Content Notice:  NSFW photos below the fold, rope bondage, women bound in rope.

“Risk” is probably a conversation that ranks #2 in the BDSM community, second only to “consent.” Like consent, there are a contingent of folks in the kink community who will talk a lot of talk, fuck up in practice, and then go back to talking the talk. Someone will come forward with a conduct violation and no matter how obviously egregious the behaviour is, there’ll be a lot of hand-wringing and deflection and victim-blaming and humming and hawing that proceeds for weeks until someone invents a snappy new initialism or acronym which everybody totally agrees to adhere to, bygones be bygones, we totally don’t have to do something about the predator in our midst.

Yeah, I’m not cynical. /s

Setting aside the fucksticks who turn these conversations into smokescreens into abusers, the rest of the kink community does have a lot of valuable insights on risk in general, just as it does for consent. Most of what I’ve learned in kink can be taken outside of kink. I would even say my lessons learned from BDSM, and from the Leather community in particular, have formed the bedrock of my personal ethics.

Safety and Risk

You can’t have a conversation about risk without having a conversation about “safety.”

Often the introductory initialism taught to new kinksters to give them some ethics heuristics is SSC–Safe, Sane, and Consensual. On the surface, none of these values are bad. Consent isn’t hazy or difficult to understand (despite what MRAs might claim), Sane can be quickly clarified to mean things like “don’t play while intoxicated,” and safety… well. Safety is hairy.

Most kinks aren’t particularly safe, as long as we understand safety to be relative and not absolute.

So, like, a plane could crash into my house, right now. But it’s not terribly likely to happen. But it could! It is theoretically possible. When I speak of relative safety, this is what I mean–there are any number of hazards that could kill me, and I can make choices to mitigate my exposure to those hazards. For instance, when crossing the road, I put down my Pokemon Go until I actually finish crossing the street, and this reduces the likelihood I will waltz onto the road out of turn.

In general, getting struck by a car is unlikely. But that doesn’t mean I can’t act carelessly and increase my odds of it happening.

Kink is the same idea. Most kinks have some degree of risk. Many kinks are arguably never safe. The probability of injury could be quite low, but it is nonetheless much higher than if you didn’t do the kink. Much like crossing a road in traffic, we can be aware of our conditions and perhaps reduce the likelihood of injury. Or we can waltz onto the road without checking and just deal with the consequences.

So SSC started to fall out of fashion because hey, masochists like pain, so a lot of us do stuff that’s pretty fucked up to non-kinky non-masochists, and we weren’t really convincing people we were safe (even if we meant we were as “safe as a dangerous activity can be”). Kinksters came up with a new acronym to try and address this–RACK, or Risk Aware Consensual Kink.

Now the activity didn’t need to be “safe,” relatively or absolutely. You merely had to know the risks and prepare accordingly. This gave kinksters some justification to do the kinks they had been researching extensively but which made most people nervous.

At some point, the acronym du jour became PRICK, or Personal Responsibility In Consensual Kink. Think “personal responsibility” is a dog whistle for victim blaming in sexual assault? Congratulations! You’re right. Because the kink community–like most special interest communities–has no god damn idea what to do when a pillar of the community is accused of wrongdoing, PRICK arose from the ashes of yet another sexual assault accusation, and was indeed the bludgeon I was beat with twice when I tried to come forward about my rapes.

Sigh.

The Advanced Version

Evolving past snappy initialisms and acronyms means trying to develop a more thorough code than these simplistic systems allow. Enter the concept of the “Risk Profile.”

My favourite part about the Risk Profile is that it’s applicable outside of kink. The basic principle is this:

1. Safety is subjective, so try to establish what to you are safe values and choices;
2. Within those choices, minimize risks;
3. Prepare for the absolute worst;

If that sounds like the start of an investment profile, you wouldn’t be wrong. They were the same questions I asked of myself back when I had money to invest. It was still small fish investing, mind you, but hey! Extra coffee money. Because I couldn’t afford to lose a lot, I didn’t risk a lot–and that’s a principle I took with me to kink. That’s the principle I’ve invoked since March, where I figured daily nightmares was a sign that I shouldn’t be dating again and probably need more extensive help than I’ve been getting. You can use it literally everywhere! “Crossing traffic without paying attention to the cars is outside of my Risk Profile!” “Traveling to rural Mexico for dental is outside of my Risk Profile!” “Voting for Trump is outside of my Risk Profile!”

Example: How I agreed to suspension bondage.

Suspension bondage is when you restrict someone’s body partially or entirely in rope, and then suspend that rope from the ceiling causing most or all of the person’s weight to be upheld by your “rig.”

Any responsible introduction to suspension includes a GIANT ASTERISK: **DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. YOU CAN KILL YOURSELF OR SOMEONE ELSE.**

What might not be apparent is the amount of training and preparation that goes into these. For one, the Rigger needs to have pretty extensive training in rope bondage, plus a working knowledge of anatomy. The bottom ideally has a lot of experience being tied up, and also a working knowledge of anatomy. These things can go side ways, fast, so in the process of executing a suspension, the bottom has to be prepared to communicate rapidly to the Rigger whether something starts to feel wrong, and if so, where it’s happening.

At the time I had my first suspension, similar to the bottom photo here, my Rigger was training under the person running the local rope dojo. We had a first aid kid nearby, a phone handy to call 911 in a jiffy, some medical scissors, and a big cushy mat underneath me, and a fourth person to be an extra spotter. I had been doing rope for years and could name which nerve was being pinched if the rope wasn’t sitting right. “Radial nerve, shoulder.” I’m also lightweight, flexible, and highly masochistic, which makes me an ideal suspension bottom (even correctly performed suspensions are quite painful).

My Rigger had been training every day for about 10 months when she approached me to ask for a supervised suspension. She walked me through her planned rig. I grilled her on things like hard points and the type of carabiner she would use to feed her ropes through (there was a brand that had been recalled!), made sure she knew by name which nerves and arteries her rope could potentially pinch. Notice how the rope across the bottom model’s leg looks like it’s making four passes (it’s actually two, for reasons I won’t get into)–I asked her how many she would wrap around my limbs. (She said two, too). Where exactly was she going to place the load bearing ropes? Again with the bottom model, you might be fooled into thinking her right hand is losing circulation because it’s supporting her body–in actuality, the load bearing rope is around her ribs and under her shoulders, and doesn’t touch the arms at all. Her hand is a little purple because that position makes your hand numb after 15-30 minutes. What’s the basic rope scheme? TK–a phrase which will be gobbledegook without some bondage experience (it’s a patterned chest harness often espoused for its suspension qualities, although I’ve come to like other chest harnesses better). Who was going to be our spotter? (the person running the rope class). etc.

You learn to ask these kinds of questions because once you’ve been tied up a lot, you can really feel the difference in all these choices. More importantly, you know some choices become off limits depending on the circumstances.

For example, I wanted lots of passes around my limbs for a suspension. Two (that looks like four) passes spreads out the pressure of my body weight and allows me to sustain the suspension for a couple minutes longer. When I’m doing a sadistic ground tie–that is, where the entire purpose of the bondage is to inflict pain while on the floor–one pass is actually better. One pass would be totally unsafe for suspension, but you don’t put your entire body weight into the rope in a ground tie, so it’s not idiotic to do so for that kind of play.

These are the sorts of details that empower me to consent to an activity like suspension, which is probably in the same risk category as sky diving or getting dental in rural Mexico. If I didn’t know about these details, I wouldn’t consent to suspension. If my Rigger didn’t know about these details, I definitely wouldn’t consent. There will be some nattering about how unsafe suspension is–but really, years of study goes into these projects, and those of us engaging in Risk Profiles aren’t doing it whimsically. Or we are, and we’re probably more aware of the potential consequences than you are!

If you’re curious why someone would be into suspension bondage… well, I’ll get into that another time. I’ll say it’s better than any drug I’ve ever tried (and also really dangerous please don’t try this on a whim).

Here’s the neat thing though–there are so many things where you could swap out the activity and the lingo and still have a functioning model for risk management. Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know the potential consequences? Are you prepared for the worst? No, really–what could possibly go wrong? What changes if we modify the circumstances? Do the other people involved know what they’re doing? I may have applied these lessons in bondage at first, but I definitely took them to everything else I did. Still do.

-Shiv