Shibari You Can Use: A great Starter Book for Kink Friendly Therapy
Shibari You Can Use: Japanese Rope Bondage and Erotic Macrame
Lee Harrington has taught over 1,100 classes on sexuality and kink across all 50 U.S. states and six countries. He’s the only author to win the Geoff Mains Award for excellence in nonfiction sexuality writing three times. So when he sat down to write a beginner’s guide to Japanese rope bondage, the result was less “here’s how to tie knots” and more “here’s how to do this with someone you care about.” Shibari You Can Use (Mystic Productions, 2007) covers the fundamentals of shibari through step-by-step photography, but the real strength of the book is how seriously it takes the emotional and relational side of tying someone up.
That matters, because rope bondage has a communication problem. Not between the people doing it, but in how it gets taught.
Most online tutorials skip straight to technique. Harrington starts with safety, consent, and the kind of honest conversation that needs to happen before anyone picks up a length of jute. For people who are curious about rope but feel a little overwhelmed by the intensity of what they see on social media or at kink events, that’s a genuinely useful starting point.
What the Book Actually Covers
The scope here is intentionally narrow, and that’s both its greatest strength and its main limitation. Harrington focuses on a handful of foundational ties, broken down with clear photos and descriptions that assume you’ve never touched bondage rope before. He’s not trying to get you to suspension in a weekend. He’s trying to get you comfortable with a single-column tie and a chest harness, and to understand why those basics matter before you move on to anything more complex.
The photography features diverse body types and gender presentations, which was unusual for a rope bondage book in 2007 and still isn’t as common as it should be. For queer and trans readers especially, seeing bodies that look like theirs in instructional material makes a real difference in whether a book feels like it’s for them or just tolerating their existence. If you’re exploring kink-friendly therapy, this kind of inclusive representation is the same principle at work: feeling seen changes everything about how safe it is to learn.
The Consent and Communication Piece
Harrington weaves safety information throughout the book rather than dumping it into a single chapter you’re supposed to read and remember forever. Nerve compression, circulation checks, how to have a conversation about boundaries before you start, what to do when something goes wrong. It’s practical and specific rather than preachy.
That said, the consent framework here is very much a product of 2007. It leans heavily on safewords as the primary tool for communication during scenes, which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn’t really address the ways that freeze responses, power dynamics, or dissociation can make safewords unreliable. If you’re someone with a trauma history who’s interested in rope, the book’s consent model is a decent starting point but not the whole picture. Working with a therapist who understands both sex therapy and kink can help you figure out what additional communication structures might work for your specific situation.
Who This Book Is For (and Who It Isn’t)
If you’ve never tied anyone up and you want to start somewhere that isn’t a YouTube rabbit hole, this is one of the better options out there. It’s short (156 pages), it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it respects the reader enough to lead with safety without making the whole thing feel clinical.
It’s not the book for experienced riggers looking for advanced techniques. There’s no suspension work, no complex predicament bondage, no hishi karada. Harrington published a sequel, More Shibari You Can Use, that picks up where this one leaves off, but even that stays in intermediate territory. For people who want to go deeper into the Japanese tradition and aesthetics of kinbaku, they’ll eventually need other resources.
The other thing worth mentioning: this is primarily a technique book. It touches on the emotional and relational dimensions of rope bondage, but it’s not a deep exploration of why rope play can be so psychologically intense for both the person tying and the person being tied. The power exchange, the vulnerability, the trust involved in letting someone restrict your movement. Those are big feelings. For people in couples therapy or doing work around intimacy and trust, rope can bring up material that a how-to guide isn’t equipped to hold. That’s not a flaw in the book, just a limit of what any instructional manual can do.
Where Rope Meets the Rest of Your Life
One thing Harrington gets right is treating rope bondage as something that exists within a relationship, not as an isolated skill you practice in a vacuum. The sections on negotiation and aftercare, while brief, frame tying as a collaborative act. That’s important. Rope bondage can be profoundly connecting or deeply destabilizing depending on the relational context, and a book that acknowledges that distinction is doing more than most.
For people who are part of queer communities where kink is a normal part of the conversation, Shibari You Can Use feels like a book written by someone who’s actually in those communities rather than observing them from a clinical distance. Harrington’s background as a trans educator and longtime kink practitioner comes through in the tone, which is warm and direct without being overly casual about the risks involved.
If you’re interested in kink education and relationships more broadly, Dossie Easton’s The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book pair well with this one, covering the power dynamic side that Harrington mostly leaves to the reader. Find Shibari You Can Use on Goodreads →
