EROTICS /
OF RECEIVING

The erotics of touch without the ability to interact, to touch back, or to stress your mind with thoughts about what you should give back is a very different kind of erotics.

Often touch is an exchange, and even while enjoying it some part of the mind may remain busy:

How should I respond? Does the other person feel my response? Should I move closer? Should I touch them in the same way? Am I giving enough back?

When the body is restrained, this whole conversation is interrupted. You cannot follow the hand that moves away or reach for the person touching you. There is nothing to negotiate with your own movement. You can only receive.

This inability is chosen, and this is important. It is not the absence of agency, because the choice was made before and continues to exist throughout the experience. But inside this choice, the responsibility for what happens to the body is temporarily shared with somebody else. You do not need to control every movement or decide what comes next. At the same time, you become more dependent on attention, because the person who creates the discomfort is also the person who notices it, adjusts the rope, supports the weight and touches the body with care.

This contradiction makes the tenderness feel different.

Without the usual comfort of massage salons or spas, being in an awkward position and struggling to find a pose that does not hurt, the soft touch of the rigger brings a new calmness and thankfulness to the mind. The body cannot simply settle into a comfortable position and disappear there. Some parts are compressed, some are stretched, some carry more weight than they usually do. The rope is rough, the position is demanding, and against all of this even a very small touch becomes intense. A hand placed on the back for a few seconds can feel intensely present.

The body reacts on its own while the mind is busy with discomfort and pain. It moves toward the touch as much as the rope allows it, the breathing changes, the skin becomes more sensitive, and muscles release without being consciously told to release. Because you cannot easily move toward the source of softness, you become more aware of every moment when it arrives and every moment when it disappears again. The touch does not need to be explicitly sexual to become erotic. Its intensity comes from attention, restriction and the impossibility of casually answering it.

Can the softness and tenderness gradually push the thoughts out and draw all attention into an empty space within, making the muscles forget about tension and the mind stop calculating how long the position has lasted or how long it can still last?

There is nothing you need to perform and nothing that has to be returned. The body is no longer waiting for the next moment because it is completely occupied by the present one.

Time does not matter anymore. And sometimes, even after the ropes are un/knotted and movement returns, the body continues to remember the restraint and the touch held inside it, while the skin may still carry their traces…