We think that this thought does a nice job of expressing the tension that often happens in good S/M – the “oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don’t-stop” energy that we all know and love.
Another good thought we’ve heard is:
S/M takes place when the top trades his or her energy for the bottom’s armor.
All these definitions convey good information, but none of them seems to us adequate or comprehensive.
One thing we do know is that BDSM play is completely and qualitatively different from abuse. What we do bears the same relationship to abuse that consensual sex does to rape: a photograph of lovemaking might look exactly like a photo of a rape, but what is going on in the hearts and minds of the participants is entirely different. Hence, we say:
In S/M, the participants have one another’s wellbeing as their paramount goal.
Some folks get confused because the fantasies they use to get turned on are not about consensual play. (Ours certainly aren’t!) If you feel disturbed by this seeming contradiction, let us remind you: everyone in your fantasy exists only inside your head. Since they are all aspects of yourself, they have all given their consent to be there. One of the characteristics that defines safe play is a recognition of the boundaries between our fantasies and our realities. A lot of this book will be devoted to helping clarify those boundaries.
In general, though, we’d say that if it feels like S/M to you, then it’s probably S/M – or at least something close enough that you can learn more about it by reading on.
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU’RE A TOP?
Many tops remember having toppy fantasies for as long as they can remember anything. It’s not uncommon for a top to remember talking neighborhood kids into playing cops-and-robbers with lots of bondage, or teacher-and-student with lots of spanking. On the other hand, some people have their first top fantasies at puberty and some during young adulthood. Some excellent tops don’t remember ever having had a top fantasy until a partner talked them into trying a light scene – and a whole new world opened up to them.
These fantasies may have caused the top lots of pain and worry. One top of our acquaintance recalls having his first bondage fantasy in the late ’60s, shortly after the Tate/LaBianca murders – and spending anxious months worrying that he was turning into a mass murderer.
Janet remembers:
I can remember having top fantasies since very early childhood, but I was well into my twenties before I recognized that these diverting thoughts – which were obsessing me to the point of making it difficult for me to function in the real world – were actually sexual in nature. And once I figured that out, it took me even longer to grasp that these marvelous, dirty, nonconsensual stories didn’t have to stay fantasies, that there were people out there who would be interested in acting them out consensually with me.
So the easiest way to know if you’re a top is to take a hard look at your fantasies. Being a dominant person in real life doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a top – many people who are hard-driving type As prefer to bottom. Nor does being a bit quiet and withdrawn in real life mean that you’ll turn into Attila the Hun in scene.
On the other hand, if the idea of giving direction, taking control, inflicting strong sensation sends you into a panic, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not a top. Even the most experienced tops suffer from what performers call “flop sweat.” The question is: while you’re jittering at the very thought of topping, is your dick getting hard or your pussy getting wet?
If you’ve occasionally dreamed of somehow rendering your partner completely helpless so that you can wreak your wicked will on her… if you find yourself looking speculatively at the belt rack in the department store, and you’re not thinking about holding your pants up…. or if the thought of someone kneeling naked at your feet as he serves you a nice cup of tea sounds like it might be, well, your cup of tea… guess what. You may already be a top.
DOES THERE ALWAYS HAVE TO BE A TOP AND A BOTTOM? Well, no. Some people like to play scenes in which both (or all) players are receiving sensation: “nipple tug-of-war,” in which two people both put on nipple clamps with chains running from one person to the other and lean backwards so that both sets of tits get a nice steady pull, is a good example. Some like scenes that involve power struggles, where nobody knows until someone “wins” who the top will be. Still others like to switch in mid-scene.
It isn’t always easy to tell who’s the top and who’s the bottom even in one-sided scenes. For example, if Janet orders Dossie to tie her up in a specific position and give her an exact number of cane strokes to the lower half of her butt… who’s the top? Who’s the bottom?
Nonetheless, it does seem to be true that the vast majority of BDSM play involves at least one discernible top and one discernible bottom. Outside a given scene, these two individuals may identify as the opposite role (many tops are excellent bottoms, and many bottoms are excellent tops).
The important thing to remember is that whether you’re an experienced top or a novice, a bottom who’d like to switch or a bottom who’d never dream of switching, or a novice with a head full of tangled fantasies and some uncertainty about which string to pull to unravel them… there’s something for you in this book. So read on!
2
WHAT IS IT ABOUT TOPPING, ANYWAY?
In the so-called “real world,” most of us constantly struggle with power, working to empower ourselves, and to protect ourselves from being overpowered by others. This is serious business.
But power can be sexy as well as serious. In S/M, we imitate the outward appearance of those grim real-world struggles for power, while building in the safeguards we need to keep us from being genuinely harmed. We believe that one purpose of S/M is to give us a way to enjoy the “upside” of power – its sexiness and drama – without bringing along its “downside.” We’ve heard people say, “S/M is power games for fun instead of profit,” and we agree.
BUILDING YOUR HEARTH. But isn’t this desire for power potentially destructive? Good question. We live in a culture of powermongers. We see all around us the ways in which power is misused to abuse those who lack the power to protect themselves. So how can we, as tops, justify wanting to get our rocks off feeling like the most powerful person of all?
The popular stereotype of an S/M top is of an amoral, irresponsible and destructive person: that’s what you’ll see in the movies. But in our world, we find that playing with power is like playing with fire: yes, there is the possibility of destruction if we are not careful… and there is also enormous potential for constructive heat that warms and heals.
One way we make it safe to play with fire is to build an adequate fireplace, a container, a hearth. We call it “scene space,” and we’ll tell you about building it later. Another way we make it safe is to become wise in the ways of power (in BDSM, we have lots of opportunity!). An ethical top understands power and wields it constructively, responsibly and safely.
IS ALL POWER THE SAME? From feminist theory we have learned to distinguish between power-over and power-with. Power-over is a behavior pattern in which a person measures personal power by his or her ability to control others – you increase your own power by stealing power from somebody else. You can see this dynamic anywhere you see rigid hierarchies or chains of command, like the military or the corporate ladder.
In our experience, if your goal is to build yourself a sense of empowerment and solid self-esteem, stealing power doesn’t work very well. You can’t build a solid sense of self-esteem by stealing someone else’s. When people strive to empower themselves this way they behave like addicts, constantly scheming to replenish a supply of power that never was truly theirs.
On the other hand, there is power-with. Power-with enables us to get more power by sharing our power with others. The more I have, the more you have. By supporting one another in our power, we get more for ourselves.
In any S/M exchange there is a sharing of power – the bottom lends his power t
o the top for the duration, the top adds power, and together they make a lot of voltage. The top gets to wield all this power, a form of extreme empowerment that is exciting, thrilling, hot, erotic, and, as we said before, very, very sexy.
So the first big payoff for topping is that we get to ride a whole lot of power, and to be, within the agreements and boundaries of a scene, enormously powerful.
SO WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?
We asked a number of tops what rewards they found in topping – thanks to all of them for the following list. Remember, when you read a list of other people’s turn-ons, some of them will work for you and others will not. Don’t worry – hardly anybody could like every single thing on this list; there are certainly a few that we ourselves have not experienced.
• Empathy. Near the top of most people’s lists is the “contact high,” the turn-on we feel in empathy with the bottom’s response to the physical, emotional and sexual intensity of the scene. One top describes this feeling as getting to surf the bottom’s sensations.
It is certainly a truism of S/M that the bottom is on the receiving end of most of the stimulation. If empathy didn’t work so well we wonder if anybody would get turned on to topping in the first place, or if we would all decide that topping is all work and no fun. But the happy truth is that we can indeed get intensely stimulated from what our partner is feeling. Both of us are amazed, after a few hours of highly technical topping, when we get to the part of the scene where the focus is on our orgasm, to experience an enormous orgasm (or several of them) – as if it had been building bigger and bigger inside us, just waiting for us to have the time to have it.
Empathy in BDSM presents a wonderful paradox: as tops in role, we are often called upon to present ourselves as cold, cruel and unfeeling, when in fact we are getting our rocks off on an empathy so profound that it can approach the telepathic. So we believe that, contrary to the opinions of the uninformed, consensual sadism, dominance and topping are primarily empathic activities.
• Creativity. Another frequently cited delight of topping is the opportunity for creativity. We get to be the playwright, the producer, the director and the lead actor all at once. We are presented with a lump of malleable clay – the bottom – with which we can create the sculpture of our fantasies. We get to enjoy our inventiveness, our resourcefulness, our competence and our flashes of genius. We get to exercise our intuition as we figure out what will get to this particular bottom, or how to get them where we want them. We get to have our fantasy our way, to play dolls with real people: for a while we get to make the world look just the way we want it to. We play God.
• Bigness. When we top we get to feel big. It may not be okay to act huge in ordinary social interactions, and you’re usually not allowed to overwhelm people without their permission. When we top we put on a role that is about being important and powerful. And when our bottoms respond to us in our role as giants, when they offer us their trust, their adulation, and their belief in us as we see ourselves in our fantasies – when we see ourselves enormous in our bottoms’ eyes, what a blazing hot mirror!
• Nurturing. Janet remembers some of her childhood fantasies in which she was doing really terrible things to very small people, so she could cradle them like dolls afterwards. Nurturing is a big part of much of what we do, and the combination of kindness and cruelty is one of the fastest ways to take a bottom down the deepest.
How does nurturing reward the top? Well, the nurturer, again, is big, and in play gets to be even bigger as we practice a kind of hyper-nurturance, enveloping our bottoms, almost as if we could engulf them. As nurturing tops we may play out the roles of Good Mommy or Good Daddy, maybe in a way we didn’t get to experience in our childhood, so we get a chance to rewrite history. In scene space we can elicit and reenact trauma and also be the good parent who heals the wounds. Many of the most profound psychological scenes include intense nurturance. And in a world in which nurturing energy can be in short supply, it can be a delight to create an environment in which we get to taste a whole lot of it.
• Bullying. In BDSM we get to act out from parts of ourselves that could not be described as nice: the bully, the villain, the inquisitor, the brute, the betrayer. Wicked, wicked, wicked. And popular. Check out mainstream movies, or fiction from best-sellers to classical mythology, for verification that everybody adores a really good villain. Those bad guys are big. Big enough to carry all the world’s ills, and create all the pain and trouble a hungry bottom could want to suffer.
And what could be more forbidden than our own nastiness? Most of us learned things from our families and our culture, or perhaps from our more primitive and essential natures, that aren’t very civilized. Many people view almost all relationships as interactions between victims and oppressors, so in topping we manifest our oppressor so the bottom can be in victim role, and both of us can have a powerful and erotic experience. S/M provides a safe way to be in the world for our internalized oppressor, the precious bully within.
• Control. Another powerful reward we get from topping is the opportunity to be in control. We can be control queens with permission – even encouragement. If you enjoy being served, the world seems like a much happier and calmer place when your morning cup of coffee is exactly the strength and temperature you prefer, with just the right amount of sugar and cream. And there’s a keen joy in knowing that your needs and desires are echoing in your loved one’s head, even when you’re not there to express them.
• Competence. Many tops who used to be primarily bottoms report a strong motivation in the chance to do it right: if you’ve ever been on the bottom thinking about how that knot is too loose, and if you ran another rope from just here to over there then the tension on that thigh would be released and the legs would be held perfectly open, you’ll understand some of the joys of control.
S/M is a technical sport, and a lot of us eroticize the chance to be competent, to generate perfectly balanced rope bondage, or an exquisitely timed sensory deprivation scene, or to choreograph a profound psychological journey. And when we do that well, we get to ride the scene and our bottoms – with our universe, for the moment, exactly as we want it. How gratifying.
• Self-knowledge. A familiar story – “helpless captive,” “shopping in the slave market,” “punishing the naughty boy,” those good old stories that snuggle us to sleep at night – can be the tip of the iceberg of profound psychological archetypes that we don’t see clearly, like a dream or a vision. Playing these roles out can be the way in which we clarify our vision, and developing an S/M persona can become the process by which we learn more about who we are. Then our bottom’s response becomes the mirror in which we see ourselves more clearly, and as we choreograph the bottom’s experience and stretch both of our limits in scene, we constantly create new mirrors in which we can see yet more. The possibilities are indeed endless.
WHAT ABOUT BOTTOMS?
If some of the above tickles your fancy, chances are you would enjoy topping. So what about bottoms? What do they get out of this? Why would a person want to be beaten, humiliated, ordered around and otherwise inconvenienced so that you can feel big? Well, because bottoming is very, very sexy too. There is tremendous luxury in giving up responsibility and power to a top, in being small, possibly childlike, in having your behavior controlled, in getting nurtured while being subjected to all kinds of intense stimulations.
Fear can be arousing… the subjective experience of bondage can be so sensual as to approach a trance state… the chance to devote yourself to another’s pleasure can soothe away your own cares… the controlled experience of pain in a safe and consensual scene can be tremendously rewarding.
Many of our activities enable us to use our bodies’ ability to produce naturally occurring morphine-like neurotransmitters called “endorphins” in response to intense stimuli. In The New Bottoming Book we described in detail how sensations can be processed through the body to create an endorphin high, and how ecstatic experiences of
intensity and openness transmute strong physical and emotional sensation into an altered state of consciousness that we experience as extreme pleasure.
Other rewards of bottoming include getting lots of attention, as well as acting out fantasies of helplessness and other forbidden emotions (needy, pathetic, dependent, guilt-ridden) that, like their toppish counterparts, would cause lots of trouble in the real world.
HOW ARE TOPS AND BOTTOMS INTERRELATED?
So tops and bottoms are interdependent – we need each other to play out our fantasy roles as well as to perform the physical acts that make us so happy. Bottoms need tops to push them off cliffs so they can fly, and tops need bottoms so they can ride the same winds, and that’s how both can have their dreams come true. This is obvious… but the fantasies we play with are not necessarily obvious.
The nature of the dance of BDSM tends to polarize our roles to a greater extent than might be possible or healthy in the rest of our lives. Play pushes both top and bottom out to the far ends of the spectrum. Each player, in traveling further out, supports the other in going yet further. Thus as a wonderful scene progresses, the bottoms get smaller, the tops get bigger, and the larger the territory we encompass: we move to the outer ends of the spectrum, generating something like centrifugal force, spinning further and further out while holding each other safe and tight.
WHOSE FANTASY?
We want to mention here that not all scenes are based on fantasies, and especially not on fantasies that have detailed scripts or stories. Often the scene is based on an image, a feeling, an emotion, or a specific activity like bondage or flogging or anal sex.
The New Topping Book Page 2
