Once a month on Sunday night I prep for the first class in the intro series. I move through what I’m teaching and feel my body and the patterns out. I start with aisatsu shibari.

Pushing my arms forward, I roll my shoulders in and break posture. I bend at the knees and look up and forward. There’s no rope on me, there’s no one in the room, and it may be artificial vulnerability, but it’s real. I feel a little bit of embarrassment if not shame. Even if there is no audience, I know the cultural meaning of what I’ve communicated, not just intellectually, but deeper. It’s been worn in by intentional repetition.

It’s a commonplace to say that BDSM practices parody power, but that’s not the whole story. Early advocates for BDSM within queer theory liked to describe it as a kind dress-up play that shows us how much of power springs from its own vestments. The benefits of BDSM in this account are largely critical. But BDSM is not just about skewering. Ask most practitioners. They navigate all sorts of feelings and meanings beyond some ironic, intellectual detachment. No joke is just a joke.

The same can be said of rope. There’s pedagogical value in rope’s imitation beyond denaturalization and irony. Rope is an education in rhetorical device. Just as early modern students learned rhetoric in the trivium by imitating Cicero and Livy, we learn the how to communicate by repeating and iterating, watching the deformations and differences in our repetitions and seeing what they do to the message.

Rope classes are working well when they create a space to be otherwise. They’re even better when they give students the tools to do something different and new. Almost every month, I have students who want to find vulnerability in ropes and are frustrated at their difficulty in doing so. I’m always quick to point out that having a hard time being vulnerable in a rope scene doesn’t point to a flaw or anything fundamental about a person. Vulnerability is technical too. And the tools for allowing oneself to be vulnerable, or communicating that one is vulnerable, aren’t something we are all given equal education in or access to.

How often, growing up, was I given license to be visibly and publicly vulnerable? How little was I told how to make space to be open in? How easy it was, to become hard and brittle when certain versions of masculinity were expected of me? How much was I policed when I tried to be soft and open? I cobbled an education on vulnerability from unexpected and unlicensed places, in a queer counter-education. Rope has given me tools to express some of what I’ve learned.

Sometimes all one needs to do to open up a space of vulnerability is to make a small postural change. Part of vulnerability is stance. It’s hard to feel vulnerable when squared up on a firm base. So when I’m tied I move up onto my toes and place my feet more narrowly. I break my posture. I change my center of gravity. I’ve had students with a long history of practicing martial arts hesitate at entering such a position. It goes against practiced bodily habit, and what most of us learn when we tie. When I want to project power when I’m tying, I firm up my base. I change my angles. I draw on an education of bodily comportment I learned all too well with the socialization I received. These are not things I always knew I did, or thought about much. Not all education is explicit. Naming something as learned can be the first step to learn or teach it.

Being able to be in a position where I could move fluidly as a bottom is not something I’ve seen taught explicitly classes. It’s not something I was able to think about specifically or talk about clearly until recently. At a SpaceTime eventin Vancouver, I had a realization watching @Addie movie in preparation of being bound in the first part of a TK. I noticed that that the positioning was the opposite — or better perhaps, compliment — of the what I have learned I should aim for when I apply ropes. Being in ropes involves a whole realm of technical knowledge all too rarely discussed because in general culture doesn’t valorize communicating vulnerability as much as it does power and force. But in the disciplines of projecting power and force, there’s always a counter-current, the suggestion of an opposite, of what one can do to be vulnerable.

Rope, at its best, is contrasexual. It makes the tropes of role and gender “open, copyleft registers available to all bodies.” Rope education is not just about having a good time with a partner. It’s about accessibility and redistribution. It’s about who gets to have the opportunity (and the tools) to experience certain kinds of vulnerability and power. Part of the project of rope education should be to mine culture for the codes we use communicate vulnerability and power and force, and to find their compliments, counters, and opposite. When we tie, we can collect them, practice them, recode and mutate them. More than hemp or jute, they are the real raw material of what we do

It’s funny to say, but I’ve started to feel that patterns and how to tie them together make up the smallest and simplest part of tying. Maybe, rope educators should spend more time looking outside of rope, with people who have knowledge we can use. We should be speaking to people who teach drag, theater, and dance. We should speak to scholars and activists who think deeply on how we signal our identities, how we we communicate, and the economies that determine what we can access. This broader expanse, one all too neglected in most education, is far more important, both in terms of having better scenes and being better people. If doing rope has value outside of just being a hobby, it might be in learning to see what tropes and techniques we employ, and what the consequences of those are. But more importantly: it’s about learning to do new things and learning to be better.