Question: what smells like a new Barbie, won’t stick to your body hair, doesn’t require batteries, and could possibly dial your sexlife up to eleven? No, it’s not Jodie Marsh, though that’s an excellent guess. The answer, my inquisitive and possibly bi-curious friend, is bondage tape.
I bought my first roll of bondage tape about two years ago. In the cheery Bermuda pink shade of Pepto Bismol, the fat roll of tape looked innocuous and even a bit innocent, like it could be used to festoon a child’s birthday party. It seemed to me, then a neophyte in the world of D/s play—I’ve now graduated to the level of “dilettante,” a happy departure from the largely off-puttingly stern black-leather-and-chrome aesthetic of the lion’s share of D/s accoutrement. I didn’t feel ready to invest in anything that required a key for escape, but I did feel it was time to be bound tight and compliant. Bondage tape looked like it would fit the bill.
It did. The first time my then-boyfriend wrapped the tape’s pink plastic width around my wrists and then my wrists to his bedframe, I found my body go paradoxically limp and taut with submission. Just this, this four-foot length of plastic, this simple act of restraining me, this binding of my hands above my head, gave me a big blank check to lie back and enjoy myself. It rendered me an object of abject bliss. I liked it, I found, I liked it a lot.
Bondage tape, like Post-It Notes, like Ziploc bags, like aglets, like many other gifts of the modern world, is a phenomenally simple and profoundly useful invention. And like those other inventions I’ve named, plastic makes it possible. Bondage tape is merely a thin sheet of decoratively colored plastic cut in ribbons and wound around a spool: simple, ingenious, and wicked. Unlike conventional tape, bondage tape doesn’t have any sticky stuff: it adheres to skin and to itself when you stretch it and the tape is forced to expand and then contract upon itself. Therefore, the tape can’t hurt you when you pull it off—an important consideration when you’re talking about human bodies with human hair.
The big plus of bondage tape is not merely that it won’t hurt on removal; it is that it won’t confuse on application. I love rope, don’t get me wrong. Since my first foray into bondage graduated to being tied with rope, I have liked it. I like the feeling of the rope when it slick-whips my exposed flesh as my lover ties it in place. I like the way it leaves interesting marks on my wrists, arms, ribcage, thighs and ankles. I like the way it looks on my flesh. However, rope requires a patience on the parts of both the tie-er and the tie-ee that bondage tape does not. Bondage tape is easy. Rope is not.
Bondage tape is incredibly, well, plastic, in the pre-petroleum product meaning of the term: “capable of being molded or of receiving form.” You can use it to tie hands or feet in place, to spread arms or legs wide or to close them tight. You can mummify bodies, and you can even use it as an impromptu blindfold or gag, because it won’t stick to hair. You can even fashion a fetching corset out of it, should you want to rock it Wendy O. Williams style. And you can cut it off in a hurry, which you can’t do with rope. Bondage tape is like a good SWAT team, quick both in and out, and it leaves little mess.
There are downsides to bondage tape, of course. You can’t reuse it, while you can wind rope up and store it for future carting use or erotic play. And unlike, rope, bondage tape is non-porous and will make the bound person sweat. Bondage tape isn’t green, so if you’re a big environmental enthusiast, you’ll probably want yourself some hemp rope, though I suppose you can recycle the tape. Finally, if you go to your local BDSM club toting a roll of bondage tape, unless you have seriously mad skillz, you’re going to find yourself the uncomfortable object of much derisive laughing and pointing. (Bondage tape is very much looked down upon by the hardcore BDSM culture. But then so is gingham.)
However, if you have been curious about the ties that bind, and if you’re not ready for a long knotty tutorial; if you like the smell of plastic, and you aren’t ashamed to admit it; if you are curious about trying on a plethora of bound positions, and you want to do them quickly, bondage tape could be for you. It’s more fun than a new Barbie, a lot less expensive and much more useful.
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