Rope bunny

What is a rope bunny?

A rope bunny is someone who likes being tied up with rope. The word is English and stays untranslated. It points to exactly the same place in the scene as rope bottom, but it sounds different, because for centuries bunny has been both a pet name for an attractive young woman and a word for a beginner.

Where the word rope bunny comes from

From the rabbit, by way of two detours that both still run alongside it.

The first is sweet. Etymonline dates bunny to the 1680s as a pet name for a rabbit, a diminutive of the Scottish dialect word bun, which earlier stood for a squirrel. Around 1600 the same word was already a pet name for a child or an attractive young woman. Jonathon Green’s slang dictionary, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, gives that sense as a separate sub-meaning with citations from 1700 on, and shows how productive it became: bed bunnies in 1970, disco bunnies in 1982, leather bunnies in 1987, fashion bunny in 2000. In 1960 the Playboy Club hostess joined the list.

The second detour is less kind. That same dictionary files, under one entry, a run of meanings drawn from the animal’s reputation: a fool, someone who gets taken in, a poor player, and in New Zealand prison slang a newcomer. Anyone who calls herself a rope bunny drags both charges along without asking for them.

That is not a rope thing, by the way. Wiktionary defines a snow bunny, in its first sense, not as a good skier but as “an inexperienced, usually female skier”; a beach bunny is “a young attractive woman in a bikini or on a beach”; and a gym bunny is someone who spends a lot of time at the gym to look better. Always the same recipe: a subject plus bunny, and the result is enthusiastic, usually female, and not taken entirely seriously.

How the word is used in the Netherlands

As the first word you run into, and usually not by your own choice.

Anyone who starts searching in Dutch lands on it almost at once. The BDSM glossary from Meet the Kinksters has listed it since September 2019 as the entry “Bunny / Rope bunny”, with the description: “A (rope) bunny is someone who likes to be tied up. Usually this is Japanese bondage.” Rope bottom has no entry in that same list. And the BDSM test, the questionnaire many people use to name their preferences for the first time, gives you a percentage on the archetype Rope bunny.

The result is predictable. People do not choose the word, it is handed to them, and only later do they notice that the same room holds people who would not say it about themselves.

Why some women wear it and others refuse it

The answer sits in the two charges above, and both reactions make sense.

Anyone who likes the word likes exactly that rabbit: soft, happy, a little cheeky, without ceremony. The play is not meant seriously, so why should the word be? That is a defensible position, and there are women who have introduced themselves this way for years without ever running into trouble over it.

Anyone who refuses the word hears the other half. Take someone who has practiced for two years, who knows where her nerves run and who brings her own rope: over her falls a word that the dictionaries also gloss as “fool” and “newcomer”. For her there is a perfectly good alternative, and that is rope bottom.

Neither camp is wrong, because the word means both at once. What you can do with that is ask one question before you use it about someone.

What I see myself

I am Victor: gigolo, trained as a psychotherapist, and now twenty-five years into BDSM. I rarely hear the word rope bunny from women who have worked with rope for a while, and I hear it often in a first message.

I find that telling. In that first message the word does something useful: it makes the subject lighter, and light is exactly what you need when you raise something and do not yet know how it will land. Later, once the nerves and the wraps come up, it disappears on its own.

I keep it simple myself: I use the word you use. Call yourself a rope bunny and I will say it too. Do not, and you will not hear it from me.

What you can do with this word

• Just ask. “Do you like it when I say that?” costs one sentence and saves an awkward moment halfway through the evening.
• Use it about yourself, not about someone else, unless you already hear that person using it. With words like this, self-naming is the difference between playful and patronizing.
• Do not confuse it with a level. Rope bunny says nothing about how much you know or how long you have done it, even if the word family suggests otherwise.
• In a profile, write what you want to do rather than which label you wear. “I want to be tied on the floor, no suspension” gets you better conversations than an archetype with a percentage behind it.
• Do not let it stick when someone uses it to wave away your experience. At that point it is no longer a pet name but an argument.

More reading on this word

• Bunny covers the short form as it sounds in practice, plus the safety rules that apply to the tied side.
• Rope bottom explains what that side actually does during a scene, and why it is a skill.
• The entry bunny in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is free to read and lays four centuries of meanings out with sources; it reads like a short history of how this word came to be used about women.

Where this fits on this site

Whether you call yourself a rope bunny or avoid the word, what happens during an evening with rope is something we talk through beforehand. The page on the BDSM date shows how that conversation goes and what you can bring to it.

Sources

• bunny, n.¹. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, digital edition, Jonathon Green. A scholarly slang dictionary with dated citations per sense. From it: sense 1(b), “a sexually attractive young woman; also of young homosexual men”, with citations from 1700 on and the compounds bed bunnies (1970), disco bunnies (1982), leather bunnies (1987) and fashion bunny (2000); and sense 3 with the sub-meanings “a fool, a simpleton”, “a scapegoat, a victim, a sucker”, “a poor player of a sport” and, in New Zealand prison slang, “a person new to the prison”.
• bunny (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary. From it: the dating to the 1680s as a pet name for a rabbit, the origin as a diminutive of the Scottish dialect word bun which from 1580 stood for a squirrel, the use as a pet name for a child or attractive young woman around 1600, and the sense “Playboy Club hostess” from 1960.
• snow bunny, beach bunny and gym bunny. Wiktionary. Gives the modern members of the same word family: snow bunny in its first sense “an inexperienced, usually female skier”, beach bunny as “a young attractive woman in a bikini or on a beach”, and gym bunny as someone who spends a lot of time at the gym on their looks.

Related terms

A rope bunny is the tied side of a rope scene within shibari, under a different label than rope bottom.

• Bunny. The short form, and what to watch for with rope.
• Rope bottom. The same spot in the scene, in the word without the overtone.
• Rigger. The opposite role, and why that word is a term of the trade.
• BDSM test. The questionnaire that introduces this label to many people.
• Bondage. The practice itself, with the rules of thumb that always apply.