Top or bottom, YOU are responsible for managing your own risk and doing what you can to protect yourself from harm. You need to accept responsibility for your own safety and advocate for yourself.

Read everything on this page more than once. Throughout this page and the rest of the site, we teach many methods to reduce risk. If you learn, practice, and apply those things, the risk of using these ties will usually be minimal — rope marks, perhaps occasional rope burn, some muscle soreness if the bottom was in a challenging position for a while — but do remember that rope bondage can never be made 100% safe.

Every body is different, every mind is different, every person’s physical capability and psychological needs are different, every location and situation is different — so every encounter has its own unique risks. Those risks need to be understood and controlled to a level that is acceptable for everyone involved.

Bottoms

You need to understand risk and safety considerations just as much — if not more than — Tops, so that you can advocate for yourself.  You cannot give informed consent if you are not actually informed and knowledgeable.

If you are doing decorative rope or are otherwise using ties that are not too tight and do not render you truly helpless, the risk is usually low.

The risks dramatically increase if:

• You are truly helpless and unable to free yourself.
• The rope is too tight on a sensitive area or becomes too tight through movement, change in position, or struggle.
• Your body is held in a challenging position too long.

If something goes wrong, you can be injured, perhaps severely, perhaps with lifelong impacts.

So: Bottoms, read all of this chapter. You need to understand it. It will help you make better decisions about who to trust when you put your safety into another person’s hands.

Tops

If you are a Top, you are the one who has the ability to take action. Your partner cannot. They can tell you things, but if they are bound, it is your responsibility to act. Your partner has put their trust in you. They rightfully expect you to take care of them. You have a duty of care. Learn everything in this chapter — the stuff for Tops and the stuff for the bottoms — and then keep on learning. Don’t get over-confident. Play within your level of skill; proceed at a responsible pace.

Learning about risks and safety needs to be an ongoing activity

This page should not be your only source of information. Information on bondage and rope safety is constantly evolving. This section contains lots of great information and tips that have stood the test of time, but new ideas are constantly being developed and tested; the best of them make their way into the community zeitgeist. There may now be better ways of dealing with some of these things. So, stay active; commit yourself to continual learning!

Disclaimer

We are not doctors. Nothing on this site or on this page is medical advice. Your doctor outranks this website.  This is information that has been collected and shared by kinksters around the world and is currently considered common/best practice within the community.  That is all that it is.