Peer rope

What is peer rope?

Peer rope is a rope gathering with no teacher and no program, where people practice together on their own initiative. Peer means equal: no one stands up front, no one demonstrates. You bring your own rope, find a spot, and work on whatever you want to work on that evening. Asking questions is fine, but no one has to teach.

How a peer rope evening runs

Everyone starts at the same time and no one gives the signal.

The room opens, people roll out a mat, and within ten minutes half of them are already in rope. One repeats the same arm tie for the fourth time, another tries something that did not work last week. People look over the shoulder and ask questions that would not fit a class: why does that wrap sit so low on you, may I feel how tight that is.

What stands out is the tone. People doubt out loud. In a workshop the person up front knows the answer; at a peer rope evening the answer is often “no idea, let’s have a look”.

Why people go to peer rope

Because tuition and authority are both thresholds, and here they fall away.

Zoey Jones recorded in her study of rope practitioners how hard the first threshold can be: one participant weighed a day of sixty-dollar workshops against a week of groceries, and chose the groceries. That same study describes how participants with a disability pieced together their own way of tying because the usual teaching methods did not fit their bodies. An evening without a curriculum is not a second choice for someone like that but the only one that works.

The second threshold is less visible. Whoever runs an event or teaches has social power, and Jones shows that this power weighs in the moment something goes wrong. Without a teacher there is also no authority to speak up against.

That people set up spaces like this themselves is not a rope phenomenon, by the way. Graham and colleagues asked forty-eight participants in The Journal of Sex Research what a BDSM community does for them, and sharing knowledge came out as one of fifteen categories from their answers.

The downside

Without a teacher, no one is obliged to correct you. That is the price. At a peer rope evening you can practice something wrong for an hour without anyone stepping in, and the people around you are by definition not screened for skill. So actively ask for someone to watch instead of waiting for someone to say something, and keep it to floorwork until you know someone you can trust on a line upward.

Where this fits on this site

Peer rope is something you seek out yourself; I do not organize it. If you want to experience rope once first without a room full of strangers, that can happen within a BDSM date. That page covers how such an evening is prepared.

Sources

• Pleasure, Community, and Marginalization in Rope Bondage: A qualitative investigation into a BDSM subculture. Zoey Jones, master’s thesis in Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2020. Twenty-three in-depth interviews with rope practitioners in Canada and the United States, carried out by a researcher who belongs to the scene herself. Provides the conversation in which a participant weighs a day of sixty-dollar workshops against a week of groceries and chooses the latter; the description of a participant with a chronic condition who taught herself her own way of tying because the usual teaching methods did not fit her own body; and the finding that the social power of an organizer, venue holder, or teacher weighs heavily the moment a boundary violation is reported. A thesis not published in a journal; publicly accessible and university-supervised.
• Member Perspectives on the Role of BDSM Communities. Benjamin C. Graham, Sarah E. Butler, Ryan McGraw, Shelby Marie Cannes & Joanna Smith, The Journal of Sex Research 53(8), 895–909, 2016 (DOI 10.1080/00224499.2015.1067758). Seven sessions by the nominal group method, together 48 participants and 133 recorded terms. Only the abstract was read; from it, used here is that sharing knowledge and education is one of the fifteen categories the answers were grouped into.

Related terms

• Munch. The same idea without rope: gathering with no program and no play.
• Public play. What does happen at a party, and why a peer rope evening is exactly not that.
• Shibari. The tradition most of the rope on such an evening comes out of.
• Floorwork. What nearly everyone at a peer rope evening is busy with.
• Rope jam. The other word for almost the same thing, with the jazz behind it and a Dutch playbook included.
• Play relationship. What such evenings often lead to: meeting up with the same person more often, without a relationship.