© 2001 by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television or Internet reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Cover design: DesignTribe
Cover illustration: Fish
Published in the United States by Greenery Press. Distributed by SCB Distributors, Gardena, CA.
Readers should be aware that BDSM, like all sexual activities, carries an inherent risk of physical and/or emotional injury. While we believe that following the guidelines set forth in this book will minimize that potential, the writers and publisher encourage you to be aware that you are taking some risk when you decide to engage in these activities, and to accept personal responsibility for that risk. In acting on the information in this book, you agree to accept that information as is and with all faults. Neither the authors, the publisher, nor anyone else associated with the creation or sale of this book is responsible for any damage sustained.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the first edition: Lizzard Henry, Mic Bergen, Babs Bryant, Tom B., Sora Counts, Cleo Dubois, Jaymes Easton, Raelyn Gallina, Wolf Griffey, Francesca Guido, Max, Fakir Musafar, Joy S., Sage, Jaime Santos, Shayne, Skeeter, Joi Wolfwomyn.
For the second edition: All the above, plus Deborah Addington, Alix, Elayne Angel, Beth B., Darren, Martha Equinox, William Henkin, Huckleberry, Ruth Marks, Tyler Morse, Carol Queen, Paul R., Sockermom.
Special thanks to Jay Wiseman.
1
INTRODUCING OURSELVES
This book is a celebration of sensational submissives and marvelous masochists, of the naughtiest schoolboys and the sluttiest slaves, of those who love to struggle and serve and scream and submit and come and come and come… of bottoms, submissives, captives, slaves, pets and all the beautiful recipients who ever peopled a kinky imagination.
This is an unabashedly bottom-centrist book. In it we will tell you over and over again that bottoms are beautiful, bottoms are powerful, bottoms are alchemists who magically transform suffering into sex, humiliation into desire, screams of pain into moans of pleasure.
In this book, we will teach you to be a proud, fierce, redoubtable bottom – a bottom whose power is so profound that it attracts tops like pollen attracts bees. And the honey you and those tops make together will be the sweetest you’ve ever tasted.
WHO ARE WE?
WE’RE Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. (If you’re wondering what happened to Catherine A. Liszt, check the Foreword.) We’re both women, we’re both mothers, we’re both BDSM practitioners, educators and activists, and we both live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dossie has been doing S/M for almost three decades, originally as a bisexual, today as a dyke and queer. She works as a therapist in San Francisco. While she is a well-known bottom, Dossie also tops, and has taught dozens of classes on technique, skills and philosophy. She was one of the first members of the Society of Janus, San Francisco’s seminal S/M support and educational organization, and has been a leader in the emerging area of practice that links S/M and spirituality. Under the name of Scarlet Woman, she also writes spectacularly filthy erotic poetry. But, she says, “My main contribution to both the S/M and lesbian communities is my unstinting effort to reclaim the word ‘slut’.”
Janet started doing BDSM almost 20 years ago, exclusively as a heterosexual top. Today she identifies as “a standard-issue Northern California bisexual polyamorous switch.” She makes her living as a sexuality writer, educator and publisher. Under her remaining pen name “Lady Green,” Janet wrote the how-to manual “The Sexually Dominant Woman: A Workbook for Nervous Beginners” and several other books, has published numerous articles on S/M practice and philosophy, and has taught hundreds of women and men the basics of kinky play in lectures and workshops around the country.
Janet and Dossie met when Janet got word of Dossie’s upcoming demonstration for the Society of Janus on “Pain Play with Canes from Psyche to Soma,” and volunteered to be demonstrated on. When the program went beautifully – with Dossie the dyke bottom caning Janet the het top in our first scene together ever – we figured if we could make that work, writing a book together would be easy. And, indeed, we found that we shared a great many assumptions and beliefs about what it means to be an S/M player and a bottom… beliefs which we’ve gone on to explore in our ten years as co-authors, play partners and friends, and in the three other books we’ve written since the original Bottoming Book.
SCOPE OF THIS BOOK. This book focuses on understanding ourselves as bottoms, how we are healthy, how we hold our power, how we negotiate, how we stay safe, how we feel proud of who we are and what we do. What it isn’t is a how-to book. So if this is the first book you have ever read about BDSM, please recognize that you also need a practical handbook that will educate you about fundamental techniques, safety practices, equipment, and in general show you the ropes. You will find several how-to books listed in the Bibliography. Please add one or more of them to your reference library, and read up on the specifics of any pleasure before you practice.
DEFINING TERMS. It’s all very well to write something called The Bottoming Book — but defining what we actually mean by terms like “top” and “bottom” gets very tricky.
For the purposes of this book, we’re going to define “bottom” as someone who has the ability to eroticize or otherwise enjoy some sensations or emotions – such as pain, helplessness, powerlessness and humiliation – that would be unpleasant in another context. This does not mean that a bottom enjoys these kinds of stimuli in a real-world or nonconsensual context – bottoms hate stubbing their toes or getting chewed out by their bosses as much as the next guy. A bottom might be a submissive, a masochist, a slave, a baby, a “proud beauty,” or a host of other roles and styles as variable as a wardrobe full of clothes.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s define “bottoming” as “acting like a bottom”… or “submissive,” or “slave”, or “captive,” or whatever your erotic identity might be. Not everyone who bottoms is a bottom – Janet, who now identifies as a switch (which means a person who both tops and bottoms, usually not at the same time), used to call herself a “top who bottoms.” Many people enjoy bottoming, occasionally or frequently, but don’t identify as bottoms. Janet remembers:
My lover and I had just finished a very intense scene in which he caned me long and hard at a play party. It had pretty much stopped the party while everyone watched. After it was over and we’d wound down together, I staggered upstairs in a daze looking for something to eat. A woman came up to me and said, “Wow, that was really impressive.” I said, deadpan, “Yeah. Just imagine what I could do if I were a bottom!”
Likewise, a “top” is someone who can eroticize giving someone an experience that would be unpleasant in real-world interactions – so a top might be a dominant, sadist, master, mistress, nurse, pirate captain, or whoever else is titularly running the show. A good top is not bossy, cruel or abusive unless you ask him or her very nicely: topping is an awesome honor and responsibility. And “topping” is simply acting like a top – Dossie is a “bottom who tops.”
SOME SHARED ASSUMPTIONS. We also need to define our understanding of what we do. We don’t believe that S/M is a perversion per se, although we both refer to ourselves by the affectionate sobriquet of “pervert”: Dossie likes to call herself a “radical pervert”. Nor do we like to be pigeonholed as a sexual minority; while only a small percentage of the population identifies as being “kinky” or “sadomaso
chists” or “into S/M,” many – perhaps most – people bring some aspects of BDSM play into their sex lives.
We like to think of kinky play as “gourmet sex.” Some people eat only to meet their bodies’ physical needs, others seek out food that satisfies specific cravings. Some people like fast food, and others like whatever their mother used to cook, and still others prefer their food spicy enough to make them sweat… and all these ways of eating are valid, nutritious and tasty. Gourmets choose to put a lot of time, energy and attention into thinking about, seeking out, preparing and eating very elaborate food, often with arcane ingredients. Similarly, sadomasochists tend to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about sex, learning about it, socializing with other like-minded people, preparing for sex – and, of course, actually having sex. (Although both of us spend so much time talking, writing and educating about sex we sometimes run out of time to have any!)
We prefer to define leathersex as one part of a continuum of sexual behavior – not separate, but maybe farther along one axis. This is an activity in which one partner consciously, consensually relinquishes control to another in at least one of four areas: movement, behavior, sensation or emotion. Therefore, we believe that the couple role-playing “hooker and customer,” the woman holding her lover’s hands down against the pillow, the swain feeding a chocolate truffle to his conquest, the couple who retreat to the motel for a hot and heavy fuck after a scary roller-coaster ride, are all playing with S/M energy – although each may think the others to be wrong, sick, kinky or decadent.
We believe that the games we play are marked by their ethics, by the players’ insistence on high consciousness, by the respect in which we hold consent. Power games exist in many forms in our culture, often unconscious and often unsafe. In BDSM, protected by clear communication and negotiated consent, we find a protected space in which to explore and eroticize some of our darker dreams.
BDSM allows us to experience things safely that would not be safe or okay in the real world. We can feel the adrenaline rush and the head-spinning loss of control that highlight rape fantasies – while placing our emotional and physical safety in the hands of someone we trust. We can re-experience the neediness and dependency of childhood, then return to responsible adulthood when the scene is over. We can consciously transform that which is scariest and least acceptable into acts of trust, intimacy, learning and healing.
S/M is play, theater, communication, intimacy, sexuality. It combines the child’s urge for make-believe with the adult’s ability to take responsibility and the adult’s privilege of sexual reward. Our sexuality, at its best, represents a remarkable convergence of civilized agreements and primitive urges. We believe it to be a very high achievement of the human body and spirit.
IS IT REALLY BDSM? There is a certain sort of player who seems to delight in trying to draw lines: such-and-such an activity is or isn’t “really” BDSM, such-and-such a player is or isn’t a “real” top or a “true” submissive. We question the purpose of such exercises, and the emotional and sexual security of those who feel compelled to engage in them.
If the people directly involved in any given scene or activity agree that what they’re doing is BDSM, it is. If they believe themselves to be tops, bottoms, subs, doms, owners, slaves, masters, mistresses, pets, boys or girls, they are. Nobody else gets to vote. And the fact that these people call their play BDSM, or S/M, or D/S, or leathersex, even though their sexuality may or may not look like yours, does not in any way devalue or change what you like to do.
In our experience, people who want to tell you that whatever you’re doing is wrong, or not real, are often enacting some sort of agenda. They may want to feel superior to you by setting themselves up as the arbiter of what is and isn’t appropriate play. Or they may be trying to make themselves more attractive to you – recognizing that bottoms are often drawn to the appearance of power and authority – by setting up some artificial goal of “realness” that you’ll have to strive to achieve. While some of these people may simply have been given bad information, we suggest that persistent inflexibility regarding roles and definitions is probably a sign of a person you’ll want to avoid. (More about choosing tops in Chapter 5.)
In general, erotic roles seem to be a great deal more fluid these days than both of us remember from our early days in the scene. Although many players still prefer to stick strictly to topping or bottoming, switching roles is considered quite normal and acceptable in many if not most circles. Choosing to top occasionally does not make you less of a bottom, and your partner’s choice to bottom occasionally does not make him less of a top – in fact, some people feel that having experienced both ends of a scene adds to a player’s skills and empathy. In addition, some people play as “submissive sadists,” “dominant masochists” and other styles that challenge the traditional boundaries between top and bottom: when a dominant orders her submissive to tie her up and torture her, who’s the top and who’s the bottom? Who cares, we ask, as long as everybody’s having fun?
These days, most players do not believe that just because someone is sexually submissive, it’s OK to treat him or her as submissive outside a pre-negotiated scene. Similarly, many dominants resent being addressed as “Master,” “Mistress” or a similar term by someone with whom they have not negotiated roles. We generally feel that it’s a good idea to make a clear distinction between persona within the scene and real-world persona. A persona (plural, “personae”) is a term borrowed from Jungian psychology to describe a character, personality or archetype that we might play, that might be a role that you put on like a costume, or might be an expression of a particular part of yourself that doesn’t always show on the surface. In an S/M scene there is an opportunity to explore and experience personae that might not fit very well in the so-called “real world.” Thus, these personae are understood to exist within us all the time, but to become visible mostly within the scene.
Today we are also seeing the emergence of S/M – often referred to in this context as “Sex Magic” – as a spiritual practice. The combination of ritual with S/M, and the use of strong sensation and sometimes opening the skin to achieve transcendent states, have led to a potent combination of S/M practice with spiritual seeking. This sort of spiritual practice may or may not include traditional BDSM practices such as bondage, role-playing and dominance and submission, and is sometimes confusing to more traditional players for that reason.
KINK ETHICS. Many people get off on reading about, looking at pictures of, or imagining scenes which would be nonconsensual and abusive in the real world. We see no problem with this, as long as nobody has been coerced or exploited into participating.
However, both of us confess to moments of confusion and guilt over our nonconsensual fantasies, and have talked to many, many other people with the same problem. We wish we had the good sense of Dossie’s daughter –who, at the time of this story, was about six:
I found my daughter in her bath after she had obviously just finished masturbating. Beaming up at me from her heap of bubbles, she asked, “Mom, when you’re in the tub, do you ever put your fingers in your vagina and daydream?” When I agreed that yes, I certainly did, she explained, “I’m daydreaming that I’ve been kidnapped by sexists.”
Unlike fantasies, real-world play absolutely must be negotiated and consensual. For the purposes of this book, we’ll use Dossie’s definition of consent:
Consent in S/M is an active collaboration for the benefit, well-being and pleasure of all persons concerned.
A bottom who tries to goad a top into giving him non-consensual pain, abuse or domination is failing to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and risking both his well-being and that of the top. Similarly, a top who inflicts pain or gives orders without the unforced and informed consent of the bottom is abusive and possibly criminal; she may think that this is what the bottom “really” wants, or she may be a dangerous sociopath.
If you have a really hot, really nonconsensual fantas
y, a good question to ask yourself is, “How can I bring this into reality – safely and consensually?” Fortunately, you as a human being are blessed with the tremendous gift of imagination… and we bet you already know how to have kinky fantasies during non-kinky sex!
We do have a word for people who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality: we call them “crazy.” It is sometimes tempting to try to fudge the boundaries between the play world and the real world. When life’s burdens seem overwhelming, we may wish, for example, to be owned – to have our omnipotent master or mistress tell us exactly what our role is so we don’t have to be bothered with trivia like stress, frustration and ambiguity. Or we may have the urge to take control of our partner’s life and run it better than she ever could. These roles can be very satisfying to enact for the duration of a scene, or even longer – but if you’ve been enacting them for such a long time that you’ve forgotten how to function outside the role, we suggest that you’re courting trouble: the nature of life is change, people need to grow, and the role that works for you today may be a serious problem next year or even next week.
As we’ve already mentioned, BDSM gives us permission to act in ways that are unacceptable in the outside world – to be dependent and clingy, passive and boundaryless, manipulative and covert, bossy and cruel. However, if you find yourself bringing these characteristics into your interactions outside a pre-negotiated scenario, this is both nonconsensual and unhealthy. Work on these problems in a therapist’s office – not in a dungeon.
We maintain that there’s no such thing as a politically incorrect fantasy: if brutal rapists, voracious nymphomaniacs, wimpy slaveboys or imperious Amazons are your turn-on, go for it – within your pre-negotiated scene. For instance, we may wish to play with unacceptably sexist stereotypes. (Dos-sie maintains, “One of the things that perpetuates sexism is that it’s sexy.”) If, however, you find yourself treating men or women according to these stereotypes outside scene space, you are acting in an unhealthy and nonconsensual way, and you will cost yourself both friends and play partners.
The New Bottoming Book Page 1