Charlie J Forrest

Disclaimer

I am not in any way qualified or insured to provide instruction on how to perform bondage, the following article is for illustrative and debate purposes only anyone choosing to participate in activities involving the activities shown do so entirely at their own risk.

Right, let’s have some fun.

I had a couple of Twitter conversations recently about unusual or improvised bondage (see my post on suits for what immediately came to mind). This also led tangentially to the old stories of Japanese police being trained to restrain someone using their belt, and onto general belt based bondage. I thought it might be interesting to offer my thoughts and knowledge, limited though it currently is. If you know anyone or any source of more information on this I would be delighted to hear as I think this is an underserviced aspect of shibari that has a lot to recommend it.

Differences to rope bondage:

Compared to traditional rope bondage there are a couple of (mostly) obvious differences when working with belts.

Belts are wider: I talk more about this below but this offers advantages (more comfortable, better support, less likely to hinder circulation) and disadvantages (knots and, well, other things).

Belts are shorter: I’m using a belt that’s about 250cm long. I think the longest ones readily available only reach to about 3 meters, and a lot of that gets used up in knots really quickly. More importantly, with normal rope you can easily add length by simply adding another length onto your current one. This is nowhere near as easy with belts. Plus, if you want to go down the traditional route, there’s a fundamental limit of two belts (yours and the one of the person you’re restraining). This means that a lot of the nicer looking forms (full body harnesses etc) are probably out of reach… and now I’m thinking about that scene from the Fifth Element…

Materials:

For the purposes of this article I’m using a spare white martial arts belt that came with a dogi.

Source: The internet (seriously, everywhere!)

Belt. Other brands of martial arts equipment are available.

It’s a not too-wide (1-2 inches) multi-stitched cotton belt. About as bog standard as they get. This one is about 250cm long (the label gives the size of the gi, not the belt).

I also make use of my wrist and a suitcase, but they’re less important.

Basic Knot:

The most important thing with any form of tying is obviously the knots. Belts offer a couple of interesting differences to rope. Firstly, as a belt is much broader there will be considerably more friction for even a very basic half hitch.

Basic half-hitch. Note the direction of the lapping end of the belt.

The other thing to note about knotting with belts is the direction of the lapping parts. Try not to have them completely change direction as this will tend to pull the entire knot loose. In the photo above note how the lapping piece is forming a sort of spiral, roughly mirroring the direction of the piece it laps. As a general rule of thumb a knot should, ideally, lie flat. This generally ensures your getting the most friction to hold it, plus it looks nicer.

Of course, once you have the basic knot, you can always tuck in the end to tidy the look and add a bit more friction for security. In this photo the knot is on the inside of the wrist (because tying yourself up can be difficult), but putting it on the outside makes it much harder to escape from.

Advanced Techniques

Is it an exaggeration to call the rest of these techniques advanced… yes.

Changing Direction:

This is an interesting problem I’m grappling with of how to secure a loop around someone and change the direction to work on something else. If we have two ends of belt like so…

We can’t just hook them around each other as with normal rope as this will cause the belts to stand proud.

Proud belts, probably not good.

This looks messy and, in all likelihood, won’t be very comfortable to wear.

One possible alternative is to make the direction change using a half-hitch Like so.

Belt end from right half-hitches to pass downwards.

But this only really works for one end. You can try to do the same with the other end but you end up with the following.

Both ends half-hitched to change direction.

I don’t like the look of the resulting asymmetry and, more importantly, it pulls unevenly on the (in this photo horizontal) belt it’s branching from.

I’m still very much puzzling over this one and would love to hear people’s thoughts on it.

Hooking:

If one were, theoretically looking to hook strands around a vertical belt, as in a normal rope harness, this can be done relatively easily by just ensuring that one goes over, one goes under.

hooking for karada or similar.

This one has a tendency to roll the central vertical belt, but at least remains contained by the two looping around it.

More elaborate/fuller techniques are probably going to have to wait till I have a model to work with, but hopefully this should be enough for some folks to start playing with.

Please let me know what you find does and doesn’t work and if you know of any resources out there (as there almost certainly are) that provide more/better information I’d love to learn from them.