A play session that I had yesterday at a friend’s house should be a lesson as to what not to do when playing with rope. Short of it is that I had a bit of bad pain in the middle of a scene, and it was my own stupid fault.
When this particular friend and I play, we switch, and we service-top for each other. In those scenes, the top plays with the bottom per the bottom’s desires, and checks in to make sure that they are good to go and are otherwise enjoying it. The first scene, where I was the top, went very well, with simple ropework and a lot of playing.
My scene, on the other hand, didn’t go too well. I like a lot of bondage, and I was thinking about how I wanted to be tied this time. Usually, this comes naturally, but I was a bit stumped on what I wanted to do this time. What I ended up deciding on was a frogtie and arms behind my back. For this, we used my 15′ lengths of rope, and tied everything using a double-rope style. I usually tie my own legs, since I kind of enjoy tying myself up (as much as I can, at least). Then my friend tied my wrists together behind my back. After that, we added a blindfold and a gag, I rolled over onto my back, and then it was off to the races.
We ended up playing mostly with my big spoon. By the way, I should note that I really am enjoying the spoon. That is one of the best toys that I have, and I got it for very little money. After a bit of refurbishment, it’s become a really good, solid piece of play equipment, and can also be innocently hidden in plain sight when it’s not being used for BDSM. I’ve even shown it to my mother in its role as a mild-mannered wall decoration.
However, I don’t think I lasted as long as I could have. A few factors worked into my calling out earlier than I would otherwise have liked. First, my hands fell asleep. Second, the rope on the frogtie was a bit too tight and was pressing into my legs too much. And third, my hands were situated under my lower back, which was a little awkward. And that led to my needing to be released, but I had put myself in such a position that I couldn’t move to be released without a pain penalty – bad pain. I will say this about the scene – my friend was awesome. They got me exactly as I wanted, and did a great job in the scene. However, it seems that I need to be protected from my own bad ideas or something, since the reason that this scene went bad was from things entirely orchestrated by me. Frogtie? My idea. Arms behind back? My idea. Rolled onto my back? Also my idea. See a trend here?
In deconstructing what went wrong, it came down to two big things. First, It is highly advisable to use longer lengths of rope when tying legs, especially when doing a frogtie, which involves the thigh. Using my 50′ lengths of rope would have distributed the pressure across a wider area, and caused little or no discomfort, vs. having the rope jamming into one spot (I only got one or two wraps of the 15′ before I needed to cinch it). Yes, using the longer rope means more of it to deal with when getting started, but between that and a scene-ending safeword, I’ll gladly deal with the annoyance that longer ropes sometimes bring. Plus the rope marks afterwards were uncomfortable to touch.
Second, this was not the sort of scene for arms behind the back. I consider restraining my arms to be important because it means that I can’t remove the gag and/or blindfold on my own, increasing the feeling of helplessness and vulnerability. That’s not to say that tying one’s arms behind one’s back is a bad thing, but this just wasn’t the scene for it. Arms behind the back is better for scenes where the captive will either be standing up or leaning forward. It’s not good where you’re laying on your back, and especially not on a concrete floor, because then you’re laying on top of your hands, which are beneath your lower back, on a surface that is literally hard as a rock. That caused my hands to go to sleep (which I can handle to an extent), but the lower back part was too much. I shifted around a little bit, and my back didn’t waste any time in letting me know that it was unhappy with me. Pain, and in the bad way. That was enough to end it for me, since now, rather than think about the fun things that were happening to me in the scene that my friend and I were doing, I was thinking about my lower back.
So in figuring out what to do better, fixing the frogtie is a no-brainer: use the longer ropes. I’ve had much more comfortable frogties in the past, and it was because we used the longer ropes. Easy enough. What to do with my arms is a different matter entirely. The moral of the story, as I see it, is not to have my hands at the bottom of the stack. My hands’ being on bottom not only caused them to fall asleep, but that also caused the back pain. If I’m going to do a scene where I’m lying on my back, I need to be able to lie flat on my back. That means no arms behind the back. I also like to roll around a little while frogtied, and so I don’t want my arms to be restrained in such a way as to cause injury when that happens. I also don’t want to simply move the two-column tie to the front, since then I could reach up and undo my gag.
So apparently I have some thinking to do about how to do this, since I don’t like bad pain, especially when it was my own bad ideas that caused it in the first place. I’m open for suggestions on how to do things better next time (leave a comment!). How would you tie arms and hands for a scene where the captive is lying on their back?