One question that comes up when we actually sit down to negotiate a scene is whose fantasy are we playing, the top’s or the bottom’s? The answer is either, or both, or whatever the two of you together decide will work the best. Some bottoms are not comfortable talking about their fantasies for fear of seeming too directive, but we believe that it is a requirement for a skilled and supportive bottom to be able to tell you about her desires – as a top, you need some information to figure out what will make this scene work.
Good tops learn to support bottoms through the embarrassment of revealing their fantasies – and isn’t embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with? Force that shy little thing to tell you what she wants!
Similarly, tops need to learn to speak comfortably about their fantasies and desires. As we’ll see when we talk about negotiation, tops don’t just walk up to bottoms and do whatever comes to mind. Scenes are negotiated, and constructed to satisfy both bodies and imaginations while remaining within the limits of both top and bottom. And to find out if your fantasy is within your bottom’s limits, you have to discuss it at least enough to establish those limits (everybody enjoys a surprise, but it’s not kosher to tattoo “Kilroy Was Here!” on your friend’s ass without permission).
Some tops feel they lose authority as a top when they agree to play all or part of a bottom’s fantasy, and are offended by the idea that they may be “servicing” the bottom. We think it’s inappropriate to get your ego invested in your bottom’s having no desire but to please you, or no ideas of his own. We would be equally critical of a bottom who didn’t want to hear about the top’s desires and needs, or was not interested in trying out his fantasy.
New players often start out with one fantasy they have desired and elaborated on for years, while more seasoned tops and bottoms may enjoy many roles in many scenarios. So when we play out a bottom’s fantasy we have little to lose and lots to gain. When we stretch to realize someone else’s story, we get to enlarge our repertoire, learn new skills, and perhaps discover yet more ways to get turned on. Sounds like a win-win situation to us.
So we see no need to compete over whose game we are playing – we’d rather play your wonderful ideas tonight and mine tomorrow, regardless of who’s in charge. Once again, we see this as a collaborative endeavor, in which we play with power that is shared, for the pleasure and benefit of all parties in the game.
SYMBOLISM AND STRUCTURE
As Sir Stephen remarked in The Story of O, we are indeed fond of rituals. BDSM is often characterized by a certain formality or ritual quality that reminds us of opera gowns, dress uniforms, nuns’ habits and other formal signifiers.
That’s because play is to a very real degree about symbolism. The “kidnapping” we do for erotic pleasure reflects an arousing fantasy (since in our fantasy, the kidnappers do exactly what we want), and when we play we make sure the “kidnappers” are actually doing exactly what we want, a ritual of helplessness in the face of overwhelming stimulas. An actual kidnapping, with no concern for the feelings of the victim, would be a life-shattering reality. The symbol enables us to confront our simultaneous fear of, and attraction to, the genuine horrors of the world. But we need form and structure to clarify the distinction between the symbol and the thing itself.
The structure we build around our play creates a “firewall,” a boundary that enables us to take vague and abstract ideas, emotions, roles and dynamics and pull them upwards into reality, where we can explore them and get turned on by them. We learn a lot about what the limits are, and where the boundaries are between scene space and the rest of our lives.
Wise players study the play of those who have gone before us, just as art students study the Old Masters (interesting choice of name, don’t you think?). By building on the foundations that others have developed, we can build taller and stronger fireplaces for our flames so they can leap higher, hotter and safer.
Sometimes costumes help define our structure, telling us what role we’re playing – both from the archetypes expressed (cop, pirate, doctor) and by the function of the garments (the daddy’s belt, the vampire’s fangs, the goddess’s sky-high heels). These symbols are also a reminder that the top has made a commitment to remain aware, contained, in control of both partners – that she has agreed not to fall down on the floor and thrash in ecstasy until it is safe and consonant to do so. The bottom may not dress at all, indicating vulnerability and availability, or may have his essential nakedness accentuated by symbols like collars or corsets, or by clothes which can be removed by the top as part of a spiritual and physical stripping away of defenses.
Bondage, even symbolic bondage such as a loop of thread holding thumbs together, creates a structure which controls the bottom’s behavior and defines roles. So are the names which we call one another – “sir” and “boy,” “mistress” and “slave,” “milady” and “sirrah,” “Spot” and “woof woof!”
Sometimes our structure is defined by logistics: time, physical abilities, environments. We enter the dungeon and become our “other selves,” then leave it and become our day-to-day selves again. Our time agreements may be our form: we’ll play until 3:00, then go get something to eat. Or we may agree to play until one or the other or both of us has had an orgasm, or has reached some mutually agreed upon level of stimulation.
All these structures are there to help you get as big as you can, and your bottom as small as he can, while ensuring your safe return to your normal size when you need to go back. Like Alice’s looking glass, they enable you to wander safely through the topsy-turvy dreamscapes of fantasy, where pain is pleasure and cruelty is love.
3
WHAT DO TOPS DO?
FINDING YOUR TOP PERSONA. As a top, you might be a sadistically vicious interrogator, or a sweetly sorrowful parent who’s only spanking this naughty boy for his own good. You could be a mad scientist out of a horror film, an eight-year-old girl blackmailing her babysitter, Simon Legree, the Phantom of the Opera, or the evil caliph keeping his harem in order. You could be Captain Bligh, Captain Picard, Captain Hook, Captain America or even Captain Kangaroo, because the ways to be a top are limited only by your imagination.
Most of our fantasies come from very deep places inside us – Janet blushes to admit that she still has toppy fantasies about the villains on the old campy “Batman” TV show that aired in her impressionable adolescence. We draw our fantasies from the powerful archetypes found in popular culture, like movies and TV shows; from the real-world torture and rape that simultaneously fascinate and horrify us; from well-thumbed reminiscences of our own childhoods – in short, from almost any place our monkey curiosity carries us.
Fantasies are seldom sophisticated, ambiguous or even very pretty. They almost never contain negotiation or safewords (these are “safety nets” that get built into our real-world play to help make our fantasies safer to enact). For these reasons, and because we know that wanting to hurt, control or humiliate people is not OK, we may feel very ashamed or embarrassed about our fantasies. But once we overcome that embarrassment, and discover how many other people have similar feelings, our fantasy world becomes a hot and happy playground.
During one of our play dates, we originally had no particular scenario in mind. But during the one-hour drive between our houses, Janet was idly fantasizing about being the matron in a Victorian workhouse full of girl orphans. With no small embarrassment, she shared that fantasy with Dossie over lunch. Dossie happened to be wearing a sundress that made her look about fourteen, and the roles and scenario fell easily into place from there: Dossie became the new little orphan recently brought into the workhouse, and “Miss Janet, ma’am” spent a happy couple of hours showing her “how things is done around ’ere,” and demonstrating the dreadful canings she would get if she ever misbehaved.
Advertising people refer to radio as “theater of the mind,” because a few well-chosen words and sound effects are all it takes to create an entire scenario inside the head o
f the listener. We think S/M is theater of the mind, too. It’s a rare treat when you can set up a scene with full props and costumes and dialogue; more often, a couple of items – a dashing hat, say, or a flogger that looks like something Basil Rathbone might have used on Errol Flynn – is all it takes to create and maintain an illusion. And, as the top, you get to be playwright, set designer, costume designer, director and audience.
DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE A ROLE? A lot of our best S/M scenes have been done without recourse to any particular role – we’re not Harriet Marwood or Ming the Merciless, we’re simply us.
Still, any given scene has a “flavor” that can often be described by describing a role. A harsh scene in which limits get pushed, in which the top acts as though she really doesn’t care what happens to the bottom, may have the flavor of a torture or interrogation scene. A very nurturing scene, in which the top is giving the bottom a lot of “there, there, you can take just a little more” messages, may have more of a nice-mommy or nice-daddy flavor.
A lot of people are bashful about overt role-playing, and others simply aren’t turned on by it – it seems false to them. But, just as a role-playing scene where the bottom wants to be a horsie and the top wants to be Superman is likely to run into problems, a scene where one partner wants to humiliate and the other wants to be nurtured is probably not going to work too well. So even if you’re not into playing your roles overtly, it’s important to be clear about what flavor of scene you want. And when we talk in this book about a “daddy scene” or an “interrogation scene,” we may be talking about a scene with overt roles, props and dialogue, or we may be describing the overall flavor of the scene.
WHERE ARE THE BOUNDARIES?
As you can see, many of the roles in this book reflect real-world power relationships of various intensities. Because we are eroticized to power, we may begin to feel that we want our play to be more and more “real” – to creep closer to the edge where the realities of consent and power begin to blur.
S/M folk sometimes describe people who play in that blurry area as “edge players.” But we think all players are edge players.
We’re all playing in a topsy-turvy world where pain equals pleasure, where fear equals arousal, where “no! no!” equals “YES!!!” Each of us may be, in our own way, trying to define the boundary where our bottoms’ enjoyment of “not wanting something” turns into really not wanting it, and trying to explore and, perhaps, alter that boundary. The player whose play seems so light that you wouldn’t even define it as S/M is an edge player when she is in her own way doing something that’s difficult or scary or painful, in an attempt to turn the unacceptable into the erotic: playing at his or her edge.
Janet once did a scene with a novice bottom:
He’d never played at all before, and so I set his first scene up to be very lightweight: I tied him to the bed, blindfolded him, and simply gave him mild, sensuous sensations with different textures – fur, leather, my fingernails and so on – all over his body. If you’d asked me beforehand, I’d have told you such a scene would not be much of a turn-on for me; I was doing it as a favor to him. But as I caressed him, he began to release some deep emotions: he giggled, he writhed, he sobbed… he was just one great big live nerve ending. And I found that I was getting very turned on, because while the sensations I was giving him weren’t much, they were eliciting such powerful and primal responses from him. He was getting stroked with a scrap of fur, but it was edge play for him – and that made it edge play for me too.
We deplore what Dossie has dubbed “the hierarchy of hip about heaviness.” In this form of craziness, a player whose forays into branding/bullwhips/whatever have been only moderately successful is deemed superior to one whose light spankings or erotic bondage sessions have left his or her partner glowing like a 200-watt bulb. To us, the only criterion for good play is: did everyone involved get what they wanted from it? If the answer to that question is “yes,” the session gets an automatic A-plus – whether it was a handspanking or a needle suspension.
We know one player whose mantra is “This is not a contest. This is not a contest” – repeated to himself every time he begins to try to exceed another player’s accomplishments. We think this is a good mantra for us all.
SAFEWORDS. A safeword is a word agreed upon by the players in a scene that means stop, there’s a problem, we need to change something, something isn’t working, someone’s in trouble. We establish a code word because many of us become incoherent when we are very excited – we recommend safewords that are short and easy to pronounce when breathing hard. We use code because many scenes are based on a fantasy of nonconsent, and yelling “nononononono” may be part of the script.
Tops safeword too. Dossie tells the story of a time when she safeworded out of a major scene:
My lover had wanted me to brand her for a long time, and we had planned, collected information, researched everybody else’s experience and our own personal symbolism, and set up to do a ritual branding. We lived in the country, and had invited friends to come down to support this event, so there were witnesses. I had been practicing branding and felt somewhat insecure about my facility with the procedure, but spent the morning up in the ring of redwood trees over a very hot hibachi gamely branding slices of potato and turkey parts until I felt I could touch her with hot metal and not burn all the way through her. During this time, the houseguests were keeping her amused, and when we started up she was already entranced. Our ritual included a flogging to bring up the endorphins before the actual branding, but when I started to flog her it became apparent that something was wrong. Nothing I did seemed to be right for her, a very gentle stroke was too hard, she was not comfortable and neither was I. She wanted to go ahead anyway, but I decided that I could not brand her when I couldn’t make connection, and that there was no way that I was going to put a serious and permanent mark on her body when things were feeling unpleasant. So I safeworded, big bad brander that I am. I felt like an idiot. Here we had brought all these people together and I had chickened out. And my lover wasn’t happy about it, and it took awhile to bring her back down onto the planet from her tranced-out space – it was dire. I must have apologized forty or fifty times to our guests, who were very supportive and reassuring, bless their hearts. I reminded myself over and over, as I remind you now: it is possible, actually not very difficult, to have an experience of extreme public embarrassment, live through it, and be fine afterwards. Which we were. I now think the first time was a rehearsal, and perhaps we both needed to know that we could back out. About a month later, we got together with two friends and pulled the branding off without a hitch, and with much delight.
Whenever a player safewords, this is an occasion for mutual support. We understand that nobody safewords from a happy place, and that all of our egos feel frail and kind of runty when we need to back out of a scene. It is completely unethical to respond with scorn or ridicule to a person who has safeworded: S/M is not a competition, we are not playing against each other.
As tops, we have noticed that if we are having a good time and our bottom safewords, our initial feelings may not be happy. Whaddaya mean you don’t like that? I do all this work and you don’t appreciate it? I’m hot for being in control and you want me to stop? We have felt real anger and felt challenged in our top role… and, on a deeper level, we have felt put down, hurt and rejected. It is okay to have these feelings. It is not okay to act on them. Take three deep breaths and everybody start taking care of each other.
Sometimes bottoms get so deeply engaged in a scene that they fail to safeword, or forget, or so profoundly believe in the fantasy that it doesn’t occur to them: many of the techniques we play with, like interrogation, function in the real world to undermine volition. Dossie remembers a scene in which a top offered her a choice of something or other: “I felt very confused. Some distant part of me vaguely remembered having made choices, but the response from my state of consciousness at that time was, Choose? I am not
a thing that chooses.” So then what is the top’s responsibility?
If a bottom does not safeword and you don’t pick up on what’s going on, and this will happen if you play long enough and well enough, there is no blame. However, it is still your responsibility to monitor for physical safety as best you can. As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms. To this end we check in regularly to make sure that things are going the way we think they are, and we constantly monitor the physical and emotional safety of our bottoms. If a bottom is beyond safewording, and you as the top feel unsure about how far you should go, it is your responsibility to slow down or stop the scene and get into communication with the bottom to make sure you have informed consent. If you have to bring the bottom back into reality to do this, please remember that you helped get them into that altered state in the first place, so presumably you can help get them back there again as soon as you are sure of what’s going on.
And just because someone safeworded doesn’t mean that the scene has to be over. There may be times when the problem that brought either of you to safeword is so overwhelming that carrying on doesn’t feel like the right thing right now – but most often we find that after we’ve dealt with whatever the difficulty is, we’re still terrifically turned on, with the added bonus of a shared intimacy.
WHEN YOU ITCH TO GO FURTHER. Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between “enough” and “too much,” between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we’re craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.
We will assume that you who are reading this book are not about to do any such thing: if you feel that you are in danger of actually harming someone, please seek help from a therapist or counselor right away. But when you’re feeling frustrated by partners who want to stop before you’re ready to, or who don’t want to play the way you want to, it’s easy to let the fantasies grow so strong that they begin to seem like realities. The good news is that, with patience, skill, mutual knowledge and trust, and sometimes a bit of compromise, there are usually ways to indulge those desires without harming, alienating or losing your partner.
The New Topping Book Page 3
