The New Topping Book

by Dossie Easton

  We suggest that you spend a little time thinking objectively, if you can, about the fantasies that are driving your desire to push limits. In your fantasy, what is the turn-on? How can you tell, for example, that the bottom has been driven past limits? Is she begging, crying, screaming? Is there physical evidence – blood, urine, tears?

  When you have a pretty clear picture of what that turn-on looks like to you, you get to the embarrassing part: describing it to your partner. You may find, to your surprise, that your bottom has been having similar fantasies, and needs only your permission to go into the headspace you’ve both been craving. (Begging for mercy, for example, is difficult for many bottoms, who may be worried that they will beg so effectively that you’ll actually stop. Knowing that you’re willing to keep going unless you hear a safeword can feel very freeing.) Or your bottom may be willing to play-act the fantasy in the way that turns you on – he may find that the role starts to seem very real and very arousing once he gives it a try.

  We sometimes meet tops and bottoms who want to do scenes without safewords, reasoning that it is impossible to “really” push limits when the bottom can stop the scene anytime she wants to. A safeword is simply a code we use to communicate the status of consent. Responsible tops play consensually – the safeword is your safety net, to let you know that’s what you’re doing.

  In our experience, the most common problem is the opposite one: bottoms who earnestly hang in there way beyond their limits and safeword too late rather than too soon. But remember – bottoms are there with you because they want to explore their limits, and they, not you, are the best judges of where those limits are. The safest and most growthful way to expand limits is with time, trust and practice: as partners play together and learn more about each other’s communications style and physical limitations, they tend to use encoded safewords less and less frequently. But even partners who have been together for years need safewords to signal the rare but critical situations where one partner or the other has a genuine physical or emotional emergency such as illness, injury, unexpected rage, age regression and the like.

  IF YOU’RE DOING IT, IT’S “REAL”

  Both of us cringe, and have been known to get a bit snappish, when we hear phrases that start with “real” or “true” – “real submissive,” “true Master” and so on. When you hear someone say one of those phrases, we suggest you mentally translate them into what they really mean – “someone who plays in a way I approve of.” Usually, the next thing we hear is that so-and-so is not a “real” top or not “truly” submissive. Ick.

  Often, people who dismiss others as not being “real” are expressing scorn for limits which are both real and realistic, and which exist (acknowledged or unacknowledged) in all safe play. When you set yourself up an unattainable ideal role, and subtract points from your estimation of your friends and yourself whenever anyone falls short of that ideal, we think you are setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment.

  The player who does a light session twice a year is doing something extremely “real” – she is giving away or taking as much power as feels safe, healthy and sexy to him or her. So is the most extreme 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week owner and slave couple.

  S/M is about contradiction, about paradox. A bottom who is (or pretends to be) without desires, fantasies or power is an unsafe and unhealthy bottom. A top who is (or pretends to be) without vulnerability, compromise or connection is an unsafe and unhealthy top.

  If you can’t understand these paradoxes – the ways in which symbolic powerlessness can empower and symbolic cruelty can sensitize – please sit down and think them through carefully. We hope that when you’re through thinking, you’ll realize how destructive concepts like “real dominant” and “true slave” can be, and discover the far greater joys that lie in play in which everybody’s needs and wants are acknowledged, honored and enjoyed.

  interlude 1

  A sensation scene at a party, played by Janet and a female friend.

  B. and I are close friends, but had played together before only once, in a very limited way; this would be our first full-on scene together. We are both het-identified bi women, both experienced players, and while we’re both switches, she is more comfortable in the bottom role. I knew from our discussions ahead of time that she enjoyed flagellation of all kinds, particularly on her butt, and that she was fond of play piercing and of both vaginal and anal penetration. While she is comfortable with dominant/submissive roleplay, she doesn’t need it to enjoy straight sensation play; since it isn’t a preference of mine, we decided to pass on any kind of mental control and simply go for the “high” of strong sensation. We agreed on safewords and were ready to go.

  We arrived at the party somewhat early, so we had our choice of bondage equipment. To start out, we chose a large cable-spool table, padded with vinyl and surrounded by handles. B. told me that bondage makes her feel uncomfortably confined and that she would prefer simply to be told to hold still. She hopped onto the table and I told her to lie face down, placing a thick pad of paper towels under her pussy to keep her juices off the equipment. I unfastened her garters and took down her stockings, but left her corset in place; her butt was my target for this part of the evening.

  I started out with a heavy soft suede flogger and began gently flogging her butt and upper thighs. I could tell she was hardly feeling these strokes, but I built them up fairly slowly anyway, swinging overhand from her left side, then from her right. By the time the strokes got fairly hard, she was beginning to get turned on, arching her butt up to meet the suede and moaning loudly. I moved down to her feet and pulled them apart to spread her legs, then began flogging her butt from below in a figure-eight configuration, quite hard. Her response grew vivid enough that I was pretty sure she’d come if I kept it up, and I didn’t want that to happen yet. So I finished with a few more strokes and switched to a harsher, stingier braided cat, using the same pattern of first from the left side, then from the right, then in a figure-eight from below. I thought that this sensation would be more painful and less sexual for her, and judging from her reaction, it was… but she was obviously still having a good time. (It was somewhere around this time that I moved up to her head to see how she was doing, and she saw that I was laughing and began to get a little uptight, thinking that I was laughing at her. I said, “No, I’m just laughing because you’re so unbelievably fucking wonderful.”)

  I wanted her next sensation to be solider, not as spread out as the multi-tailed implements I’d been using so far. I got out a heavy leather strap and began swinging that from the side. She was obviously working pretty hard to handle that sensation; she started rolling from side to side to avoid the blows, so I used my left hand to press the small of her back down toward the table while I whipped with my right. I wasn’t sure if being held down physically would trigger her aversion to bondage, so I watched her reactions carefully. It seemed OK, and I was enjoying it, so I kept it up. The sensation of the strap didn’t seem to be turning her on much, though, and I wanted to keep her sexual arousal high. I put a glove on my right hand and lubed a couple of fingers and began to explore her asshole. One finger went in effortlessly, and so did two. She was moaning and wriggling against my fingers – OK, great. I got a medium-sized butt plug out of my bag, stretched a condom over it, lubed it up, and inserted it. It went in with no difficulty at all, and she reacted with dramatic and visible arousal. I resumed strapping her, pausing to wiggle the plug a bit whenever the balance between pain and arousal seemed to be tipping too far.

  Next I got out an experiment – a birch rod (a bundle of long whippy birch switches bound together at the handle and spreading out into a broomlike spray). She’d never felt a birch before, and I’d only used one a couple of times before, so we weren’t sure how this would work out. Since she’d been reacting more positively to thuddy toys than to stingy ones, my guess was that she’d have a hard time with something as stingy as the birch. I started hitting her ass with it. She
went quite still, her back arched, hands braced against the table and shoulders and head up. Obviously I’d guessed right – this was a tough sensation for her. But she rose to the challenge. I went a little harder. Her face was working with the effort to process the sensation. I was enjoying birching her a lot, but I wanted this scene to be more about pleasure/pain than straight pain, so I didn’t push it too hard. I rubbed and massaged her butt a bit to diffuse the sting, and told her she’d been great.

  Time for something more fun. I took out a clublike rod of heavy Teflon – a thuddy instrument that has to be used extremely carefully, since it could break bones with a missed or overly hard blow. I tried a couple of not-too-hard strokes on her lower butt and she began to moan almost immediately. I hit a bit harder and she began to writhe. Experimentally, I tapped the base of the butt plug with the club a couple of times and she began to act like she was about to come, so I grabbed the plug and began to wiggle and thrust it. She came almost immediately, loudly and enthusiastically. I alternated hitting her with the club and getting her off with the plug a couple more times until she was panting and limp.

  At last, the grand finale – the canes, which I knew were her favorite and mine. I started with my lightest cane, a medium-width whippy rattan one. I gave her one trial moderate-strength stroke, and when I saw her reaction I knew we were onto something. I hit harder, mostly giving her about fifteen seconds between strokes to process the sensation, but occasionally making her work harder by giving her two or even three in quick succession. Her moans were low-pitched and the motion of her hips told me that she was finding the cane strokes erotic. But she’d taken quite a bit by now, and since I didn’t really know too much about how well her body recovered from heavy beatings, I didn’t want to push my luck, so I began to think about winding the session down.

  I switched to a different cane – a manmade one, a bit thicker and quite a bit heavier in weight. I gave her a dozen or so blows with it, walking from one side of the table to the other between strokes so that she had plenty of time to work with the sensation. I reached for the butt plug again, manipulating it with my right hand and pressing against her pubic mound with my left, bringing her to one final giant orgasm. Then I told her she could choose a number between two and ten to receive with the heavy cane, and then we’d be done. She chose four. I gave them to her as hard as she could take, and felt the endorphins rush in her and me as she stretched to meet my challenge. And then the scene was over.

  We both got caught up in a tremendous fit of the giggles, composed of equal parts, I think, of endorphins, relief and triumph (we’d done it!). I got up on the table with her and held her and we smooched and giggled for a while. When she felt ready to get up, I helped her off the table and swept the toys any old which way into the bag (I could always reorganize them later) and went back out into the social area looking for food and drink. We spent the next hour or so cuddling, nibbling, chatting and watching other scenes together.

  The next morning, before I had a chance to call her to see how she was doing, I found an e-mail waiting for me raving about what a wonderful time she’d had and how colorful her backside was looking. It felt great to receive it.

  4

  RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

  “It is always wrong to wield power if you are not prepared to accept the consequences for your actions and do the work it takes to use your strength and authority with precision and fairness. A good leader is many people’s servant. If being trained to become a perfect servant sounds too humiliating, you are not strong enough to withstand the temptations of wielding power.”1

  Lighting up dark places – your own and your bottom’s – is a tremendous responsibility and a tremendous turn-on. While you may top playfully, you should never do so frivolously; your partner’s physical and emotional well-being, and your own, are on the line. This chapter is about the kinds of responsibility you are agreeing to take on when you decide to top, and about the kinds of rewards you have a right to expect in return.

  THE TOP’S BILL OF RIGHTS

  We the players of the BDSM communities, in order to form more perfect scenes, establish arousal, ensure domestic titillation, provide for mutual support, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of sadomasochism to ourselves and our play partners, do ordain and establish this Bill of Rights for dominants, sadists and all those who put their self-image and reputation on the line to get themselves and their partners off.

  YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO CLEAR COMMUNICATION. Before, during and after your play, you are entitled to receive as much information about your partner’s needs, wants and limits as he is capable of giving you. He doesn’t get to withhold information for fear of scaring you off, to exaggerate his abilities, or to pretend not to have limits (we all have limits). On the other hand, he can’t share information he doesn’t have; novices may not know much about their limits, but can still probably tell you quite a bit about their fantasies. Asking you to top without as much information as you can get is like asking a contractor to build a house without seeing the blueprint.

  YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXPECT SUPPORT FROM YOUR PARTNER – WHETHER YOU’RE IN SCENE SPACE OR OUT OF IT. As we sit here writing this chapter, we’re looking in our crystal ball, and it tells us that you’re going to make mistakes. We wish the lottery were this easy to predict.

  When those inevitable mistakes happen, you have the right to expect that your partner will work with you to help correct the situation promptly and efficiently, so that the two of you can go on playing – or, if things have gone too far awry to finish that particular scene, to go on being friends and to play again another time. Unless your screwup is malicious or unforgivably careless, you have the right to mutual non-blaming – to the assumption that you were doing your best and simply made an error.

  And you have a right to your partner’s friendship and support at those times when you don’t feel like being a top: sometimes we all need simply to be held, sympathized with, taken out to lunch, or maybe even to get some pain or bondage for ourselves – and a bottom who withdraws from you the minute you take off your fetish gear or put down your whip isn’t supporting those very human and essential needs.

  YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO BE NURTURED. People’s needs for nurturance vary widely, but most of us need to feel taken care of at least sometimes – even, perhaps especially, tops. We remember a scene we did together:

  In this scene, Dossie was a prom queen, all in taffeta and rhinestones, and Janet was the street hood who kidnaps her from the prom at knifepoint to torture and rape her. It was a very hot scene, played at a party in front of dozens of eager spectators. Janet found herself becoming a very scary “hoodlum,” conscienceless and full of anger, and the scene became charged with frightening, sinister – and very hot – energy. After duly binding, stripping, beating, torturing and fucking Dossie, Janet held her and brought her nicely back down to earth. Then we went upstairs for something to eat. In the food room, Janet, who was by this point trembling and a bit weepy, sat at Dossie’s feet and said plaintively, “Could you just pet me for a while, please?” Dossie stroked Janet’s hair and rubbed her neck and shoulders until Janet felt quite sure that Dossie wasn’t still seeing her as the nasty hoodlum, and still accepted and liked her after experiencing such a dark and shadowy self.

  The moral is that accessing your shadow, as a top or as a bottom, can put you into a state of tremendous emotional vulnerability, and you may need lots of nurturing and acceptance while you are in that state. If you’re not getting the kind of nurturing you want, you should ask for it – needing to be taken care of does not make you less of a top, it makes you more of a human being.

  YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO GET YOUR NEEDS MET. A footrub? A sinkful of clean dishes? An earful of shrieks? An orgasm? Whatever it is that you need to feel like topping has been worthwhile for you, you’re entitled to get that (the reverse, of course, is also true – your bottom has the right to expect to get his or her needs met as well).

 
But you can’t expect your bottom to read your mind. If you like to hear begging, for example, say so – your bottom may have previously played with a top who insisted on stoical silence, and only be doing what she thinks is right. Some tops may have come of age in a milieu where genital sex is an expected part of S/M, and be dismayed and annoyed by a bottom who doesn’t automatically work to get his or her top off – others could be outraged by a bottom who tries to get inside their leathers without express direction. You have to ask if you expect to get.

  It sounds obvious to say that a top should tell his or her bottom how to meet his or her needs – after all, isn’t that what a top does? But we’ve found it isn’t necessarily that simple: asking for what you really want, particularly if it isn’t part of a standard S/M scenario, can feel vulnerable and embarrassing. All we can tell you about that is that the payoff is, or should be, worth the vulnerability: that a scene where you and your bottom both get your needs met is almost certain to be more satisfying for both of you, and to lead to more and hotter scenes later.

  YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO RESPONSIVENESS. Very few tops enjoy pouring their energy and toppiness into a bottom who’s so stoical that they can’t tell whether or not he’s enjoying it. When we top, we enjoy a bottom who gives us lots of hot sexy screaming, moaning, trembling and/or writhing, preferably with a wet pussy or hard dick for reinforcement. Other tops like watching a bottom struggle to maintain composure under stress (although a bottom who maintained composure too perfectly probably wouldn’t be very much fun to play with). Again, ask for what you want.