The New Topping Book

by Dossie Easton

  So, how do you get your bottom’s breathing slowed down so that she can relax? Some tops like to simply use the word “breathe” to remind their bottoms to take it easy, but we find that using words in the heat of play can distract a bottom from the wonderfulness of what you’re doing to her. A trick we like is to establish contact with your bottom – eye contact and/or physical contact: Janet likes to place the palm of her hand firmly and gently on her bottom’s chest or the center of her back. Then simply breathe in the rhythm you want your bottom to breathe, perhaps a little noisily or emphatically. Most bottoms will instinctively begin to breathe with you. Since breathing in synch, especially during eye contact, is often taught as a tantric exercise to achieve greater union, this strategy may also bring you closer to the heights you’re trying to achieve.

  Bottoms also reveal a lot with the sounds they make. Happy bottoms hum, babble, giggle, growl, purr, moan, and “sing” – a beautiful smooth multitoned melody that goes up and down as the sensation rises and falls. Bottoms who are nearing their limits scream, shriek or sometimes snarl or curse. An experienced bottom may be able to tell you ahead of time which sounds mean what.

  • Posture and movement. Watch your bottom’s body. For example, if he’s leaning or arching into the sensations you’re giving, that’s a reliable sign that he’s with you and ready for more. If he’s flinching or drawing away from the sensation, it might be time to back off a bit – and then later, when he’s more relaxed, you can take the play up another notch if that feels right.

  Bottoms who are beginning to become entranced may show it with rhythmic movements of their bodies. They may “dance,” shifting back and forth from one foot to another or even bouncing up and down. Their hips may undulate back and forth, or from side to side. Their heads may nod or shake. They may also throw off excess energy by shaking their hands as though they were shaking water off the ends of their fingers, grabbing the bondage and yanking or rattling it, or stamping their feet.

  If your scene is about control rather than sensation, watch for posture. A submissive who is proudly and happily under your command will show it with a proud carriage and springy step. An entranced submissive may move slowly and dreamily, but purposefully. A reluctant or unhappy bottom is likelier to slump and trudge. While we can’t tell you what to do about those situations, it’s always best to know your submissive’s state of mind so you can act accordingly.

  These are just a few of the ways that you can observe what’s going on with your bottom so that the two of you can fly higher and farther. But what of the perceptions you may sometimes experience that aren’t observable – that you somehow “just know”?

  INTUITION AND WHERE TO FIND IT

  The best definition of “intuition” we’ve heard is “the ability to know something without knowing how you know it.”1 You may have experienced intuitions in your day-to-day life – a sense that someone you just met isn’t what they seem, or that you shouldn’t turn around that streetcorner, or that something wonderful is about to happen to you.

  Many people feel that intuition is simply your subconscious mind gathering clues that your conscious mind is too busy to grasp. Others think it’s a genuine paranormal phenomenon. We don’t really know, or, for that matter, care – as long as it works for us, both outside our scenes and in them.

  We can’t teach you how to get intuition – you already have it, to at least some degree. What we can do is teach you how to find it within yourself and use it to read your bottom’s physical and emotional states for bigger, hotter scenes.

  Intuition, of course, has its limits – even the professional psychics who find lost children for police departments are the first to tell you that they’re right less than half the time, and much less often when the intuition involves someone close to them. So while we love and encourage intuition, we want to emphasize that while you’re in scene space, it’s very easy to get your intuitions mixed up with your own desires and fears. Serious mistakes can get made this way: it’s not a good idea to follow your intuition to grab that cattle prod and press the button with no previous negotiation.

  But when it works, it can really work – as we discovered together recently:

  You know how in your fantasy certain things happen in a certain order, almost like a ritual, very specific and detailed? Some of us embroider the same fantasy over long periods of time, creating a rich tapestry night after night, our personal and very private bedtime story.

  We played a scene together recently that was a true mindblower. Now your authors have been playing with each other for ten years, and certainly each knows a lot about what the other one likes. But this time, with Janet topping Dossie, Janet managed to do Dossie’s fantasy (which Dossie had never told her), item by item, in order, down to the smallest detail.

  Dossie says, “It took me a while to realize what was going on – at first, it just plain felt good, and entrancing, and very right. Like somebody humming an old song you’ve loved for a really long time. We were well into the scene before I got it that something amazing was going on. I didn’t say anything – not on purpose, more because I was so absorbed in the play that it would have been ridiculous to interrupt. And who would want to anyhow?”

  Janet says, “I was startled and a little bit freaked afterwards when Dossie told me what had been going on. I had no sense of the scene being anything special. In hindsight, I could see that some of the things I’d done weren’t in my usual repertoire, but at the time they just felt like inspirations – like I was simply putting this toy in that orifice, and tying that body part in this position, the way I always do. It was wonderful, of course, but playing with Dossie just about always is… and it didn’t seem any different than that.”

  The scene was fabulous and emotionally profound, but, curiously, not more fabulous than other scenes we have played. And, notes Dossie, the feeling was different: in the fantasy, the culminating moments are tremendously romantic. But we’ve never had a romantic relationship, rather a solid and loving friendship… and that didn’t change. Maybe that was the biggest surprise, to play a scene that was perfectly psychic and still feel like the same two people afterward.

  So what do you do when you feel a sense of what to do next but aren’t sure? One possibility is simply to ask, either in words (you may need to step out of scene space to do this if your scene has a strong D/S element) or by holding up a proposed implement for the bottom to see and agree to. Another, probably more useful, is to try just a little of whatever your intuition is telling you, then use the observational skills you’ve already learned to see how your bottom reacts.

  So, now that we’ve given you all these warnings and cautions about intuition, how do you discover yours? To answer that question, we’d like to refer to a concept that the Buddhists call “expert mind.” Expert mind is the part of you that stores facts, makes decisions, thinks about what happened in the past and projects what may happen in the future. Without expert mind, you couldn’t function in the world at all and you certainly couldn’t be a top – you’re using your expert mind to read this book, for example.

  But when you’re seeking intuition, you have to move expert mind to the back of your consciousness, letting it guide your actions in the same way that it guides you when you drive a car. Expert mind is the enemy of intuition – it tells you things like “you’re wrong,” “you know better than this,” “nobody else does it that way” and our personal favorite, “real tops don’t do it this way.” What the Buddhists recommend for finding your intuitive wisdom is “beginner’s mind,” in which you approach everything as though you were doing it for the first time.

  So: try to focus on the moment. Trust that expert mind will be there to guide you through the technique parts, and open yourself up to your perceptions of what’s going on right now, right here. You may have to stop for a second and adjust your focus. Take in your own body, your bottom’s body, the room, the sounds, the smells, the light – everything in and around you right now. I
f you know any guided relaxation techniques, use them (and if you don’t, allow us to recommend a good yoga class). If you simply open yourself up (remember, we talked about this earlier) and perceive what’s going on, you may start to receive messages. Beginners are always learning something new.

  For some people – Janet is one – the messages come as lights and colors. “I see a kind of ‘glow’ from a certain part of my bottom’s body, or from a particular toy,” she notes. Others may feel a part of their own body twitching to move in a certain way, or may hear a hum, click or other sound coming from the place, action or toy that needs their attention. Some actually hear a voice, their own or someone else’s, telling them what needs to happen next. Or maybe it’s just an urge to do something – to give a certain order, to place the bottom in a certain position, to say a certain sentence. When you get such a message, proceed slowly and gradually, as we told you earlier. If your bottom’s response is enthusiastic – congratulations, go for it!

  If you get nothing, don’t worry about it; you can always try again later. Although the process of seeking intuition sounds clunky and awkward as we describe it here, with practice it gets faster, smoother and more effective.

  To many readers, much of this chapter will sound too New Age for words (one of Janet’s regular partners, a highly intuitive body worker and martial artist, says indignantly, “I don’t do woo-woo shit”). But in our experience, the best tops pretty much universally use these concepts and techniques, whether they do so consciously or not. We encourage you to at least give these ideas a try and see what can happen to your scenes – they’ve certainly created some amazing play for us!

  NOTES

  1 Intuition Workout: A Practical Guide to Discovering and Developing Your Inner Knowing, by Nancy Rosanoff. Aslan Publications, 1991.

  7

  BDSM ETHICS

  When we play, we give ourselves and each other permission and encouragement to explore the further reaches of our psyches and to adventure bravely down the path of the forbidden. We open ourselves up to the unknown on the dark side. And when we are open, we are terribly vulnerable.

  So, in order to be open, and to be safe and healthy while we play at violation and betrayal, we believe that all players should enter into scene space with the highest of ethics, and a firm commitment to respect and honor the courage and the vulnerability that we all, tops and bottoms, bring with us into a scene. We see a scene as a special and sacred space: it is critical that we respect the trust and integrity of each individual in it.

  CONSENT

  Full consent in S/M, or in any other manifestation of sexuality, requires an active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all persons involved. We come into our play with the intention of actively supporting each other in exploring sensation, danger and vulnerability.

  Consent to any scene is very specific: we consent, tops and bottoms both, to every detail, and we can choose not to consent to any item on a scene agenda.

  Honesty in consent is mandatory for both tops and bottoms. You can easily understand what can happen if an eager-to-please bottom consents to some violent assault that they really don’t want, and you go ahead and they hate it. Your safety and competence as a top are violated, and you are faced with a freaked-out or angry bottom through no fault of your own. As a top, if you consent to play a scene that you really don’t feel good about, and you don’t share your reservations, and you don’t somehow magically get into it after you begin, then you can wind up playing an awkward and “cold” scene, with little or no connection to your bottom, who can wind up feeling abandoned, abused and violated.

  Consent is only meaningful if it can be withdrawn without risking undue criticism, judgment or rejection. If a bottom or top tries something in a scene and it is genuinely unpleasant to them, they have an absolute right to interrupt a scene, renegotiate the agenda, and to have their concerns heard without blame. Respect for consent is mandatory.

  RESPECTING LIMITS

  Respect and honor your bottom’s limits. Respect and honor your own limits. Respect means nobody gets put down or belittled, top or bottom, for whatever limits they may have. Looking for loopholes in a bottom’s stated limits is cheating, as is concealing your own agenda with half-truths or omissions. “Well, you didn’t say I couldn’t shave your head” is not a substitute for consent. Ethical players negotiate scenes in good faith.

  CONFIDENTIALITY. In recent years, due to the energetic work of members of our community, kink has become less stigmatized, and some of us may not feel as great a need to keep our sex lives in the closet as others. This is wonderful progress, and we look forward to the day when none of us needs to walk through the world fearing oppression if our secrets were known. However, that time is not yet here, and many of us could be at tremendous risk if the wrong people – our landlords, employers, students, parents, children – were to find out about our interest in BDSM.

  So we still need to keep information about others that we acquire at support groups and play parties confidential. Do not assume that just because you are totally uncloseted, everyone else should be. Do not assume that because a player is well-known in the community that the person has no closets – we know players who use assumed names because outing might jeopardize important parts of their lives like joint custody of their children. Do not assume that you know what another person’s requirements for discretion are, or that another person lives his life as openly as you do – just protect everybody’s privacy.

  Are there exceptions to confidentiality? Yes. We can look to the legal and ethical standards of medical and therapeutic confidentiality for guidelines: it is acceptable, and at times even required, to violate confidentiality when there is significant danger of harm to any person. If a person assaults you, you don’t keep it a secret, you call the police. Gossip may sometimes have an unpleasant but necessary function within the community to warn others of players who in your experience are in some way dangerous. (It is not ethical, however, to badmouth a player simply because you don’t like them or are angry with them.) We try to balance negative gossip with “goodmouthing”: making a point of introducing people to each other with full regard for their prowess, and letting others in the community know when a player does something wonderful.

  BOUNDARIES AND BLAMING

  Any problem in ethics, including the complex dilemmas we may run into when we pretend to be unethical, can be clarified by looking at it from the point of view of boundaries. Personal boundaries are found wherever we understand that I end and you begin. Within the boundary of scene space, our personal boundaries will probably be very different than they are in the outside world… so when I know which boundaries are in effect right now, I know when it’s the right time to violate you.

  People also have internal boundaries that tell us what state of consciousness we are in. For those of us who play a number of roles – top, bottom, Doctor Mean, Dracula, little boy, baby girl – we open and change our internal boundaries to get in and out of role, often unconsciously. The more conscious we can be about this, the safer we will be, and the more adept at getting into (and back out of) the role we want to play right now.

  Internal boundaries tell us the difference between a thought, a wish, a fantasy and a dream. For the S/M player, the boundary between fantasy and reality is all-important: it is how we maintain our sanity, and how we maintain our identities as big bad mean ethical loving sadists.

  Blaming, a special case of bad boundaries, consists of refusing to own and take the responsibility for our own stuff, our feelings, dilemmas, and actions. Of course, occasions in which a problem is truly one person’s fault do happen, and need to be respected… but we believe most problems that crop up between people actually belong to both or all of them. When we blame, we fail to shoulder our part of the burden; we project the responsibility for whatever is wrong onto another, usually to protect ourselves from feeling terribly guilty or anxious. When we blame, we also disempower ourselves – if it’s al
l your fault, then I must be impotent.

  So we recommend that you approach conflict that arises from play (or any other relationship, for that matter) in a nonjudgmental mode. In our culture, you can observe many people attempting to resolve a problem by discovering whose fault it is (the comic author Fran Lebowitz says “It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s where you lay the blame”), as if most of our dilemmas were caused by somebody doing something wrong. In S/M, we can make tops wrong by accusing them of anger, attitude or abuse when a scene doesn’t work out well. We can make bottoms wrong by accusing them of being needy, resistant or smart-ass.

  Blaming may alleviate our anxiety on a short-term basis, but in the long run resolves nothing. If, on the other hand, you can put your judgments aside and operate on your own feelings while you listen to your partner’s feelings, you may be able to come to an understanding that keeps you in sympathy with each other and empowers you to take care of the problem so you can continue playing and having a good time.

  HEARING FEEDBACK. Good post-scene etiquette is for the top to call the bottom within a few days of a scene to check in and make sure everything’s okay, and bottoms will respect you and feel well cared for when you do. Mostly you will hear flattering feedback that can be a big help if you’re feeling a bit uncertain, guilty or low. This is also an occasion to ask the bottom if there was anything in that scene that she would change, or do differently in the future. This is how you make space for your bottom to tell you about that little bruise in the wrong place, or something that was sharp or harsh or otherwise not optimal for them. Our experience is that bottoms often tell us what we could have done harder or longer or louder or stronger. Greed is a wonderful thing in a pig slut bottom.