Zipper

What is a zipper in BDSM?

A zipper in BDSM is a row of clothespins or clamps tied together with a string and pulled off the skin in one motion. Setting it up is the calm part. Pulling it off is what it’s about: all the pins release at once, and that lands hard.

How a zipper is set up

Slowly, and that’s on purpose.

You thread the clothespins onto a string before you begin, with the springs all facing the same way. Then you place them one by one on a fold of skin: a strip along the inside of a thigh, a line across the belly, two rows on either side of the breasts. Each pin on its own is easy to take. What happens while you sit there is that the skin under each spring slowly goes numb and the attention shifts upward instead, to the next one coming.

So the build-up does all the work. By the time the last one is on, everyone knows what’s about to happen, and that’s half the tension.

Why the pull-off is the hit

Because it all comes back at once.

As long as a pin is closed, the blood flow under the jaws is pinched off and the skin there stops reporting much. The moment you pull the string, they all open within half a second and the blood floods back in one go. That’s the peak. Not the pressure, but the return.

That’s why the direction you pull is the one technical choice that really matters. Straight off the skin is the gentlest version. Along the length of the row, with the skin, gives the longest after-echo. Pulling at an angle is the hardest, and immediately the version where it goes wrong.

Where the Dutch word rits comes from

Two words that ran together in Dutch. In English the tool is simply called a zipper.

The first is old. According to Etymologiebank, rits already meant “incision, scratch, line” between 1351 and 1400, probably borrowed from Middle High German riz, “tear, wound”. It belongs to the verb rijten, to tear. The second is onomatopoeia: the sound you hear when something rips to shreds. Van Haeringen notes that those two lines merged in Dutch.

From that onomatopoeia comes the clothing fastener. The Etymological Dictionary of Dutch dates ritssluiting to 1937 and the shortened form rits to 1939; before that the thing was called a patentsluiting or a treksluiting. The English zip went the same way, as onomatopoeia for tearing fabric.

So the word stands twice over. The row of clothespins is called a rits because it tears and because it sounds that way.

How often clothespins and clamps are used

Far more often than people outside the scene suspect.

Jennifer Rehor, for Archives of Sexual Behavior, presented 1,580 women from the kink world with sixty-two behaviors. To the line “Using clothespins/clamps”, 62.47 percent answered that it had been done to them and 37.53 percent that they did it to someone else; in some form, 78.80 percent came out as yes. Breast play with clothespins scored a little higher still, at 83.16 percent.

The zipper itself isn’t listed separately. What the figures do show: the gear is in nearly every bag, and the zipper is nothing more than those same clothespins with a string through them.

What can go wrong

A tear, and it’s in the pulling force.

The international definition of a skin tear is useful precisely because it names the mechanism. Hilde Van Tiggelen and colleagues, in The British Journal of Dermatology, established that it concerns a piece of skin that unintentionally comes wholly or partly away from its place through shear force, friction, or blunt trauma. Their classification has three grades: no loss of the flap, partial loss, full loss. The instrument was tested by 1,601 healthcare workers in 44 countries.

Shear force is exactly what a zipper does. On healthy skin on a thigh there’s little to worry about; on thin skin, on a scar, or with someone taking blood thinners it’s different. So look at the color under the clothespins before you pull, and never leave a zipper on until the skin stays white after release.

Misunderstandings about the zipper

“The longer they stay on, the more intense.” Up to a point, and after that it reverses: leaving them on longer actually numbs and at the same time raises the chance of tissue damage. Ten minutes is a common upper limit with clamps.

“You need special BDSM clothespins.” No. Plain wooden clothespins work and are even easier to dose, because their spring tension is fixed.

“Rip it off in one go and it’s over.” That’s right on timing, but the direction determines whether it’s pain or damage. Straight off the skin, not at an angle.

“A zipper is impact play.” No blow falls. It belongs to sensation play, and its place in the A-to-Z list next to needle play and clothespins fits better than the place next to the whip.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. On my profile, pain play is a yes, in soft, medium, and hard, and nipple clamps too.

The zipper is one of the few things where the announcement weighs heavier than the act. I set it up, I sit down, I talk, and I do nothing for a while. That waiting is the scene. The string in my hand is a promise no one can get out of anymore, and with women who like tension that often works better than what comes afterward.

At home it goes wrong the same way every time: too many clothespins, too close together, and then no idea what to do with the after-echo. Start with eight. Not with twenty.

What you can do yourself

• Thread the string through at home in advance. Knotting clothespins together while someone lies waiting takes the tension out.
• Place them on a fold, not flat on the skin. A fold gives the jaws something to hold and spreads the pressure.
• Look at the color before you pull. White that doesn’t come back means off, now.
• Pull straight off. Pulling at an angle is where the tears come from.
• Hold ten minutes as an upper limit and not as a target.
• Agree what happens after the pull. The afterpain lasts longer than the hit, and you don’t want to lie there with it alone.

Where this fits on this site

Want to know how a zipper feels without threading ten clothespins onto a string yourself? That belongs on a BDSM date. What we agree beforehand about how far it goes and which word stops everything is on that page.

Further reading on the zipper

Within this glossary, clothespins and clamps explain the gear, nipple clamps covers the nipple in particular, and breast torture describes where such a row most often ends up. On the blog, the art of nipple clamps covers build-up and dosing.

Beyond that, the ISTAP classification gives the best picture of what a skin tear exactly is, and Etymologiebank shows how the word stuck to the clothing fastener in 1937.

Sources

• Standardizing the classification of skin tears: validity and reliability testing of the International Skin Tear Advisory Panel Classification System in 44 countries. H. Van Tiggelen, K. LeBlanc, K. Campbell, K. Woo, S. Baranoski et al., The British Journal of Dermatology 183(1), 146–154, 2020 (DOI 10.1111/bjd.18604; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref, which gives 28 November 2019 as the online publication date against volume 183 from 2020). Full text read via PubMed Central. Used: the definition of the skin flap in a skin tear, set in a two-round Delphi procedure with 17 experts from 11 countries, namely a part of the skin (epidermis or dermis) that is unintentionally separated wholly or partly from its original place through shear force, friction, and/or blunt trauma; the three categories of the instrument (type 1 no loss of skin or flap, type 2 partial loss, type 3 full loss); and the scope of the validation, an online survey with 24 photos among 1,601 healthcare workers from 44 countries.
• Sensual, Erotic, and Sexual Behaviors of Women from the “Kink” Community. J. E. Rehor, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44(4), 825–836, 2015. Used is only table 2, in which 62 BDSM behaviors are given as a percentage of the whole sample of 1,580 women. From the line “Using clothespins/clamps” come the figures 37.53 percent (did it to someone else), 62.47 percent (had it done to them), 72.97 percent (either role), 47.78 percent (watched it) and 78.80 percent (took part in some form). From the line “Breast play: slap, clothespins, etc.” only the final figure 83.16 percent is used. The zipper as a separate act does not appear in the questionnaire.
• rits (incision, tear; also as interjection). Etymologiebank, with Van Veen & Van der Sijs (Etymologisch woordenboek, 2nd edition 1997), J. de Vries (Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, 1971) and C.B. van Haeringen (Supplement, 1936). Used: the dating of rits as “scratch, line” between 1351 and 1400; the probable borrowing from Middle High German riz, “tear, wound”, with the kinship to rijten; the meanings “slot, incision, notch” and “groove, slit, scoring”; and Van Haeringen’s finding that these words merged in Dutch with onomatopoeic formations tied to the interjection rits.
• ritssluiting (pull fastener). Etymologiebank, with the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (Philippa et al., 2003–2009). Used: the dating of ritssluiting to 1937 and of the shortened form rits to 1939, both via the supplements to the WNT; the explanation that rits is the onomatopoeic name for the sound of tearing material, with the citation “hij scheurt het, rits! aan flarden” from 1761; the earlier Dutch names patentsluiting, treksluiting and zipsluiting; and the parallel development of the English zip as a shortening of zip-fastener, likewise onomatopoeia.

Related terms

• Sensation play. The umbrella a zipper falls under, and not impact play.

A zipper isn’t a separate object but a way of using ordinary gear. So its neighborhood is mostly that gear.

• Clothespins. The part a zipper is built from, and why wood doses better than you’d think.
• Clamps. The adjustable version, with the ten-minute limit that applies here too.
• Nipple clamps. The same pressure on the most sensitive spot.
• Breast torture. The area where a zipper is most often laid.
• Needle play. The other way to put a row on the skin, with a very different risk.
• Impact play. The family the zipper is often placed with, though not a single blow falls.
• Pain threshold. Why the peak at the pull-off lands so differently from the pressure before it.
• Bruising. What’s visible the next day.
• Clothes pegs. The clothespins that go on the string, with the difference between wood and plastic.