Shibari, “Extreme Sex,” and Anti-Sex Prejudice

A Shibari-related death in Italy has prompted some American bloggers to show their blatant discomfort with sexual variation, with the result that bad information about bondage is being coupled with a grotesque and sensationalistic disregard for what really happened.

It’s bad enough when Erin Elzo at “Jerk Magazine” headlines a September 24 article “Maybe They Set the Shibari Too High,” but after all, that’s Jerk Magazine, so it stands to reason that Erin Elzo is a jerk. Reporting on someone’s death is never a good time for puns. Dead bondage bottoms don’t get to be your laughing gas just because sex makes you uncomfortable, Erin. Bad blogger. Bad!

At least she didn’t confuse “bemused” and “bewildered” in reference to the incident like Business Insider did.

But I generally expect more from The Daily Beast, which is one of those web sources supposedly replacing the mainstream press as our place for responsible muckraking. This ain’t it.

The Italian death occurred on an unreported date, as far as the English-language press is concerned. But it showed up on Yahoo News on Sept 11 in a story from Agency France-Presse (AFP). Perhaps the most revolting thing is the spooky, horror-movie image Yahoo chose to run alongside it…and the caption that blatantly states that it has nothing to do with the story, but is the shadow of a woman dancing. Huh?

“Horror, horror, horror,” the photo seems to scream. What does the shadow of a dancing woman have to do with a death by suspension bondage? Well, I’m just guessing…but if you ask me, it looks like the shadow of a person hanging from the gallows. I’m sorry, are we reporting news, or promoting a Vincent Price movie?

The September 11 Agency France-Presse text is as follows…importantly, it skips the whole “they were all drunk and high” part for several paragraphs in.

Italian prosecutors have charged a 42-year-old man with killing a female student who suffocated during a sex-game gone wrong, media reported Sunday.

Soter Mule tied Paola Caputo, 24, to another woman while performing a Japanese sado-masochist technique known as “shibari.”

The engineer was originally held for murder but authorities in Rome believe Caputo and her friend consented to the game.

[Link.]

Okay…right out of the gate, it was clear we were getting bullshit from AFP. Calling Shibari “a Japanese sado-masochistic” technique is almost as execrable in and of itself as professional writers referring to someone “performing” a “technique” or putting a hyphen in “sadomasochism.” The latter two cases, however, are merely torture of the English language, which can take the abuse. The former is a gross misrepresentation of what happened, and a jump-to-conclusions flavor of pervert-shaming that started this whole media frenzy off on the wrong foot.

It’s also a gross oversimplification of what Shibari is, and a revolting display of carelessness about something that is a huge part of many very safe players’ lives. Leading the account with “performing a Japanese sado-masochistic technique known as ‘shibari'” is easy and sleazy. If you take out the conflation of sadomasochism and bondage out of the equation — and even I’ll agree, it’s a distinction that’s probably irrelevant to the vast majority of readers — it leaves out something that would never be left out if this was a story about a car wreck. All three participants were drunk and high.

The fact that the participants, police or the press think what was being performed was “a Japanese sado-masochistic technique called Shibari” is essentially similar to saying that someone who got drunk and ran down a pedestrian “was driving a car at the time.” This comparision may seem disingenuous, but I assert that it’s pretty close to the mark, and I’m not the only bondage-positive writer to make that comparison.

Here’s more of the AFP story, in case you were wondering “why” this happened:

Investigators have so far established that the three spent the night drinking and using drugs at a club before Caputo, said to be Soter’s long-term girlfriend, suggested going to the car park of the building in a Rome suburb where she worked as a caretaker.

The two women remained clothed while they were tied tightly together with the same rope and suspended two metres off the ground. The balancing act meant that when the unnamed woman fainted, Caputo was suffocated.

[Link.]

Do not misconstrue my outrage. I’m not “making excuses” for the tragic death of someone who didn’t know what she was consenting to. There is no excuse for this kind of carelessness. Bondage, even complex bondage, even suspension bondage, even two-girl suspension bondage, can be done very safely, and is done safely, every day all over the world, by bondage tops who know what the fuck they’re doing and don’t get drunk and high before doing it.

It’s also occasionally by bondage tops who don’t know what they’re doing, take unnecessary risks, or who do get drunk and use drugs before doing it, but are very lucky. Far luckier are their bottoms…the ones who don’t get killed or hurt.

But bondage involving rope across the throat, and intentional asphyxia, as was apparently done here, has nothing to do with “Shibari” as a practice. What Soter Mule did was completely unsafe, and not just because he and his bottoms were drunk and high. He pushed the envelope as far as could be pushed, then pushed it some more, then some more, then some more. He should have had his head examined well before he involved two younger and presumably less experienced women in his incredibly dangerous scene — while they were all drunk and high!

If done badly, and particularly if it’s done while “altered,” most kinds of bondage — but especially suspension bondage — can indeed be dangerous. And yet, done cautiously, bondage is far, far safer than driving a car; not many people get T-boned by drunks inside dungeons, but that happens to innocent, sober drivers every day all over the world.

Is there an outcry of disgust about driving every time someone gets killed in an accident? Not really…because driving a car isn’t about sexual desire. But Soter Mule wasn’t just doing the bondage equivalent of “driving a car” while drunk and high. He was doing the bondage equivalent of driving a car with a blindfold on and his MP3 player blasting White Zombie while steering with his knees on a windy mountain road with sheer drops on either side. And he let two people without seat belts get in the back while probably assuring them, “No, it’s totally safe. I do this all the time.” This wasn’t “Shibari.” This was recklessness.

Unfortunately, that observation would fall on deaf ears for the likes of Barbie Latza Nadeau, whose September 15 article at The Daily Beast is headlined “Europe’s Dangerous Sex Craze.” It begins with a grotesque attack on bondage enthusiasts by implying that they’re all people who got bored with “normal” sex:

Apparently monogamous sex gets tedious even when you’re tied up with rope.

Italian engineer Soter Mule, 42, and his girlfriend Paola Caputo, 24, were avid practitioners of Shibari, an ancient Japanese erotic art. More refined than your typical night of bondage, Shibari involves the use of thin pieces of rope to bind the submissive partner in ways that are meant to be both artistically beautiful and also heighten the sensation of his or her orgasm.

But last Saturday night, the couple was looking to spice things up even more. They met up with a friend of Caputo’s at a local pub in Rome and, after drinking heavily and smoking hashish, the three headed to the parking garage where Caputo worked as a daytime attendant. The dimly lit space was closed and desolate, the perfect setting for a kinky sex act. Mule strung the two women, with their consent and help, from a rafter with strategically placed soft ropes. He used their weight to counterbalance them, each with one foot on the ground. When one woman moved, it tightened the ropes and intensified the sensation for the other, and vice versa.

Everything was fine until the less-experienced woman fainted. The force of her sudden dead weight quickly lifted and strangled Caputo, even though Mule quickly tried to cut his girlfriend free. She died of asphyxiation, and the couple’s new friend nearly suffered the same fate. Mule was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter, and later released on house arrest.

In detailed testimony to the arraigning judge on Wednesday, Mule described how extreme sex like Shibari involves total control. He explained how he alternately teased and penetrated the women for maximum pleasure. He admitted that he made a mistake by not cutting Caputo from her bondage ropes sooner, but insisted that the extreme sex was consensual. “No one forced anyone,” he told the court. “Paola and her friend consented, but I was the master and I ultimately made the fatal mistake. I should have had the knife closer, as they suggest when practicing this type of bondage. By the time I found it, it was too late.”

Nadeaux has elaborated on the details to heighten the spooky-ooky ominous Silence of the Lambs quality of the scene. Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s not trying to paint this as some serial-killer case…or anything. Or is she?

When police searched Mule’s apartment, they found a cache of sex toys, bondage ropes, and albums of photos he had taken of women bound in various contortions. His computer was filled with content suggesting sexual deviancy or erotic artistry, depending on your point of view. Nothing Mule did was illegal. The surviving friend, still recovering in the hospital, backed up his version of events. There were no minors involved, and sadomasochism is not a crime in Italy.

There, Nadeaux, like so many writers about sexual variation and porn, has done that thing that promulgators of sex-terror and porn-terror like to do:

There were no minors involved.

Who said anything about minors?

I’m sure the author thinks she’s just responsibly acknowledging that this guy is not a child molester. But nobody suggested Mule was a child molester; they suggested he was a murderer. It’s Nadeaux who felt her audience needed to be told that minors were not involved.

What Nadeaux has done in introducing child molestation in the minds of her reader is part of the generalized social strategy for dealing with any kind of sexual “deviance.” It always has been, and it’s even more common because outré sexuality is more common.

What’s more, the “Shibari” for journalists is pretty freakin’ low nowadays. Generally I’m in favor of that; the mainstream media has engaged in roadblocking and obfuscation so aggressively over the years on every conceivable topic that I say good riddance to them.

But that means ignorant dweebs who don’t like perverts to begin with get to start howling about child molestation whenever somebody dies in a tragic bondage-related death that has nothing to do with minors. Welcome to culture 2.0! If someone gets arrested for drugs or DUI, and they also shoot fetish videos, we need to be told whether or not they’re shooting kiddie porn. Huh?

The result is that a prejudicial assumption has become common currency: anyone who does anything “weird” in the bedroom or takes pictures might be taking pictures of underage people. Which is absolutely true, as is the assertion that any given office worker, cop, kindergarten teacher or Army Ranger might have frozen heads in their freezer or be about to flip out and start shooting people.

Reporting that there were no minors in Soter Mule’s photos is not responsible journalism. It barely even pretends to be responsible journalism. It’s about as passive-aggressive as a punch in the face, but it’s still pretty passive-aggressive. It’s sex-hating in the extreme, and it’s only subtle because so many writers do it.

Don’t worry, though, it pales in comparision to where Nadeaux is going:

Caputo’s death has since opened up a steamy debate in Italy, which has some of the highest numbers of extreme-sex aficionados in Europe, according to a poll by La Repubblica newspaper. Not to be confused with sexual predators who attack their victims, extreme-sex participants engage in risky, mutually consensual sex that they know could kill them if something goes wrong. One in 10 Italian couples practice “extreme sex,” which is defined as sex that could put one partner’s life at risk—and even those who aren’t doing things that could end in death are still risqué. Sixteen percent of Italian couples use masks and forms of bondage, and 5 percent admit to regularly engaging in mild sadomasochistic practices. Over half use erotic props in their usual sexual rapport. Just under 3 percent of the population has had sex with more than one person at a time, and slightly less than that have had group sex involving three or more partners.

Ayzad (he goes by only one name), author of A Guide to Extreme Eroticism published last year in Milan, told The Daily Beast that sexual extremism is a growing phenomenon across the globe primarily because of the Internet, which hosts thousands of websites and message boards where fetish fanatics can post their ideas and learn how to fulfill the most fringe erotic fantasies.

The use of the prejudicial term “extreme-sex,” which was apparently used by Repubblica but was then repeated by Nadeaux without comment, is ludicrous enough at face value. But then Nadeaux again does that passive-aggressive thing with her “Not to be confused with sexual predators…” — just before throwing “sex that could put one partner’s life at risk” with “masks and forms of bondage,” “mild sadomasochistic practices,” “erotic props,” and sex “with more than one person at a time.”

And while we’re at it, I’m sorry, “masks and erotic bondage”? Since when do “masks” have so much to do with erotic bondage that they’re in the same line-item? And what is a “mask” in this context? Like, as in, anonymous sex? Or, like, wearing a Zorro mask to bed? Or has she (or La Repubblica) confused “mask” and “gag” or “mask” and “blindfold”? Either way, if Nadeaux is simply restating errors made by the Italian newspaper, then one has to assume that Nadeaux doesn’t know the difference.

The mashup of bizarre numbers without comment indicates that the author is parroting stuff she doesn’t “get.” The problem is not with failing to understand “extreme sex” or sex in general but of journalistic principles. In an attempt to conjure up some naughty eyeball-grabbing sex panic, she’s pumped up the menace to the point where a fairly common sexual variation like threesomes is presented as part of a syndrome of nightmares.

Thankfully, the second commenter isn’t buying it, and put it as well as I could have…in fact, uses the exact same analogy I did above.

Turning the accidental death of someone’s loved one and partner into a sensationalist piece is absolutely disgusting. Think of the woman who died in this accident and her family and friends. How many more people die in car accidents? I don’t hear you calling taking a drive a dangerous craze.

The sad truth is, it appears that this was not just an innocent Shibari top who fucked up. This was the case of a trio engaging in some of the most dangerous bondage there is, and it was the top — Soter Mule — who failed because he was not in control of a situation that was ill-advised to begin with. As a poster on Ropebondageforum.com put it:

“He had one rope with one end around each girl’s neck and with the middle looped over a pipe a couple of metres off the ground. Only one girl’s feet would be on the ground at a time and she had to push off the ground to bring the other one down. So only one at a time was hanging completely it seems. A combination of predicament bondage with heavy breath play. It is not written if they were hanging only from the neck or partially from the neck and partially from other bondage.”

If this was a chest compression asphyxiation, that is one thing — and yes, very dangerous. But if we are talking about hanging by the neck, as described, then that is some seriously dangerous shit. Even within the spectrum of breath play, it is way out on the edge.

What’s more, even if there was no throat bondage involved, the kind of bondage in the Soter Mule case has nothing whatsoever to do with the silk-scarves-and-blindfolds bondage that the La Republicca survey is talking about. “Extreme sex trend” my ass.

There are many, many members of the bondage community who will tell you breath play is never okay. You’d have to go pretty damn far to find a bondage educator who would tell you two-person suspension bondage coupled with breath play while you’re all drunk and high is anything other than a shit-stupid idea…especially if you can’t be bothered to keep the knife close at hand. Yes, even “extreme” forms of bondage can be done safely. If anything, the Italian case should remind us why it should be and must be done safely, or not done at all.

The fact that this tragic event occurred during consensual sexual variation and nobody intended it to happen shouldn’t take away from the fact that Soter Mule did something utterly reprehensible. But his mistake was not in “trying something freaky.” It wasn’t even in doing something dangerous. It was in doing something dangerous in which he placed other, apparently less experienced players at serious risk…and did it while he and they were fucked up, without safety equipment close at hand, and without paying close attention to the condition of both his bottoms.

In playing dangerous and drunk, Soter Mule violated a sacred trust. Anyone responsible who’s ever done bondage, SM or D/s had better take that trust far more seriously than Soter Mule took it…or bottoms should never, ever play with them, for their own good and the good of the community. But trying to slather the horror by drawing some sweeping conclusions about “extreme sex trends” is one of the most boneheaded things I’ve seen in a long lifetime of complaining about press coverage about sex.

Photo: Lew Rubens, “Straddled,” available as a print in the Lew Rubens print store.