it would be slower and more dangerous than taking some initial advice from others.

2. Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes – a Question of Gender (and a tango rant)

I started this series of posts by stating that from where I stand in the rope community, I can see a clear asymmetry in how rope classes are taught. Instructions are primarily given from and to the people who tie, and very little information is passed on from and to the people who are getting tied.

In this post, I want to write a bit about the obvious gender patterns that coincide with the present structure of learning and teaching in the rope world. In my experience, rope spaces have a strong bias towards cis men tying and cis women getting tied. If I don’t include the explicitly women and trans* separatist rope events that I myself hosted in Stockholm with friends, I can count the clear exceptions from this bias in my personal history of attending rope jams or workshops on a couple of fingers.

Now, what has this to do with learning and teaching being in ropes? A lot, I would say. We live in a society where gender matters: where women still statistically talk less in relation to men, feel less assured to initiate movement in relation to men, take less space physically in relation to men and so forth. The degree to which this is true differs from context to context, but in some contexts, it is certainly more obvious than elsewhere.

I used to dance tango several times a week. The tango scene has a lot in common with the rope scene. It has a historical bond to the queer culture, to the whore houses and the criminal elements in society, but has, at least in Europe, become a reasonably expensive hobby for economically well established grown-ups. Its activities are centered around an improvisatory couple work. It is, to different degrees, an eroticized or intimacized physical practice. It has a strong bias towards cis male leaders and cis female followers. And its image world is haunted by the extrapolated masquerades of norm functional female forms posing through or for the male form (I mean like this:
https://www.google.se/search?q=tango&client=firefox-a&hs=lT3&rls=org.mozilla:sv-SE:official&channel=sb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=-AMwU839EYG24wTf0oCACg&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1208&bih=654 If you google shibari, you will actually have slightly more diverse results. But the tendency is still strong.)

As a female bodied gender fluid tango switch, I have danced with people of all ages and genders. I have felt safe, trustful and respected in traditional Argentinian community tango balls, separatist queer balls, retirement homes with afternoon balls for old people and high tempo elitist white inner city tango carrier balls (ok, almost safe). I have also encountered numerous peculiar reactions on my choice to lead, while simultaneously observing a certain kind of abusive dynamics that would strike against the women who chose to primarily follow. Some things made me laugh, other things scared me away from the scene for weeks.

There was the guy who hurt his followers in tango class physically when they didn’t understand where he wanted to lead them (because he was unclear). There was the guy who told my friend to go to a lesbian night club instead of destroying his tango floor by following women. There was the guy who walked up to my high-heeled leader in the middle of a tanda (set of tango songs) to save any of us from the disgrace of dancing with each other. There was the guy who asked me, with a weird glare in his voice, if I drive as good backwards as forwards. There was a stream of female followers who felt more safe dancing with other females because they wouldn’t risk sexual approaches. There were others who asked me if I was “dancing man” and did different jokes on that, which had a sort of queering potential but also contained a grain of trans/homophobia (like: you’re dancing in the wrong direction, what’s between your legs and will you grope me now?).

These things, in their different degrees of curiosity, humor and aggression, is what I would call heterosexism. Both the latent fear in tango women of being physically intimidated and the general incapability of properly disassociating leading and following in tango from male and female gender identity are for me strong indicators of a system of desire that privileges a dynamic of male dominance and female submission, not primarily in the BDSM sense of the words, but in an even wider sense, a social sense. People come to tango not only to dance, but also to embrace their dreams of masculinity and femininity, and some really find great pleasure in that. At the same time the system of desire between these extremes (the back-bended girl in the red dress, the man in the black suit holding her weight) is a system that encourages infractions on female integrity, a system that doesn’t respect personal boundaries or safe words. To play with tango is to play with patriarchy. That is also why I have been in so many tango balls, I suppose. We need to play or we die from boredom.

I love to find other orders of desire – orders that are less rigid, less fearful, that allow for limits to be set and respected, that allow for opening up, leaning backwards, giving weight and being sure of not being attacked. Sometimes it is there for me, I can move stuff without hurting myself or others. And then sometimes I just get so shocked with the kind of violence people carry I can’t even think of how to begin a dialogue.

Some from the rope world might recognize elements of what I have told about tango from their experiences of rope. Others might not at all. I know I do. But I can also see differences, and these differences allow me to return to the question of asymmetry in how rope classes are taught.

When it comes to teaching, I think tango is far ahead in its capacity of addressing both roles. This said, I have still met a lot of female followers who feel they would never dare to lead because its “too complex”, and male leaders who, when they finally met a female leader, are super enthusiastic about finally getting to follow (some male leaders suffer from the delusion that they can never follow a man) – only to discover that they don’t have the technique to do it, which makes them disappointed with the female leader since they thought following would be easy. And I have met a small number of tango teachers that, apart from teaching, also keep on telling their tango followers to “just follow”, “don’t think”, “empty your head”. This is not what I call an instruction, especially not if it’s combined with instructions to the leaders that go along the lines of “it’s like driving a truck”. No, definitely not! A leader is not moving a dead object in space, and nor is a follower’s head empty. Real instructions (for both followers and leaders) are about the activities of listening, being prepared, waiting, answering, taking action, interpreting and giving attention in a constant flux of rotation, balance, muscular activity, breathing, tension and relaxation. Most tango teachers know this, no matter how oblivious they are of gender politics. A typical traditional tango class would thus be two teachers, one leader and one follower, giving feedback to the student couples using their respective knowledges about following and leading. They usually manage to give equal attention to all students – and they don’t even have to make a stand against heterosexism to do it.

Why then are not rope teachers employing this teaching style to a higher extent? I think the question could be answered in a lot of different ways.
– How the practices look in terms of movement is different. Tango followers are moving a lot, often more than the leaders, since the leaders are turning the followers from and around themselves. People who are getting tied are always actively doing things with and in their bodies, not least when they are still, but on the outside it might look as though the person tying is the more active physically. To give instructions for how to handle stillness can be less obvious.
– Tango has a longer history in Europe than shibari which means there are even more practitioners bringing their competences to the practice, and it is also for historical reasons more influenced by the fairly well established field of dance pedagogy. Tango is mainstream, shibari is still pretty underground, which means it has not had the chance of developing the same way.
– Rope has a stronger connection to photography and the art of looking good rather than feeling. People often work to recreate rope images, and the professionalism in rope has an aspect of modeling-photographing-rigging for shoots that the tango professionalism lacks (tango professionalism it is all about teaching and performance).
– And, the most important answer for where I am going with this post: rope is even closer than tango to the domain of sexuality, closer to the naked lines of the body – and to submission and dominance in the BDSM sense.

Though BDSM practitioners often stress their interest in safe words, there are certain things that are bigger than us, community and society that we cannot really safe word ourselves out of.

Recently, I was in a presentation round where a lot of female rope bottoms did not present themselves or said very little about their own experiences of ropes, since they were there with their male tops who would just insert the bottoms name in their own presentation (typically “and this is my model X”). I completely understand that it can be pleasurable to let someone else speak for you. I mean, enjoy both “dancing woman” and playing dog (nope, dogs don’t get quotation marks). To give over power willingly to someone I trust can make me feel extraordinarily strong, safe and free. But if the activity that I am engaging in is not a priori to practice or reflect on verbal power exchange – but for example, to practice and reflect on ropes – and the bleed from people’s power exchange kinks is there already before the rope work starts, it risks to set up certain norms for behavior that does not facilitate learning and teaching rope on mutual terms for both roles at all. And I even doubt that every individual couple in that presentation round chose to distribute the talking in the way they did just because they were enjoying that kind of power transfer so much. I think the social fear of being attacked and the lack of own initiative that is at the heart of traditional femininity sometimes get mixed up with submissiveness in a way that does not generates much pleasure at all, but merely undermines the potential conversations, explorations and confrontations that a space could contain. I am saying this not only because of the people who assume that I am primarily interested in getting tied up just because I have a pussy, but also because of my own experiences of slowly conquering the space of leading and the space of rigging. My initial default in both tango and rope was to go for following positions. Not because I was not curious about the other side, but because I thought that would make me melt in more and melting in would be the less complex thing. But it isn’t. And I don’t want to melt in. I want us to be as many and diverse as we actually are.

I want rope bottoming and femininity to be categories of its own, that coincide occasionally but not on default.
I want rope bottoms to have distinct own voices and own things to learn and teach in the rope community.
I want a rope community that actively works to reassure that submission comes from a powerful place.

And I want patriarchy to respect my safe words. But I won’t stop dancing just because it doesn’t yet.

1. Learning and Teaching Being in Ropes – a Question of Community

I have done rope for three years now, and I know that the branches and roots of this activity are so many I cannot ever say I have a good overview. But from where I am right now, I have a concern about how rope is taught.

On my travel in rope, I have met a bunch of different teachers.
– Many teach beautiful rope patterns, suspension techniques or suspension progressions.
– Most give some basic speeches about nerve damage, knowing your limits and being able to say stop.
– Quite a few teach improvisation techniques; how to find ways to let the rope flow over a body also without a structured plan.
– Some are busy with the experience of the material of the rope: the sound, the smell, the feel of it, how to treat it, how much load it can bear, or even how to make it.
– Some teach “connection”, which is to say that there is not only a rigger and an object getting tied, but something happening in-between the people tying, some kind of exchange of emotions and interpretations. Some have strong opinions on how this connection should be performed physically (close, distant or varied according to specific rhythms) or psychologically (exposure/shame, dominance/submission). Others just set a more or less clear frame for exploring and playing.

There is more too and I am grateful for all that I have learnt. Knowledge also enables us to discover things for ourselves and in the company of the people we trust to see the whole of us. Maybe because I have been very fortunate when it comes to the later kind of discoveries, it took me something like two and a half years until I realized: very few teachers really gave me much of a clue of how I can work with my body when I am getting tied, or how the person I am tying can work with their body. Despite the fact that there are usually a teacher couple in the classes I attend (demonstration bunnies counts: they are there because they have a skill) and thus two positions being explored, nearly all the pedagogic attention of most teachers I have met is directed towards the activity of the one tying.

This is a problem because the people getting tied are half of the room. Which means, if this group of people want to learn anything, all they can do is to hope that their own bodies will present them with some kind of hallelujah moment, hope that the one tying them will know enough to give them a hint, or hope that they can catch something useful by imitating the expressions, postures and attitudes of other people getting tied around them. To have hallelujah moments is great but not necessarily common. To trust your co-studying top to coach you creates an additional power dynamic which is not always so cool if the co-student is just as much a beginner as yourself. To only imitate without knowing the purpose usually does not help you getting a feel for your own desires, capacities and limits.

If we want a rope scene that develops on the terms of all practitioners, we need more teachers who actually have a plan for how they address the totality of their students, not only half of them. Thus, I am now going to write a series of posts about different aspects of learning being in ropes. This is my attempt to structure both my present reflections on this practice and the fragments of articulate knowledge I have about being a rope bottom. I share it because I care about what our community as a whole is capable of and because I want rope-bottoms to validate, discuss and share their knowledge, so that I can learn even more in the future.