To talk about sexuality in a shared language, we define the basic concepts we will use throughout the course and explain how asymmetry is understood in the style of shibari we teach.
Academic definitions take on meaning when we bring them into our own experience. We look at what erotic experience is, why each person’s eroticism is unique, and how we can cultivate it through fantasies and behaviors.
Emotions are predictive schemas with which the brain interprets the environment and our internal states, and erotic desire is one of them. That is why the same shibari practice is experienced differently depending on the person and the context.
By emotional reaction we mean the set of emotional moments that we interpret as part of the same experience. Knowing how it evolves gives us tools to manage it at each moment of the session.
We focus the management of desire on behaviors and, consequently, on the body, which thus becomes the tool for acting on the situation the brain is trying to explain.
The richer our erotic map is and the better we know it, the more possibilities we will have to experiment and create new experiences in our interactions.
Restriction is the tool with which erotic shibari manages desire through behavior. For it to be an erotic experience, and not a mere sensation, it must have erotic value for both people.
There is no foolproof method that guarantees the full satisfaction of erotic desire, but shibari is a valuable tool for exploring it from a different perspective.
Hidden desire cannot be reached directly or quickly, and in an erotic interaction we would not want it to be. The system sekibaku (責縛) uses to manage the emotions of an erotic shibari session lets us go as far as we want, together, toward a shared experience.
In erotic shibari, shame only arises when there is a chance that another person may gain access to a private part of us that makes us vulnerable, and exposure goes far beyond showing the body.
References to “communication” in shibari are generally full of vagueness, fantasies, inaccuracies or even nonsense. Fallacies such as “another level of communication,” “talking with or through the ropes” or “non-verbal communication” are nothing more than masks for avoiding reality.
The literal translation of Kyosho-gaku (急所學) is “the study of vital points”: a martial arts concept referring to areas of the body where it is advantageous to apply a particular technique in combat.
These are two concepts of Japanese origin that, in the context of erotic shibari, provide a precise conceptual framework to describe both interpersonal space and the mechanisms that govern how erotic interaction begins and unfolds.
Musubi (結び), whose literal translation can be “bond”, “tie”, “knot” or even “conclusion”, is the nominalization of the verb 結ぶ (musubu): “to tie”, “to join”, “to connect”, “to bind”.
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