Harness

What is a harness?

A harness (Dutch: harnas) is a system of straps, chains or rope that closes around the torso and is fitted with buckles or knots. A harness fixes nothing by itself: it spreads pressure across a large surface and supplies attachment points for other bondage work. It can be purely decorative or load-bearing in a suspension.

How a harness works

A harness works by smearing the pressure across the whole torso instead of onto one wrist or ankle. The description of the bondage harness sets out the build: leather straps one to two centimeters wide, joined with an ordinary belt buckle, with a central strap that runs over the front and the back. Crosswise to that, transverse straps close around the body, on a woman usually above and below the breasts and around the waist. Fitting it to the body is part of the work.

Why people wear a harness

A harness is the only form of bondage you can simply keep on. The encyclopedia notes that it is immediately recognizable as kink and so is also worn in public, as a reference to fetish culture. For the one wearing it there is something around you that you feel with every movement while you can still walk and talk; for the one fitting it, it supplies an anchor point without anything having to go around a wrist right away. Against that stands an honest limitation. A harness holds no one back. Anyone who really wants to be held needs cuffs or rope around the limbs.

What you watch for

Measure the space, not the feeling. The description of bondage techniques gives the two-finger rule: two fingers should fit under each strap. That same source names knees, elbows, groins and armpits as the places where large arteries, veins and nerves lie just below the surface and so tolerate moderate pressure at most. A harness by definition runs under the arms, so that is where the risk sits. On the outcome the source is brief: nerve damage happens very fast, is cumulative and often irreversible, and the first signals are pain, tingling or numbness. Not the color of the skin.

In practice: fit the harness before anything is attached to it, check the straps under the arms as soon as someone changes position, and use it as a load point only once you know what a suspension asks.

If you want to feel how a harness sits, laid on by someone who keeps an eye on the two fingers under each strap and the spot under your arms, that belongs with a BDSM date.

Sources

• Bondage harness. Wikipedia. Supplies the definition as BDSM gear worn around the body, the leather straps 1 to 2 centimeters wide with belt buckle, the central strap with the transverse straps crosswise to it above and below the breasts and around the waist, the fixing of the arms by laying those straps over instead of under the arms, the use as an anchor for further bondage, and the wearing in public as a reference to fetish culture.

Related terms

• Bondage. The overarching term the harness falls under, with the risks and the ground rules.
• Shibari. The Japanese rope tradition the rope harness comes from.
• Breast bondage. What happens at the place where the cross-straps land above and below the breast.
• Armbinder. The garment that really does fix the arms, instead of only pressing them against the body.
• Corset. The other garment that spreads pressure across the torso, with a very different pressure profile.
• Collar and D-ring. The band around the neck and the little ring a harness draws its anchor points from.
• Karada. The Japanese rope harness with the same working principle, in rope instead of leather.
• Shinju. The rope variant around the breasts, and why it is named after a pearl.
• Hishi. The diamond pattern in rope, with there the difference from kikkou, which lays hexagons instead of diamonds.