Obsession with consent is eroding trust in BDSM

What a Japanese rope master taught me about everything Western kink gets wrong

Consent is the most sacred word in BDSM. It is the ethical bedrock, the line between what we do and what abusers do, the first thing out of every educator’s mouth and the last thing anyone is willing to question.

So let me question it.

Not its necessity. Its sufficiency.

Here is what I have learned after years of immersion in this world, after tying and being tied, flogging and being flogged, after interviewing dozens of practitioners and educators and survivors and healers: consent is not all of what makes BDSM transformational.

(For survivors of sexual assault, predictability through negotiation is often healing, so I’m not necessarily speaking to that particular aspect of this).

The scene that breaks someone open isn’t always the one we negotiated down to the last detail. It’s the one where they trusted someone enough to stop negotiating. Where they said, in one way or another: take me somewhere I don’t know how to ask for.

If BDSM is therapeutic, what makes it therapeutic? Is it the pain? The power exchange? The altered states? The aftercare?

Every practitioner I’ve spoken with has answered differently. A few of their responses:

Tani and Leslie, founders of the Light Dark Institute, say BDSM is the externalizing of the “internal dungeon.” They will stand in a room full of adults and teach them to say the word “yellow” out loud, just to get the shape of it in their mouths, because some people have never in their lives practiced the act of slowing something down.

Mistress Seren, a Dominatrix and friend based in New York, says BDSM is the greatest mirror.

Natasha Nawataneko, author and professional rope bottom, says it’s the body being put under pressure until its patterns become visible.

Zetsu Nawa says it’s trust.

Not consent. T-r-u-s-t. And he wants you to know the difference.

Zetsu is a rope artist, somatic educator, and author of Discovering Kinbaku: What My Adventures in Japan Taught Me about the Art of Erotic Rope Bondage. He has studied under traditional Japanese lineage holders, and his teaching centers on the nervous system, attachment patterns, and the emotions beneath dominance and submission, which is, according to him, often shame.

His perspective on what makes BDSM work, at its deepest level, challenges some of the most foundational assumptions in Western kink culture. He says the entire ethical infrastructure is built around consent. It’s the line. The non-negotiable. The slogan on the T-shirt.

Zetsu isn’t advocating for the abandonment of consent. What he’s doing is pointing at something underneath it and asking: what if the thing that makes a scene transformational isn’t the agreement to participate but the willingness not to know what happens next?

Neither he nor I am saying it’s best to walk into a scene without consent.

However…

What you consent to in negotiation exists in place of a deeper trust that has not yet been built, and once that trust does develop, it becomes possible to move past some of the limits you set when all you had to go on was what you already knew about yourself.

You know what you know you like.

You know what you know you don’t like.

But there is more.

There are things in it that would serve you, that would heal the torn places and make you braver than you thought you had any right to be, and you cannot agree to them in advance because you do not yet know they are there.

Trust is what lets you go there. Not the giving up of consent but the building of something consent alone cannot build: the willingness to be led somewhere you did not know to ask for, by a person whose hands you have learned to recognize in the dark.

And trust does another thing, too.

It lets two people stay in the room when something goes wrong.

It lets them sit with it.

It lets the one who was hurt say so without believing the hurt was intended, and it lets the one who did the hurting say I’m sorry without that sorry meaning I am guilty of something unforgivable.

When there is no trust, every wrong step is proof of bad intent.

When there is trust, a wrong step can become the most honest moment two people have together: the moment when a thing breaks between them and they both get down on their knees to mend it.

This matters for what Zetsu is going to say in our interview below, because the fear of doing something wrong keeps people out of this world. And it shouldn’t.

I say this as someone who has made mistakes. I once pulled a woman’s hair without asking, reading nonverbal cues that turned out to be wrong. I once told a volunteer at one of my events that working with her had been tedious and watched her spend the evening in tears. I have been on the other end of accountability, and I know what it feels like to sit in a room where the people you thought you were serving have made a list of the ways you failed them. I’ve watched nearly 200 women debate the “truth” of my character in a group chat of a community I created.

What I did after the accusations (I was called everything from an abuser to a capitalist to an ableist) was cancel the next event, host a town hall, sit with the women who felt harmed, offer mediation to anyone who wanted it, and then step away from facilitation for over a year. Not because I was told to. Because I needed to trust myself again before I asked anyone else to. I was also pretty stunned by the women’s behaviour and no longer felt safe in groups of them. No one once asked me for my side of the story because that would have been “victim blaming.” According to the takedown mob, there was only room for one valid voice. So, I watched and listened as the women I had taught to use their voice and connect to their power, fractured, turned on each other, and, for many, seemed to find pleasure in my destruction. So when I talk about the difference between a mistake and abuse, between a rupture that gets repaired and one that gets denied, I’m not theorizing. I’ve been the person who caused the rupture. And the measure of that isn’t whether I made the mistake. It’s what I did after. And, also insightful, was what “the community” did after too when faced with the choice between reconciliation and further divide.

When I think about the limits of consent, the danger isn’t solely a boundary being crossed or a mistake made.

The danger is in the person who makes a mistake and then cannot bear to sit with what they’ve done. Not because the mistake was so terrible but because of what they believe it says about them.

The person who hears that hurt me in a way I didn’t want and gets curious about the hurt, who moves toward it instead of away, that person can be trusted even when the scene has gone sideways and the plan is in pieces on the floor.

But the person who hears those same words and starts building a case right there in the room, stacking up reasons why it wasn’t their fault, why the other person is remembering it wrong, why the rules were followed and the boxes were checked, that person should not be holding power over anyone. Not because they lack skill. Because they lack the one thing skill cannot replace: the ability to take accountability.

This person might never change because the first step is acknowledging where they’re at. But if they feel that first acknowledgement labels them as a whole (abuser), rather than focuses on their actions (that action was wrong, here’s how it caused harm, and if this behaviour continues, it would be abusive…), they might deny, downplay, get defensive, or simply disappear.

This consent/trust consideration applies in dungeons and at play parties, but it applies just as much in bedrooms.

Maybe you try dirty talk and hit a word that triggers something neither of you expected.

Maybe you pull hair harder than intended and your partner flinches in a way that isn’t playful.

Maybe you attempt a power dynamic and one of you feels genuinely diminished afterward rather than exhilarated.

Communities, too, should be measuring trustworthiness not by whether someone has ever made a mistake (they all have, and if they haven’t yet, they will) but by how they responded when confronted with it.

Did they listen?

Did they take responsibility publicly or privately as the situation required?

Did their behaviour change?

A person with a track record of rupture-and-repair is someone you can play with.

A person with a track record of rupture-and-denial is someone to avoid, no matter how skilled they are technically, no matter how popular they are socially.

And this is where I want to name something directly, because the strongest objection to everything I’ve just written is this: abusers also claim they were building trust. Abusers also say the other person was just uncomfortable, not harmed. Abusers also use the language of depth and surrender to justify crossing lines that should not have been crossed.

So how do you tell the difference?

You tell the difference by what happens afterward. Trust is not a claim someone makes about themselves. It is a pattern that other people can verify. The person who says “trust me” and then, when something goes wrong, centres their own innocence over the other person’s experience, that person is telling you exactly who they are. The person who says “trust me” and then, when something goes wrong, asks what happened, how did that land, what do you need, and then actually changes, that person has earned the word.

At its worst, BDSM gives us a clear way to identify real abusers: by how they behave after harm is done.

Consent is binary. You give it or you don’t.

Trust is not binary.

Trust is layered and slow and alive in the way that a river is alive, always moving, always shaped by what it has moved through.

Let’s imagine that two people negotiate a scene.

They discuss limits.

They establish safewords.

They are careful and thorough and responsible.

And then they play, and something happens that was not on the list.

Not a violation. Not an assault. A moment.

A word that lands differently than either of them expected.

A sensation that opens a door neither of them knew was there.

A sound that comes out of one of them that surprises them both.

And because it was not negotiated, because it was not on the checklist, there is a moment of panic.

Was that okay? Did I do something wrong? Should I have asked first?

And the moment closes.

The door shuts.

The body, which was trying to tell both of them something important, gets overruled by the mind, which has been trained to believe that anything unplanned is suspicious.

That is the cost of building a whole ethic on a single word. Not that the word is wrong. The word is good. The word is necessary. But when consent becomes the only language two people speak, something else goes quiet. The body, which has its own language, stops being heard. The conversation has moved to the head and stayed there.

And what is lost is the knowing that lives underneath knowing. The animal part.

Intuition is not a mystical thing.

It is the body’s memory working faster than speech.

And when we build a practice around words alone, when we hold onto the checklist and let go of everything the checklist was trying to point us toward, we cut ourselves off from the very instrument that makes this work transformative.

There’s an argument to be made that the Western consent apparatus has, in some spaces, become performative rather than functional. The checklist gets filled out, the safewords get established, the negotiation happens, and then both people feel “covered” without having actually done the relational work of knowing each other. The paperwork becomes a substitute for the attunement. The checklist says we’re good, so we must be good. And that’s precisely when things go wrong in ways nobody anticipated, because the checklist can only account for what both people already knew to name.

Trust-based play, by contrast, doesn’t have a single binary off-switch. It has an ongoing, granular conversation that can modulate intensity without shutting everything down. The safeword stops the scene. But stopping the scene doesn’t mean everything that came before it was right, and it doesn’t mean everything that might have come after it was wrong. The safeword is a tool, not a verdict.

There is something else, and it is risky to say, and I am going to say it anyway.

In a world where consent is the only recognized measure of whether a thing was done right, anything that falls outside its borders gets named as wrong.

A boundary gets pushed and the person who pushed it is an abuser.

A moment of discomfort rises up and someone has been harmed.

The experience was not the experience that was agreed to, and so it was a violation.

The verdict comes down before anyone has asked what actually happened in that room.

But discomfort is not harm, when there is trust.

Surprise is not assault, when there is trust.

But we don’t trust each other.

Being taken somewhere you did not expect to go is not the same as being taken somewhere against your will. Not when you are with a person who has earned the right to lead you there. Not when what holds the two of you together is stronger than what the scene shakes loose.

I know what the counterargument sounds like, because I’ve already made it for you: this is exactly the language a predator would use. Which is why I keep coming back to the same distinction, the only one that matters. A predator uses the language of trust to avoid accountability. A trustworthy person uses the language of trust because they have already demonstrated accountability, repeatedly, verifiably, in the way they respond when things go wrong. The words can sound identical. The behaviour never does.

So no, I am not saying abandon consent. I need that to be clear and I will say it again because the world we live in requires the saying of it. Consent is how we opt in. It is how we say: I am here. I am willing. These are the edges of what I know about myself today. That is sacred. And any person who tells you it isn’t is a person you should leave standing where they are and walk away from without looking back.

But I am saying this…

When consent becomes the only thing we trust, we stop trusting each other. We stop trusting ourselves.

We stop taking the risks that this practice was built to hold, the risks that break us open to show the colours and crystals and hidden rooms that nobody could see while the surface was intact.

Sometimes held together by the boundaries that are actually locking us in.

There is nuance here that I trust you to consider.

You could push further and say that the language of consent has been borrowed from contract law and medical ethics, domains where the parties are fundamentally unequal: doctor and patient, institution and individual.

There’s a reason for that borrowing.

BDSM does involve real physical risk, and the person receiving the impact or the restraint is in a position of genuine vulnerability. The framework made sense as a starting point. But importing it wholesale into an erotic exchange between equals subtly encodes a power imbalance that BDSM is supposedly playing with on purpose.

The bottom becomes the “patient” whose informed consent must be obtained. The top becomes the “practitioner” who must document and defend. That framing can strip the erotic agency from the very person it’s supposed to protect. The bottom isn’t a patient. They’re a participant. And treating them as someone to be protected from the experience rather than someone who is co-creating it changes the nature of what’s possible between two people.

You could also argue that the way consent is practiced in many Western kink communities has become more about protecting reputations and avoiding liability than about actually caring for the people involved.

The focus shifts from “was this person’s experience honoured” to “can this person prove they were wronged.”

This risks creating communities where people are more afraid of being accused than they are motivated to be genuinely trustworthy. Where it is easier to reject than to reconcile. Where a single accusation, examined or not, can end someone’s place in a community overnight, and where the threat of that ending makes honest conversation about mistakes nearly impossible.

The woman whose hair I pulled? She told me later that it led her to major breakthroughs but she “didn’t want to give me that much power.” Also, that she felt pressured by the group to continue pushing forward with my takedown, despite her forgiveness.

BDSM at its best is supposed to make us free.

Beneath everything that Zetsu says in our interview below is that the potency of BDSM is the willingness to trust another person not because you have negotiated every variable but because you have built something with them, slowly, over time, that can hold what has not been negotiated.

It is the willingness to be guided by someone whose next move you cannot predict.

To say omakase and mean it.

To leave it up to them.

And to discover, in that terrifying and beautiful openness, that BDSM was never the point.

Trust was the point.

The rope, the flogger, the ball-gag: these were just the things that made the trust visible.

Or the lack of trust blatantly obvious.

I confused how much I trusted myself with how much others should trust me. I treated someone entering the community I built as an automatic sign that they trusted me.

Trust has to be earned, I know that now.

I am much more careful about who I trust, too.

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Below is my conversation with Zetsu Nawa, lightly edited for clarity. (I had someone I’ll call Luke join me for this interview and contribute some excellent questions).

INTERVIEW WITH ZETSU NAWA

Luke: Thank you for the opportunity to share your knowledge with us, from the book and also today. As you mention in your book, the keeping and sharing of knowledge is something to be taken really seriously, and you credit both Yukimura Haruki and the bottoms you tie with so much of your learning and exploration of kinbaku. Could you start by sharing about your relationship with Yukimura...what that was like and what it meant to you?

Zetsu Nawa: That’s such a big question. I was so fortunate to have met him at a time when...there’s an old saying, when the student’s ready, the teacher appears.

The very first time I met him, I was such a fanboy already. I’d gone to a studio and met him. I had just bought a copy of one of his books in a used bookstore, a very rare book that I got for something like thirty bucks, three thousand yen. And I thought, I’m going to ask him to sign it, because I have to. Not only does he sign it, he opens it up, gets out his calligraphy set, and actually writes me a little note inside it and signs it with his stamp and everything. And it was just this moment where I thought, oh my God, this book just became priceless to me.

He was just such an incredibly jovial figure. He liked to laugh. He didn’t take himself too seriously. He didn’t take rope too seriously. He knew what it was for: eroticism and fun and pleasure and sharing time with somebody. It wasn’t about any sense of bowing down. He had no pretense, didn’t stand on ceremony. All of that immediately struck me as really cool.

The other thing was, I realized pretty quickly that what he loved about rope was the psychology of it. What was happening inside our heads and our bodies and our minds, expression and creation and interaction and communication, that was what was important to him, not the ties themselves. They were just the things that allowed you to do other things. They were the tools to open people up.

After that trip, I became very close with a handful of people in Tokyo that knew him well, studied with him. We invited him to come to America for two weeks. He came, stayed with us, taught some seminars and workshops. I got to know him much better. So when I went back to Tokyo the next time, we already had a relationship and I started doing classes with him.

Now, classes with Yukimura are not like classes in America. You talk for about an hour while you drink tea about all kinds of different things. You talk with the bottom. And then eventually he’ll pick up a piece of rope and hand it to you and say, “Please tie one rope, Yukimura style.” And you go over to the tatami mat that’s all set up and you start to tie.

He watches. Sometimes he’s very approving, nodding, chiming into the scene. Sometimes he turns around, uninterested, starts working on his computer, and you know you’ve lost him. Sometimes, if you’re me, he stands up and runs in and goes, “Dame dame! No no no, you never do that, stop!” And then every once in a while he’ll see something interesting and come in and show you something new, he’ll do the tie and then say, “Okay, now you do it.” And he’ll talk you through what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, ask you a lot of questions.

So it was never “here are the five steps to do this tie, learn them, repeat them.”

And where you really learn is after you tie the model, you get to untie them. It’s the untying process where you see the reverse construction and the things he’d done. He’d never tell you. You just had to pick it up. You had to steal that kind of knowledge.

And then at the end of every session he would say to the bottom, “How did he do?” And: “You have to be honest, because if you’re not honest with me, I’ll know, and I won’t invite you back.” All the bottoms are professionals, they’re paid, you’re paying them a fee to come be tied. And then they would give you feedback, and boy, it would be brutal sometimes. Some of them were quite honest.

That was some of the most valuable instruction I ever got, actually hearing the brutal critique of what I did wrong, but also what I did right, what they really liked. That feedback was really important.

And then we’d all go out to dinner afterwards and talk about rope and life and all kinds of other things. So it was a really different kind of instruction than you would get in the West.

What he meant to me, he was somebody I connected with at a philosophical level. We shared the same love of things. One of my most favorite conversations with him was about fetishes. He said the two things he loved were ball gags and hoods, nothing to do with rope. But he wasn’t really able to ever do them in his professional life, because ball gags were considered too Western, so there wouldn’t be a market in the videos. Hoods covered the model’s face, and the model was what sold the video, not the rigger, nobody cares who did the tying, they want to see the model. Cover her face, nobody buys the video.

I told him my thing was for face bondage and nose-ups in particular, which is just a thing for me. And he immediately understood, and we just had a great conversation about that.

But luckily he loved to laugh. I have so many stories of him just cracking me up. He was just such a wise, friendly, psychologically deep person. His knowledge of this stuff seemed to be infinite.

Luke: There’s a lot of directions we could go with this. The difference between teaching structure and psychological intentionality. But I also gather from your writing a focus on emotion. There’s a quote in the book I wanted to read: “The truth is, in the rope community, nobody talks or no one talks about or values heart. They give it lip service all the time. Everyone is into connective rope, and the way they go about it is to teach class on connective rope techniques, almost, but not entirely, missing the point.” What does heart mean to you in your kinbaku practice, and what can practitioners reflect on as they seek to express themselves more deeply, emotionally, erotically, or artistically?

Zetsu Nawa: I do a whole talk called “Searching for the Heart of Kinbaku.” So it’s a big question, but I’ll try to distill it down.

The Japanese word is kokoro. It means sort of heart, spirit, it’s one of those hard-to-translate words. Essence. A friend of mine, Chiba Izo, who I studied with a little bit, said that when students come to him (in Japan, people come to tie because they have the kokoro, the heart, the desire, they have what they want to do). And then you teach them the technique to do it. Westerners come looking for that technique, hoping they’re going to develop the heart. And he’s sort of like, they never really do. Because there’s a term called “drowning in technique,” where you can get so focused on the rope that you lose the larger picture.

When I go to public dungeons here in LA and there are rope scenes, people always come up to me and ask, “What did you think of that scene?” Which drives me crazy, because it’s none of my business and I really don’t care. I don’t care what people do with their rope as long as they’re having fun.

But one night there were two different scenes. Next to me on a table was a guy and his partner, and they were clearly really new. He was tying her and he probably learned one or two ties and was doing them slowly and not particularly well. I could just tell he was new at rope. But what I was focused on was the way he was looking at his partner and the way she was looking at him. And that was magic. You can’t fake that. You can’t teach that. They just had this connection, and it was beautiful to watch. Nobody would have described the rope as beautiful, that wasn’t the point. The scene was beautiful.

Then across the room, there was a guy doing a suspension. He had his model standing for 45 minutes while he tied her. She watched every other scene going on in the dungeon as she was being tied. She could have been a sack of flour. Then finally the big moment comes, he pulls her up, she’s in the air hanging, he spins her around and slaps her butt or whatever. And then he turns around to see who in the dungeon is watching him. Sort of like, ta-da!, the prestige in a magic trick. “This is what I’ve done. Everyone should stand up and applaud.” Then he takes her back down, takes fifteen minutes to untie her, she’s sort of on the ground, he puts a blanket around her, gives her chocolate, pats her head, like we’re supposed to do.

So at that moment I had this contrast. And I said, I think the guy on the table could eventually be great. And I think the guy who just did the suspension never will. Because he has no sense of empathy toward his bottom. He has no communication with her. He’s so focused on the rope and the audience, he’s never going to get past that.

What’s lacking there is the kokoro. The guy on the table had it. I could teach him technique in a weekend and get him better. But how do I break through to the guy doing the suspension? Because he’s already convinced he knows it. He’s got it. He can do it. And that feels like what happens in the West a lot.

I really like teaching beginners one-rope ties, because they can take them home, they can do them, and they can do a lot with them. They’re three steps, not seventy-two steps. But they could have a really good time that night with each other in bed, playing around. That’s what rope should be. You shouldn’t take five years to master it. You should be able to learn something in an evening class that’s going to enhance your life.

Luke: You touched on your book’s distinction between communication and connection. It’s one of the two things that has stimulated all kinds of conversations with people I’ve sent that chapter to, also because it’s fantastic. Could you elaborate on that distinction?

Zetsu Nawa: The problem with connection is I don’t know what the hell it is or what it means. And Jesus Christ, if at the end of a rope scene two people haven’t felt connected, you’ve really fucked up. I mean, I feel connected during a conversation. I feel connected sitting with my partner watching a movie. I feel connected having dinner. Human interaction is connection. So you better have that in a rope scene.

But communication for me is something much deeper, because I feel like my job when I tie somebody is that I’m trying to curate an experience for them. Or at least I’m trying to curate a context in which they can have an experience.

And a lot of this goes back to a very Japanese notion of feeling. There’s a lot of different words for feeling, kimochi is often used. And sometimes omoi. Omoi is a concept of feeling that belongs on the inside, that belongs to the mind. If you go to Japan, if you know Japanese people, there’s a real prohibition against openly expressing feeling. It’s considered very taboo. It’s kept on the inside.

There’s a long discussion about this in kabuki theater, how do you express emotion without using words? How do you use your body and your movements and positioning to show what you’re feeling, because expressing it with words seems clumsy and taboo? And if you have to say it, it’s not really feeling anymore.

What Yukimura discovered early in his career was that rope had been very SM and pain-based. And he didn’t actually like the way women looked in pain. What he liked was the way women looked when they were feeling pleasure. And he realized that when you tie somebody, the omoi comes out, you can’t help it. Through your breathing, through your movement, through the sounds you make. All of that is feeling coming out. And because you’re tied, there’s something about the rope that lets it out. In the context of being tied, it’s considered not so taboo, even though it’s shameful in the Japanese sense: I shouldn’t be doing this, and yet I am. I’m revealing something.

Playing with that, particularly feeling and eroticism, also very taboo to express publicly, that’s the goal. How do you give somebody the opportunity to let all of that out? By using rope, they get to express a part of themselves that’s normally kept hidden.

That part of it is the communication you have with each other. You’re showing your partner something that’s often hidden. What a precious gift, to build that trust with somebody so you can show them something taboo, something about your fantasies, something about your inner world that you keep hidden. And now it’s coming out with the person you care about and are connected to. That’s communication.

But connection is just so amorphous. I can’t quite run that down. Maybe somebody has a better definition. But I know how to communicate. I know what I can read. There’s breathing, there’s movement. Look at her hands. Look at her feet. Listen to the sound she’s making. Look at how she tilts her head. All of those things are communicating. Are they connecting? I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know what that word means.

Luke: In that vein, I wanted to get into seminawa, and you have this great piece in the book about providing a space where someone ends up being seen. But I also want to cover what bottoms might find useful. There’s another quote: “I came to realize that the point of my gote was not to make my partner feel the rope. It was to make her feel me through the rope.” What insights do you have about intentionality and emotion from the point of view of the partner being tied? What might bottoms hope to discover as they practice kinbaku in communication with a partner?

Seminawa: A style of Japanese rope bondage that stays close to the ground, focused on sensation, intimacy, and emotional response rather than suspension or visual complexity.

Gote: A foundational chest-and-arm harness that binds the arms behind the back, removing the hands’ ability to push away, hold on, or shield the body.

Zetsu Nawa: I talk to bottoms a lot and get their opinions about things. I think it’s really important. I do see bottoms often feeling like they need to train, they need to strengthen their core so they can do better suspensions. They treat it like an extreme sport, something they have to be in training for.

The only thing I really want from my bottom is honesty. I want to know what they’re feeling, and I want them to share that with me. And I do think it’s my job to draw that out.

Another interesting thing about Yukimura is that for him, he regarded every scene as a game. He called it nawa yuge, the idea of turning your partner on with rope. Playing with their arousal. And the goal was never...[pause]...the Western model is “I want to tie her up and fuck her,” right? And that passes as a form of dominance.

For Yukimura, that was exactly backwards. His model was: I want to tie her up so that she wants me to fuck her. I want to get her so turned on that she can’t help but ask for it. And if that happens, I win. If that doesn’t happen, I lose. She might enjoy the scene, it’s wonderful, but I’ve lost, because I haven’t taken her to that place where I think she should go.

So that notion of awakening something sexual and erotic is really important in his style of rope, which doesn’t translate as well into the West because so many people are like, “No no, it’s art, it’s meditation, it’s for healing, it’s all these different things that have nothing to do with sex or eroticism.” For him that was never the case. For most Japanese, that’s not the case. Asking if shibari is sexual is like asking an American if a blowjob is sexual. It just is. It’s hentai, it’s perverted sex.

So yeah, I want to know my bottom’s fantasies. That stuff I’ll talk about before I tie. What turns you on? What excites you? What are you willing to give me today and what aren’t you willing to give? How do we build that trust? How do you feel about being humiliated, is that something that turns you on or something that repels you? I need to know. What embarrasses you? What doesn’t? If I growl in your ear, are you going to be turned on, or are you going to laugh in my face? I want to know those things.

And that’s what in Japan we would consider negotiation: tell me your fantasies. Not “here’s my checklist of eighteen things I want to do, sign off on this please so we can have a good time.” It’s really different. It’s almost like a bit of erotic storytelling before you start, to get you in the mood.

Luke: There’s another element I don’t think we often see: timing. I was in a conversation with someone who was describing the concept of ma, the way intervals and timing and anticipation function. How does that play into building anticipation, vulnerability, exposure?

Zetsu Nawa: It’s a big part of it. In English, “distance” is a fascinating word because we use the same word for the physical that we do for the emotional. If I say “I feel very close to you right now,” I don’t mean you’re less than a meter away. I mean, I could, but I probably don’t. Or “you’ve been distant all day.” I don’t mean you’ve been on the other side of the room, but I could.

How I play with distance and timing and pacing, all of those things feed into building that sense of anticipation, of release, of what people often talk about as Qi, like energy. I don’t believe in energy as a literal concept. I don’t think there’s any such thing. But I think it’s a pretty good metaphor. What you’re actually doing in terms of Qi is building potential, and then at some point you’re actualizing it. Energy is the ability to do work: you have to create the reserve before you can expend it.

So I may start a tie very slow and really intimate, and I’ll use my body to get very close and slowly become more and more invasive, get into my partner’s space. Eventually my arms are around them, my cheek is against the side of their head, I’m touching them, I’m tying them, and hopefully they’re responding. I’m paying attention to how they’re going deeper and deeper.

And then I step away. I break the connection.

A couple of things start to happen.

One: they go, shit, I want that back. But they can’t get that back, because they’re tied up. So now they feel way more tied up than they did a minute ago, because now they want something they can’t get.

Then they realize the only way they’re going to get it is if their partner decides to give it back. So now they’re really not in control of this moment anymore. They’re hungry for something they can’t control. They need to let go of that notion of control and surrender to the moment.

Ideally, if the scene is working, that’s what’s happening. So when I go back to that idea of curating an experience, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. I’m stepping away to create a space for them to feel the loss. Both of those things, the closeness and the withdrawal, are acts of communication. And how I’m watching them respond, are they becoming melancholy, dejected, hungry, horny?, that’s going to determine my next move. It’s a conversation going back and forth.

Nicolle: One of my favourite things of yours that I’ve read really illuminated similar thoughts I had but wasn’t quite able to articulate: the difference between consent and trust. Can you talk about how our modern interpretation of consent in the West is at odds with trust?

Zetsu Nawa: And even undermining of it in a certain way. So just to be clear, for the record: everything we do needs to be consensual. It’s not okay to pull somebody off the street and tie them up and say, “I’m going to get you to trust me.” Consent is the baseline. We have to have an agreement that we’re together in this space to do this thing.

Once we’ve agreed we’re going to tie together, then the next question is, what does that look like? And I think the model of consent is also closely tied to a word I hate, which is negotiation. Because I feel like I’m going in to buy a car with somebody who’s trying to get the most money out of me while I’m trying to pay as little as possible. It’s an adversarial relationship when you negotiate. And I don’t want to negotiate my sexuality with my partner. I want us to be partners in crime. I want us to be wanting the same thing and wanting to get the same thing. That’s what the conversation should be about.

But also a big part of what makes it pleasurable is the not knowing. If I say, “Okay, here are these eight steps I’m going to do, and boy, are you going to be surprised at step number six,” well, I’ve kind of blown it at that point. And most of the bottoms I know want to have an element of surprise. They want to be violated in a way that then obsesses them, but they don’t want to know what’s coming, because they want to surrender that decision-making to somebody else.

The goal in Japan when you tie somebody for the first time is to get them to tie with you again. And the second time is to get them to tie with you again, on down the line. So the building of trust is very important, and you’re very careful, because you want to do things that make them want to come back.

The other thing that’s really tough in Japan is that it’s a culture where people hate to say no, so they don’t. If you try to negotiate with a Japanese woman, the first thing you say is “What would you like?” They’ll say, “Omakase, whatever you want.” Which is useless to you if you’re trying to negotiate a scene, because it doesn’t put anything on the table or take anything off.

If you say, “I’d like to do this tie and have this thing,” they’ll say, “Yes, of course, yes yes yes,” even if they don’t want it. Because they don’t want to displease you. It’s just a culture of saying yes.

And often Japanese people will say yes in ways that don’t really mean yes. If I say, “Would you like to go to a movie Friday?” and you say, “I would love to go to a movie Friday,” that’s not a yes. Yes is “Yes, let’s go to this cinema at 7:30 and see this film.” But “Oh, I’d love to do that, it sounds like so much fun, I can’t wait, so exciting,” none of those are a yes. You’ll be there at 7:30 waiting for them to show up, and they won’t be there, because they didn’t say yes.

So it’s very complicated, which is part of why negotiation doesn’t work so well in Japan. But trust and taking care of people is a deep cultural value. That’s something Japanese people understand.

And that ability to trust somebody, up to the point when you’re getting into suspensions with your life, makes a very deep relationship between the people tying.

I was talking to Yuri Sunohara, who was the bottom for one of the most famous rope guys ever, Nureki Chimuo. I asked her about consent. And she said, “Some of the best ties we did were things I would have said no to if I had been asked. And I’m glad I wasn’t asked, because I trusted him enough to take me where I needed to go, even if I didn’t know I needed to go there myself.”

And they had a twenty-year relationship of tying, obviously. So he knew her very, very well.

There’s something about that boundary in SM and BDSM and D/s relationships that’s just intoxicating, to take your partner to the edge of what they think they can experience and manage and deal with, and then see what that boundary really looks like. And sometimes the only way you know is by stepping over it. But you trust that person not only to do the right thing in the moment, but to take care of it afterwards if things don’t go well.

So we’re really talking about rope and relationships. One of the things we see in the West so much is this whole idea of pickup play: I meet you, you meet me, we’re both at the dungeon, let’s talk. You can certainly do that in Japan, but you’re going to do something really small and really basic and really feel that person out. Where in the West, we’re like, “No no, I want to do this killer suspension where you do this rope drop and you’re going to be in a double futomomo spinning around.” I’m like, you don’t even know this person. You don’t know how they’re going to respond to anything. How can you even possibly think about doing something that complicated with them? You don’t even know who they are.

That part seems absurd to me. How do you tie somebody you don’t know? Or how do you tie them well? If it’s just about technique and sensation, that can work. I met one rope bottom who said that to me: rope for them is like a meal, and whoever’s tying them is the waiter. “I don’t give a shit who the waiter is. What I care about is whether the food tastes good.” Whoever’s bringing it is irrelevant. They just want the tie.

That’s somebody I personally couldn’t tie with. That would feel very exploitative to me.

Nicolle: Would you feel used?

Zetsu Nawa: Yeah. And disappointed. I would be giving them something important to me and getting nothing back. That would be an unbalanced equation. And if they’re trusting me to do the tie properly so that it’s safe and the knots are in the right places, that’s not the kind of trust I’m interested in. I want them to trust me with their psyche.

Nicolle: Yes. I like what you said about boundaries: sometimes when we negotiate, we’re met with our own limitations as to what we believe is possible. We’re almost confined to what we already know to be true about our likes or dislikes. Where trust is traversing into potentially uncomfortable territory, but not having that be a violation of a boundary, rather the feeling of truly surrendering, truly going somewhere else.

And I think that’s really important when we’re talking about shame and humiliation. You’ve specifically said these things should not be removed, in the same way you’ve talked about eroticism, they should not be removed from the art of tying. You can tie someone in a way where it looks simple, but internally they’re experiencing a huge amount of shame. The word is hazukashii.

Zetsu Nawa: That’s when you knew you’d done something really good for Yukimura, because he would go, “Hazukashii!” And you’d be like, yay! I won the game.

Nicolle: But hazukashii is shame, no? A feeling of illuminating shame?

Zetsu Nawa: It’s shame in a very specific sense. Haji is another word for it. There are lots of different words for shame in Japanese, because it’s a shame culture. But hazukashii is about exposure, showing a side of something that isn’t normally seen.

A great example: there’s nothing wrong with masturbation, but it’s a little bit embarrassing when somebody walks in on you when you’re doing it. That kind of shame. Not “you have brought dishonor to your family.” Much more: you’ve been caught being exposed in a way that makes you super vulnerable. You’re showing a part of yourself you don’t normally show, but it’s still very much a part of yourself.

It’s not like you’ve made a mistake and tripped and everyone’s laughing at you. It’s: this is a part of your sexuality that you’re showing, that you normally keep hidden, and now we all see it.

That kind of shame is both liberating in one sense and embarrassing in the other. And for people that get turned on by it, it’s a beautiful moment, because they realize they’re getting even more turned on by the fact that they’re being exposed, which makes them even more ashamed, which makes them even more turned on. You get this beautiful shame spiral that just starts spinning all the way down.

And that’s where you get kotobazeme, word torture, where you start pointing out to them how excited they are. And that makes it even worse.

I’ll never forget, in the middle of one of my classes, I was tying a bottom and Yukimura started talking. He said, “Oh, be very very careful with her, be very careful with her, because I can see it in her eyes. And I just know that after this class, she’s going to find the first guy on the train home and fuck his brains out. She is so horny right now.” And she’s of course mortified by this, but she can’t help it, she’s really turned on at the same time. She’s blushing, turning her head away.

It was this perfect moment of just exaggerating what’s happening and pointing it out, bringing it to the surface. The exposure itself becomes the shameful thing.

Nicolle: And trust plays into that, allowing someone to move toward shame rather than away from it, which is often what we’re taught.

Zetsu Nawa: And actually find it.

Nicolle: Embracing it. But they have to trust you to do that. And maybe they wouldn’t have ever thought to consent to that.

Zetsu Nawa: I think that’s right. We can’t consent to something we don’t even know is going to happen, or is even a possibility. Did she know she was going to be that turned on? Maybe yes, maybe no. But it would’ve been really weird to say, “Do you consent to having a wet pussy twenty-two minutes into our rope scene?”

Nicolle: Because you feel embarrassed.

Zetsu Nawa: Because you feel embarrassed, right? How weird of a question is that? Instead of: “Do you trust me to take you to a place where you’re going to feel ashamed and turned on? Is that a fantasy that you have? Is that something you think about? Does that sound good to you? How we get there, I don’t know, or if we get there, I don’t know. But I want to know that that’s something.” That becomes ammunition for me, to build that scene and try to win the game, try to get her turned on. I want to know her inner fantasy world, as much as she’s willing to share. And once I open that up, then it pops out and I get to play with it. That’s the goal.

And I do want to say: people are free to do whatever the hell they want with their rope. I’m not the rope police. I don’t mean to be the rope police. But what bothers me is when somebody starts talking about something as shibari or kinbaku when they’re doing double coin knots on a mannequin. Because they’ve stripped off all of the... it’s a weird form of cultural appropriation where they’ve taken the surface at the expense of the depth. If they want to call it rope art, tying, bondage, whatever they want is fine. But if you’re going to use the Japanese word for the Japanese style of doing this, then you take the whole thing. You don’t get to just pick a layer of it.

The example I love to use: imagine two guys walk into a Catholic church. They have no idea what it is. They go up and take communion. And they go, “Holy shit, that cracker was amazing, and I love that wine.” They leave and become experts on crackers and wine. They even go to the Vatican and find out what kind of crackers they use. They start Christian Con 2023, with all the cracker and wine vendors from all over the world. Talks on how to make crackers: leavened bread, unleavened bread, how to keep them crisp. Then two Christians walk in and go, “Christian Con! This is fantastic! Where is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?” And they say, “What are you talking about? This is about Christianity: crackers and wine.”

You’d have a pretty good case to say they’ve rather missed the point.

If I go to a rope convention in America, it feels like I’m getting crackers and wine. The knots and the ties and the patterns. How to do this suspension transition to that suspension: party tricks to impress your friends. And I’d much rather you just have a one-rope class about how to tie wrists together with intention and feeling and meaning and what it means to turn somebody on by taking their freedom away in that moment. How do you look into their eyes? Do you do it from behind? Do you sit next to them? Those kinds of questions are interesting to me about rope. The patterns aren’t. But people are so obsessed with them that all they have left is the crackers and wine. And they’ve missed the (it’s not too on the nose to say) salvation.

Nicolle: You shared a story with me last time we spoke: the rope master who had his ropes all entangled in a bag, and was encountered by the young up-and-comer.

Zetsu Nawa: That was actually Yukimura. Apparently at a rope bar. He used to carry his rope in a plastic shopping sack, like a grocery bag. He would go through rope quickly, probably change his ropes out every few weeks because he tied so much. Never regarded them as anything other than a tool.

And there was a Westerner there who had no idea who he was, who decided to lecture him. Because “rope is alive, it has magic, it must be respected.” Telling him it’s really inappropriate not to have it wrapped up in a furoshiki or carried in a special bag. “This is what you’re going to use to tie your partner. You should honor the rope.”

And people around the room are just laughing. They have no idea who this guy is talking to. He doesn’t know who he’s talking to.

Yukimura was just, you know: “Is that so? Well, thank you for that insight. I’ll be more careful in the future.” Nothing really shook him up.

But yeah, there’s this sense of fetishizing. It’s a kind of Orientalism, isn’t it? This obscure, mysterious thing from the Orient that has to be understood through some mystical practice. And rope was just rope. There’s a beauty to it, and you do feel something happening with it as you’re using it. But it’s only the conduit through which you’re imparting communication to your partner.

It’s like: if I have a really hot conversation on the phone with my partner, I don’t take the phone afterwards and put it in a box and say, “I love this phone because of the conversation we had.” That would seem silly. I think thinking about rope the same way, it’s a tool. You keep it clean, you don’t just leave it laying around. But there’s nothing special about a piece of rope until it’s part of communication between two people. Then sure, in that moment, it’s kind of special. But carrying it to the venue: who cares what you carry it in? It’s so silly.

Nicolle: I want to touch on one of the overarching themes for the book, which is putting forward BDSM as a healing modality. I think a lot of this has to do with the feelings it can open up for people, specifically in allowing us to move closer toward shame, to feel where shame is in our bodies as we explore these dynamics, healing our relationship to power.

Something I find interesting: I know you kind of listed rope’s healing potential alongside hyperbole, like “oh, it’s meditation” or whatever. I don’t necessarily think it’s a form of meditation, but where I do think its power lies is in it being relational. So much of healing seems to be this inner journey, this solitary endeavor. But something that’s so profound about a lot of these BDSM practices is that they require the other. They require us to actually interact with each other.

Zetsu Nawa: Yeah. Back to communication. And there’s a lot to take apart with that. I don’t mean to say that rope can’t be beautiful and artistic, obviously it can. I know a lot of people for whom it is incredibly therapeutic for the reasons you mentioned.

I know people that are incredibly masochistic, right? And if they don’t play, masochism’s not confined to the bedroom. If they don’t get that itch scratched in their sexual life, they’ll go find a way to make it happen at work or in their relationships or in their friendships. People that are masochistic are masochistic. They’re not just sexually masochistic.

Nicolle: Because...and this might be included in your answer...this thing I find really funny that I’m hearing about a lot is “BDSM as a lifestyle.” And I’m like, what’s the difference between a life and a lifestyle?

Zetsu Nawa: A style, yeah. It’s a little cringy because it makes me think of, blue leisure suits on a cruise ship or something. But one of the things I find fascinating: I’ve been in the BDSM community in Los Angeles for about twenty years. There are a number of people who talk about lifestyle to mean this is something they’ve incorporated into their daily practice with their partner. Maybe it’s total power exchange, twenty-four seven, whatever. It’s a way of saying: we live our D/s dynamic. It’s not a weekend thing. It’s not a play thing. It’s who we are. It defines our relationship.

All the way up to the other end, which is once a month on a Saturday night, we go out and I slap my boyfriend’s ass with a riding crop and we have a great time and it’s kinky and fun. You see the whole spectrum. And all of them are absolutely fine.

This is one of the things about rope, even within the narrow confines of what I’m talking about in Japan, I can probably give you a list of twenty top Japanese rope masters, all of whom approached it philosophically, technically, relationally in different ways. Almost unrecognizable to each other. And yet I would say they’re all doing it in the same context of what we consider kinbaku.

So the specifics are not as important as the heart, the kokoro, the essence. They’re all engaging in a form of erotic play that’s using rope to open up their partners to a kind of experience. Maybe that experience is about pain and suffering. Maybe it’s about hazukashii. Maybe it’s about pure sex. For some people, orgasms are really important. It’s not a rope scene if nobody orgasms. For others, it’s not important at all, and often nobody does. Are they still doing the same thing? In that context, they are. They’re just getting at it from different angles. Like a gem with a lot of different facets.

I think understanding kokoro as the context of kinbaku in Japan, and how you get at that varies dramatically, that’s the piece often missing in the West. Jumped over.

So when you talk about healing as a kind of kokoro, that’s different than healing as a practice. Somebody comes to you and says, “Doing a particular tie that puts pressure on the body is really good for putting someone in a meditative state.” I’m like, that’s fine, you can go do that. But that’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about shibari. Please don’t call that shibari. You can call it meditative rope, healing rope. I don’t doubt that all of those things are true for people.

But where I make the distinction is: if you’re going to talk about the art that comes from Japan, keep it in that context. That’s all. I don’t care what people do with rope. I just want them to be happy and safe. What I do with rope may be different than what they do, and that’s neither here nor there.

Nicolle: It’s not a right way to do any of it. And I love that you say in the book as well: you’re not there to teach them ties. You’re there to tell a story.

Zetsu Nawa: That’s everything. The story is everything. The ties are secondary. They’re just a tool. A tool to tell a story.

Nicolle: Is there anything else you want to share? You’ve given us a lot, and you somehow managed to answer all of Luke’s questions, which were colossal in size.

Luke: Under a thousand words each.

Zetsu Nawa: Eight hundred and seventy-four. I kept it brief. I’m happy if any of the people who’ve been listening have questions. I’m happy to take a crack at those too.

[This was a live interview on Zoom and below are some responses from the audience as they unmuted].

Jessica: Definitely not asleep. Just don’t know how to ask questions after all that.

Nicolle: How about in a word: can each of you express how listening to Zetsu has made you feel?

Zetsu Nawa: Aroused. All right.

Nicolle: You win.

Zetsu Nawa: I win.

Brittany: I would say humbled. Hearing about the meaning and everything, the history and all of that behind it. I feel very humbled by how much significance is in the ropes.

Cindy: I very much appreciated hearing that the little baby steps that I’m taking feel validated. Because it is very intimidating. And it’s really great to know that you don’t have to know it all, just bit by bit is really the point.

Zetsu Nawa: Yes. That’s the secret. It’s all baby steps all the way down. I tell people, when you tie, your only goal should be for your tie to be slightly better than it was last time. Just slightly. If you accomplish that every time, you’re moving in the right direction always.

One of the things I love about rope is you never exhaust it. You’re never done. You never figure it out. Because you’ve never figured out your partner fully. That’s the journey.

Natasha: I feel really validated in listening to the way you describe the connection between yourself, the rope, and the bottom. Because as I was listening, it was like, okay, yes, that is what I’m seeking. That is how this is supposed to be.

And then I noticed there’s so much in common between life and sex and arousal, because you need to know what you desire and then ask for what you desire. And the way to do that influences your ability to create trust between yourself and the other. And you continue to learn and grow with your people, because like you said, everyone changes and you’ll never fully know somebody 100%. Relationships and trust and knowing yourself all seem to come together in this practice.

Zetsu Nawa: Thank you for that, it’s really beautifully said. And what you’re getting to is learning to trust yourself as well. It’s so validating when you have that experience in rope that opens up a part of you that maybe you’re unsure about, or didn’t know how you were going to respond, or how it was going to feel. And you find it to be a really pleasurable and welcoming experience. It can be very validating to share that part of yourself and get back something positive. Because you are taking a risk.

I think good rope scenes, there’s always a little bit of emotional risk. That’s part of the game too. And even the person tying, there’s always the risk that you’re putting something out emotionally that gets rejected. That vulnerability is really important on both sides for a truly intimate experience. If it’s just going through the motions, I know what I’m doing, you know what I’m doing, we’re going to do that tie, what’s at risk? Nothing. Maybe it’s fun, and that’s okay. But if we’re talking about having that experience, there’s got to be a little bit of danger.

I used to say...I don’t know if I still believe this...that I don’t think anyone can truly do kinbaku if they’ve never had their heart broken. I prefer now to say it’s more about risk than that. But there’s something about knowing what emotional vulnerability feels like and being able to offer that to somebody. That to me is the deepest you can get with rope: to make yourself vulnerable, to make both people vulnerable, and push through that and find out what’s on the other side. If you can do that, that’s everything.

Jen: I really appreciated the emphasis on the relational aspect of the dynamic between top and bottom. It felt like watching a dance, but not just knowing the moves. Knowing how to read the room and be in a deeper conversation and bring that person to a space they’ve perhaps been aware of. And how you wove that in with the conversation comparing trust and consent. Thank you.

Zetsu Nawa: Very insightful. I love dance as a metaphor. There’s a beautiful connection there. When you think about real dancers at the high end of dance, they’re not just doing the steps, not just leading and following. What makes them exceptional is all the things you’re talking about.

Jessica: Something that will probably prompt a lot more conversations: my partner is here, and I saw all of his small smirks when you were talking about shame. How to explore that, I’m excited and terrified.

This talk has made me fairly contemplative. A lot of my time coming into this part of my life has been trying to unblock my intense emotional invulnerability. And the reframing of shibari toward exposure and vulnerability, which I intellectually know, but hearing it explained this way, it makes me curious and hopeful about continuing.

Zetsu Nawa: I’m glad. Any little bit to help along that path makes me feel good.

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I recently answered a question about consent vs trust via email: