Tags :: §Shibari
This website is a public collection of my personal notes on shibari (a.k.a. the ancient Japanese art of tying people up and having sex with them1).
When I started learning Shibari, I found a wealth of content online and in books, as well as many things passed down by word of mouth or taught at in-person workshops. There are many excellent teachers, expert practitioners, and skilled communicators in the community, but even the best will make the occasional error, omission, canard, fumble; it isn't wise to learn from only one source. Some of the best information I've found has been in relatively obscure little corners of the internet, which could easily vanish or be forgotten. Therefore, the primary aim of this wiki is not to author novel information, but to collate many different sources, providing a multi-faceted view on each topic.
As someone who cares a great deal about due credit, a secondary aim is to correctly attribute inventions and discoveries to the people who made or popularised them; there is a tendency in shibari to treat forms as immaculately conceived and given by God, and true origins are all-too-commonly lost.
Each note links to other notes in the wiki. Notes which link back to it will appear in a list at the bottom - this is important for getting around! Notes all work the same way, but some have different functions. Most notes are on a single topic, such as the article on the §kimono chest harness. This links to the §chest harnesses note, which is a "structure note" - a note which may not have any content itself, but whose list of linking notes is useful for navigation. Some structure notes may have more detailed commentary, such as the §column ties note. Finally, some notes are more like small essays or FAQs that I've written to share my thoughts with other people, like §how long is a piece of rope?.
External links look like this. They do not open in a new window automatically, but I should fix this soon.
The URLs for individual notes are long horrible strings of leters and numbers, for example <cdc39aa7-06f6-45a8-a610-0932367bcac2.html>. These should be permanent links to the page, regardless of whether its name changes at a later date.
From this page you also access the §index of all pages in the wiki. In future this should be available from every page.
First of all, this website is not a guide, and will not teach you everything you need to perform Shibari safely. If you're a beginner interested in learning, you would be better off finding a local rope group, checking out some good §Shibari resources, and maybe buying a recommended §Shibari book.
I am not an expert - I started learning in 2018 and I've progressed with fits and starts. I do my best to get to the bottom of things, but this only represents my understanding of shibari at a given moment, which may well be wrong in many ways.
Online Shibari resources die regularly - particularly on YouTube, which has a tendency to close PG13 accounts on a whim. If you find broken links, you may have some luck entering the URL into the Wayback Machine (though this won't work with YouTube).
This is actually the second time I've written these notes - my first rendition literally burned down in early 2021. This new set of notes is a work in progress, as I paper over gaps that had previously been filled. In particular, material regarding bottoming, negotiation and safety are currently almost entirely unfinished, as I want to take the time to do those topics justice.
This website is generated automatically from an original set of plain text files on my computer. Notes may be incorrekt, incomplet, or contain formatting errors. My advice is, on learning something new, grab a piece of rope and test it in a safe manner - it might be wrong!
This is a just a joke - but it's important to recognise from the outset that much shibari is not sexual, can be done fully clothed, and many people who enjoy either side of the experience identify as asexual!↩︎