For anyone who comes to this discipline out of curiosity, safety is among the first things they ask about.
On the one hand, seeing the outrageous things—in the good and the bad sense—that some practitioners share makes anyone taking their first steps in shibari worry and weigh their chances of coming out unharmed if they copy what they see in photos or videos.
At the other extreme are the “safety” mantras repeated by instructors or groups, which set out a series of intentions that are then rarely applied consistently in practice.
The social context here is easier to understand if we look at its three pillars—ignorance, good intentions and bad intentions—and analyze it from three areas of action: beginner practitioners, popularizers and organizers and, finally, instructors or reference figures.
Ignorance on the part of someone coming to shibari is natural: they are curious, they look for information and they will tend to apply an authority bias to sources that seem trustworthy to them, for one reason or another.
It is worth highlighting here how difficult it is to verify the truth or accuracy of much of the information that circulates about shibari.
Apparently “trustworthy” sources endlessly repeat errors, simplifications and dubious claims without much intention of reviewing or checking them. It is the well-known illusory truth effect.
The ignorance shown by popularizers and organizers is more delicate, because it plays a direct part in building the context where other people will learn, practice or make decisions.
You often see it: a venue looking for legitimate profit organizes a shibari-related event and includes in the description fanciful references to Asian princesses and samurai as the origin of the “art.”
When the lack of knowledge shows up in those who run training—and the euphemism “sharing knowledge” is still an attempt to soften the responsibility that teaching involves—the matter is more serious.
Teaching errors, simplifications or poorly understood practices not only puts at risk whoever believes them and tries to put them into practice, but also holds back their future progress.
Correcting a bad habit is harder than learning properly from scratch.
Mastering shibari technique well enough to explain it to someone else takes time: time to practice and even more time to process and understand each element and concept.
A lack of knowledge and understanding can be disguised under a well-crafted discourse, careful staging or a very effective visual aesthetic, but not in the face of genuine curiosity.
Asking why, what for, how, or what makes a technique be done one way or another is still one of the best tools for learning responsibly.
You often see it: instructors who, when students ask questions or struggle to understand and apply a technique, answer “just because,” or some even rudely, with raised voices and even put-downs like “you’re not cut out for this.” Answers and behavior completely out of place in any context, educational or not.
And this brings us to intentions: what motivates people to do things. Everyone is presumed to have good intentions—a matter of Augustinian thought—but unfortunately good intentions alone guarantee neither judgment, nor preparation, nor responsibility.
The international shibari scene has enough cases to show that deeply irresponsible behavior exists: from predatory dynamics to toxic behavior in practically every role imaginable.
But not everyone is a bad person.
Fortunately, a very high percentage of people in shibari mean well. Of course, the old saying already warns us about that:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Because with the best intentions in the world, risk escalates into danger, and danger leads to incidents that have consequences.
On their own, good intentions guarantee nothing; they require knowledge, time, analysis and reasoning, as well as a constant exercise of personal responsibility.
Let’s look at a few examples of basic safety recommendations that will illustrate these statements better.
Safety 101: rope-free joints
From the first workshop I attended more than twenty years ago until today, this mantra has been repeated like a prayer that wards off all evil:
Leave a rope-free safety space of at least 8–10 centimeters (3–4 inches) over the joints.
The usual explanation is that joints contain “lots of” delicate things that can break. Which is true: the white tissues that make up a joint are relatively easy to damage and hard to recover.
A more technical explanation is that the function of the joints is to stabilize the body and redirect loads to the muscles, so they are not designed to bear certain forces directly, nor do they allow proper kinetic chains to be established when they are put under direct load.
Whether it is acrobatic shibari in the air or affectionate shibari on the floor, the priority should be to protect the joints by stabilizing them and keeping them within a reasonably safe range of motion. Something hard to achieve when they receive direct pressure or load.
This rule applies to each and every joint in the body, which certainly leaves us little room to apply rope if we have to leave a safety margin over all of them.
The fingers and toes, the neck, the elbows, the knees, the cervical or lumbar spine are especially delicate areas in this respect, and the risks are easy to picture: a broken finger, unwanted choking, a spinal cord injury or inflamed nerves.
But what about the wrists?
A joint where veins, nerves, tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bones coexist in a very small space. It seems reasonable to assume it is an especially sensitive area.
Open your favorite app for shibari photos and videos and look at the wrists… How often do you see a rope, a single column or, worse still, a double column wrapped around them? How many photos can you find where the joints—wrists, knees, elbows, shoulders, hips…—are clearly under heavy loads and forces?
Before the weeping and gnashing of teeth, a note: photographs may have a dramatic purpose, be faked or convey a specific image and narrative, so they are not a 100% reliable reference; real, guided practice, on the other hand, is.
And it is in that setting that it is genuinely hard to find shibari that doesn’t tie the wrists, something that shows a lack of knowledge and good or bad intentions, depending on the case and the day; but the result is the same: the person being tied is taking on, with their body, a risk increased by poor application of the technique.
The intention really doesn’t matter; the key is both parties taking on responsibility.
Safety 102: a “false sense of safety”
Safety sells; Google’s algorithm puts it among the top searches related to shibari. And that can encourage the discourse on safety to shrink to a collection of reassuring words that are hard to back up in practice.
Let’s say our space is safe and we have someone who knows first aid—fine, that never hurts. But do we really know how to deal with a moderately serious shibari-related problem or accident?
A few months ago I was sent the dossier for an event; it detailed the presence of medical staff in the room during the class. What do they expect might happen in a class?
Let’s be clear about one thing: in shibari it takes a combination of enormous recklessness, extremely rough practice and quite a bit of bad luck for a serious injury or incident to happen on the spot.
The physical risk is not so much instant injury as cumulative damage.
Poorly applied safety recommendations will rarely cause a disabling injury at the time; what they do is wear down the tissues progressively, and depending on the age, physical condition and habits of the person being tied, recovery may be quick, slow or nonexistent.
That damage is cumulative, and shibari is not the only factor: poor posture in daily life, other poorly executed efforts or occasional incidents also add to the deterioration. At a certain point, those tissues will fail to function properly or even suffer severe injuries.
Just as worrying is claiming that a space is safe from predatory behavior simply because the advertising says so. It is wise to keep a certain judgment and weigh carefully what “safe” really means in each context.
Venues that put shibari and chemsex on the same poster hardly make me think of a particularly safe environment. I am not invalidating either practice; I simply believe they follow different logics and require levels of responsibility that are hard to reconcile.
Safety shears are another sacred totem; like those raised by tribes, their mere presence in the room seems to protect us from all evil.
But do we really know how to use them? Do we know how to cut a three-rope takate? What is the right order for a quick, efficient release? Could we release, quickly and safely, a person who goes into convulsions during a suspension? And afterward, what should we do?
Another true story: someone who teaches shibari every week who, faced with a student with a numb feeling in their hand, cannot tell from the symptoms which nerve is affected, let alone its path, to understand the cause of the problem and prevent it in the future.
And, since I like stirring things up, let’s talk about consent and pre-session agreements as a framework for a false sense of safety.
To begin with, we are trusting that the other person will keep their word and has good intentions; but we have already seen that, besides the existence of bad intentions, good ones don’t automatically guarantee a safe result either.
And this applies to both parties: shibari is a practice that, in certain contexts, can provoke high levels of arousal and increase desire. These situations change the way we interpret reality, so that things that seemed crazy ten minutes ago can start to seem like a perfectly reasonable idea.
Nor does having talked everything through cover “everything.” Another example I know firsthand:
A self-employed manual worker—with no social security cover—takes part as the person being tied in a shibari session. Everything had been talked through, everything agreed in advance. Even so, they suffer a nerve injury and the mobility of one hand is affected. Since everything had been agreed, and the person tying is very nice, the next day they sent a WhatsApp message:
—Hi, how are you? —Fine, but I still can’t move my hand. —Oh dear, did you go to the physio? Put some arnica on it. —Yes, I already did; if it’s still like this tomorrow, I’ll go.
After this there were no more messages or any gesture from the person who tied, but the person who was tied was left with an injury that kept them from working for several weeks; remember that they had no social security cover and their income depends on their daily work. Do your pre-session agreements cover what to do in case of a disabling injury? Or are they only about the body’s orifices?
Safety 103: the great forgotten
In other articles we have already warned about how reckless it is to confuse spasms, reflexes and involuntary movements, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it.
When the body is in a state of high activation and wrapped in ties, spasms are one of the greatest risks; if they appear, the prudent thing is to release the person being tied immediately.
—Ah, but I’ve seen a master use that technique…
It doesn’t matter who it is. At the very least, they are showing a very questionable understanding of the risk and of the consequences certain practices can have.
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list; these are just a few notes meant to point out that safety in shibari goes far beyond a few isolated recommendations, that risk will always be present and that it is our judgment as practitioners that will help us manage it.
And that, in the—hopefully nonexistent—event of an incident, we react from personal responsibility, accepting what happened and seeking the best possible resolution.
EN