The New Topping Book

by Dossie Easton

  You also have a right to verbal response during the scene if you want it. When we ask “How are you doing?” or “Is this working for you?,” we all like to hear answers in the affirmative. However, always getting an affirmative answer, or getting an affirmative answer in the face of evidence to the contrary (wrap marks on a belly, for example), leaves us clueless, foundering and frustrated. If having a bottom chirp “Pardon me, sir or ma’am, but could you hit a little lower, please?” seems disrespectful to you, tell him or her to ask permission to speak first – and, upon receiving it, to give you the information you need. (We like to thank our bottoms when they give us important information.)

  YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK. At some point within a day or two after your scene, you and your bottom will probably want to do some talking about how it went – what worked and didn’t work for you and for her, what you might like to do differently next time, and an overview of how the scene was for both of you. During this “debriefing” – which we think is essential to both your relationship with your partner and your growth as a top – you have a right to helpful, constructive criticism. Your bottom should tell you about anything that didn’t go well in such a way that you know how you can do it more successfully next time, and she should also tell you about the stuff that did go well, giving you lots of nice ego strokes along the way. Similarly, any feedback you have for your bottom also needs to be supportive and constructive. A bottom who blames you for your mistakes, tears down your performance without offering constructive suggestions, or shuts down and simply won’t tell you what his or her experience was like, is not a bottom we suggest you play with twice.

  THE TOP’S LIST OF RESPONSIBILITIES

  Like all rights, top’s rights carry a burden of responsibility. Here are some of the responsibilities we think you take on when you agree to top:

  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR KNOWING AND STATING YOUR NEEDS, WANTS AND LIMITS. When you’re pretending to be Attila the Hun, Scourge of the Dungeon, it can be easy to forget that tops have limits too. But doing scenes that make you feel incompetent or disgusted or like a bad person is a really good way to lose track of the fact that we’re supposed to be having fun here, and to burn yourself out.

  Everybody has needs, wants and limits. If you’re new at this, you may discover some of yours by tripping over them – by doing a scene and discovering that you feel just awful, either because of something you did that you shouldn’t have, or because of something you didn’t do that you should have. But even if you’re an old hand, your limits may change over time: Janet spent years with a strong limit around breaking skin during play, but then discovered play piercing and started sticking needles into her friends every chance she gets.

  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR FOLLOWING THROUGH ON YOUR PROMISES. When your play date is coming up, you may hear a chorus of “yahbut” voices in your head – “Yah, but I’m not feeling toppy.” “Yah, but I didn’t get a good night’s sleep last night.” “Yah, but I’ve got a lot to do afterwards and I don’t want to tire myself out.” “Yah, but what if I fuck up?” While we understand that pre-scene nervousness (which is often the part of you that’s literally “scared of your own shadow” – see Chapter 15) can be daunting, bottoms are driven insane by tops who promise playdates and don’t follow through; this sort of approach/avoidance behavior is unfair and irresponsible.

  If you’re feeling like you want to cancel or no-show on a playdate, please don’t, unless your reasons are excellent. Go, and use some of the suggestions you’ll read in Chapter 9 to help yourself get turned on and into top space. We don’t think you’ll regret it.

  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN AND YOUR PARTNER’S PHYSICAL SAFETY. Your bottom may or may not be able to tell you if something you’re doing is causing physical harm. She may be so high on endorphins that he simply can’t tell what’s happening, or may have gotten non-verbal and forgotten how to communicate. If you’re not sure whether or not your bottom is able to communicate, you’ll have to take the responsibility for initiating the communication. Questions like “How are your hands feeling” or “Some of these strokes seem to be causing some bruises; is that OK” or “Are you getting dizzy” are perfectly all right, and if your bottom doesn’t want to answer them, you should probably order her to.

  Janet did a scene once where her top did a good job of taking care of her physical safety:

  We were at a costume party where I was wearing a dress made out of imitation chain mail with nothing underneath – so I’d been sitting on a rough surface all night. I got naked, and my friend started spanking me with his hand, then with a hairbrush. I was having a swell time and could happily have gone on all night… but suddenly he stopped, said, “I think you’re losing some hide here,” and ended the scene (against my vociferous protests). But sure enough, when I got home that evening, one cheek of my ass bore a large raw blister that took several weeks of cleaning and bandaging to heal properly. If my friend had kept on going as I demanded, the combination of the rough chain mail and the heavy spanking might have done serious damage to my skin – and I’d never have known it until it was too late.

  Sobriety is also important. While different players’ standards vary – some folks feel OK about very light use of intoxicants in scene, while others do not – it is certain that if you are too stoned or drunk to drive a car or go to work, you should not be playing. We urge extreme conservatism in the use of intoxicants during any kind of sex, and most especially during BDSM: there is probably nothing you do that demands better judgment and emotional balance, and using chemicals to impair those qualities strikes us as a very bad idea. Besides, why on earth would you want to blur such a wonderful experience?

  Safer sex is a subset of physical safety. Part of safeguarding your bottom’s, and your own, physical well-being is making sure that neither of you takes anything away from the session that you don’t want – an unplanned pregnancy or a nuisance infection or a deadly disease. Opinions change monthly as to how risky various sexual and S/M activities are in terms of disease transmission; we urge conservatism – when in doubt, use a latex or polyurethane barrier. Don’t assume that your partner’s definition of safer sex is the same as yours: discuss beforehand which activities each of you thinks are risk-free enough to do without a barrier, which are risky enough to require a barrier, and which are too risky to do at all. If one of you has more conservative standards than the other, that person sets the standards, regardless of who’s topping and who’s bottoming – it is entirely unacceptable to subject someone to a physical risk to which they haven’t consented. The important thing is not the latest statistics or scientific study; the important thing is that you both feel safe.

  Take care of your own safety, too: don’t play with strangers in private, and the first few times you play with a new partner, tell a trusted friend where you are and who you’re with (and make sure your play partner knows that you’ve taken that precaution).

  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS. Not everything that can go wrong in an S/M scene has anything to do with S/M. As part of taking care of your bottom’s (and your own) physical safety, you should have the equipment, training and ability to handle real-world emergencies ranging from quakes and fires through heart attacks and seizures.

  If you don’t know what you’d do if the lights went out, if your bottom suddenly became seriously ill, or if you inadvertently started a fire in the playroom, you shouldn’t do the scene until you’ve figured these things out.

  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR CARING FOR YOUR EQUIPMENT. If you own your own whips, sex toys, bondage equipment and so on, you are responsible for seeing that these items are carefully selected, well maintained and properly cleaned. Aside from the aesthetics of the situation (dirty or uncared-for toys are a sign of a sloppy top), poor quality or poorly maintained toys are downright dangerous. We know one top who broke a finger trying to grab a whirling handle on a poorly designed winch, and we’ve heard many stories of bottoms pulling inade
quately attached eye-bolts out of the wall and sustaining nasty falls.

  While the jury is still out regarding whether or not HIV can be transmitted via uncleaned sex toys, it is certain that various other nasties, including hepatitis C, can be. When you’re not sure if a toy has been exposed to body fluids, assume that it’s contaminated and clean it carefully. Chapter 10, and several of the books in the Resource Guide, give more detailed toy cleaning information.

  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN AND YOUR PARTNER’S EMOTIONAL SAFETY. This may seem a little counterintuitive – after all, in the real world, we believe that people should be responsible for taking care of their own emotions and for asking for the kinds of emotional support they need. But we believe that the implied contracts of what we do are a little different, and that the usual boundaries get shifted a bit when we play together.

  If Dossie showed up for our co-authoring appointment tomorrow, and Janet said to her, “Dossie, I feel angry because of something you said last week,” we would handle that in certain ways: Janet would accept responsibility for her own anger and would process it herself – with Dossie’s help if Dossie cared to give that help, or without it if Dossie didn’t.

  But when we agree to play together, there is an assumption that those adult boundaries are going to be altered – perhaps even to some degree dropped. This is what we meant in the Introduction when we said that “BDSM is ritualized codependency.” Unlike the real world, where we assume that adults are responsible for processing their own emotions and taking care of their own needs, an player – particularly a bottom – may become quite dependent. Part of our responsibility as tops is caring for our bottoms when they are in that childlike, dependent state. If you think about it, this dictum is actually similar to our responsibility to care for our bottoms’ physical well-being when they may be too endorphined out or too deeply in bottom space to do so.

  So we believe that whether or not a bottom has asked to have their emotional safety taken care of, our responsibilities are to provide that support. As a default, we think that a top should take the lead in discussing what kinds of stimuli are likely to trigger emotional trauma for a bottom (Was she abused as a child? Is she a victim of violent crime? Is she grieving a lost friend or relationship?), and in ending or altering a scene that seems to be pushing emotional buttons in an unexpected way. If a top and bottom agree to venture into difficult emotional territory, we also think the top thereby takes responsibility to be available to the bottom during any emotional “aftershocks” that ensue. Tops have aftershocks too, so we think this agreement should be mutual.

  Even if you’re doing a scene that isn’t particularly emotional, we think tops should expect to provide plenty of support, praise and affection – before, during and particularly after the scene. (If your bottom doesn’t like this kind of nurturance, she should tell you so.) Taking good care of your bottom helps both of you to process the scene and nourishes both of you, so you can go on to do more and better scenes together in the future.

  1. Pat Califia

  5

  HOW DO YOU LEARN TO DO THIS STUFF?

  Okay, so you’re interested. You have fantasies, you’ve thought about it, maybe you even have somebody who wants to play with you. So now what? Do you just rear up and snarl “On your knees, bitch” (or “boy,” as the case may be)? Well, please don’t – until you have a clear idea about what happens next.

  How do you learn to do all this complex, sexy, arcane, and potentially dangerous stuff? How to tie someone up, preferably without damaging their nerves… how to build a structure that keeps your D/S connection hot and healthy… how to give someone a flogging without breaking any bones… how to give commands in an obey-me-now tone of voice… how to use an enormous range of implements to inflict all kinds of different and unimaginable sensations, and be deft enough not to drop any of them on your own toes, and still feel like a top?

  For the novice top, there is a lot to learn. Start by giving yourself permission to be ignorant: it is not a crime to not know something. And even though your fantasy top may be omniscient, you are going to have to get down and learn. The more you can learn, and the more you are willing to learn, the better a top you will be. We feel sure you can have fun while you are learning to do all these wonderful things – we sure do.

  If you live in or near a city that has a BDSM support group, join it. Support groups regularly put on demonstrations by experienced players of various skills, like flogging or play piercings, where they talk about the safety information and show you what to do. At such groups, you can also meet and ask questions of experienced players, or perhaps join forces with another learner to share experience and support each other in your explorations. You may find a mentor. You may find an experienced bottom who wants to play with you and is willing to show you a few things.

  Unfortunately, as the BDSM scene grows, we are seeing more separated populations emerging. Support groups now are often targeted to very specific members: gay men, dykes, heterosexuals (with bisexuals and transgendered folks welcome to some degree in most if not all of them), with even smaller groups for crossdressers, fetishists and the like. While it may be nice to be able to join a support group exclusively composed of people like yourself, we mourn the loss of diversity. When we were coming out, we learned so much from people who were different from ourselves, and we miss the sense of a larger community and the stimulation and adventures we encountered.

  Please don’t let your top attitude get in the way of learning from your bottom. The bottom knows these sensations and emotions from the inside, and knows more than anyone what works and what doesn’t. Also, tastes and limits vary from bottom to bottom, so even when you become experienced you’re still going to need to find out what works and doesn’t work for each bottom you play with.

  If you have friends who are seasoned players, you can try out activities you would like to do to someone else by getting someone to do them to you. A friend of ours learned massage by getting a lot of massages and remembering what she liked: you can learn topping by bottoming, and paying attention to what works, and asking the top questions afterwards if you were too distracted (or happy) to pay attention to the technical details. It’s not uncommon for dominants to learn their craft by serving under a more experienced dominant for a prearranged period of time, often six months to a year; this way they can start by learning what submission feels like, move onward to assisting the dominant during play with other submissives, and eventually “graduate” as experienced dominants, ready to take on submissives of their own.

  What, you say, me bottom? But I’m a top! (Dossie once had that last sentence printed on a T-shirt as a present for a top of hers.) Some people hold that it is not possible to become a good top without bottoming, without direct personal experience of the sensations you like to inflict on others. We do know good tops who never bottom, but we find them to be the exception rather than the rule. Most good players, both top and bottom, have some history of switching, and many identify as switches.

  We’ve told you already that this book is not an instruction manual, and we have listed several good books to read in the Bibliography that will tell you how to perform various S/M activities safely and well. Be careful when reading books, especially pornography – many books are written by people with little or no experience, for fantasy purposes only, and you can’t learn how to do the real part from them.

  People all over the world join in conversations on the Internet or on computer bulletin boards, where you can pick up a lot of information and ask questions – but please remember to check things out because you have no way of knowing whether your source has real experience or is just dreaming. Here in San Francisco there are publicly advertised classes on BDSM techniques and philosophies from basic through very advanced; other cities have similar institutions. More sources of information are listed in the Resource Guide.

  DO IT YOURSELF. Another resource for learning about new sensations is yourself. Try things out
on yourself and see how they feel. Put a clothespin on the web between your thumb and your forefinger to find out how intense the sensation is, or put it on your chest, or your nipple, or…. If the sensation seems too intense, see if you can eroticize it by masturbating. Does this change how it feels? Are you still reading this book?

  Oops! We got carried away. Here we were telling you about trying things out at home. What we meant to say is that we want you to practice hitting a pillow with your new whip till you can hit the same spot with all the tails together every time, experiment with bondage ideas to find out if a particular sash, belt or rope will cut off circulation or abrade the skin if you yank on it, kneel on a hard floor for a period of time to see what parts of your body feel strained or uncomfortable… in short, do your homework.

  Start any new endeavor by thinking about what you are doing. With a new whip, for instance, think about what parts of the body have enough padding to strike safely – the ass, thighs, shoulder muscles and other well-padded parts with no exposed underlying organs can be struck with most kinds of whips, whereas backs of knees, faces and necks can only be tapped lightly… get the idea? And each person has different sensitivities on different parts of their body. How will you find that out?

  A basic rule of starting out doing anything new: you can’t go wrong by starting out very lightly and working on up. Dossie remembers:

  When I was a real neophyte, at one of the first occasions where I saw experienced people play, I was watching two leathermen, dressed head to toe in black leather with nickel studs gleaming everywhere, aviator sunglasses – I was completely intimidated. They were the most menacing-looking human beings I had ever been in the same room with. The top had a riding crop, and the bottom bent over a table, and I expected mayhem. What actually happened was that the top took the crop and went tap tap tap as lightly as rain over that bottom’s ass. He made the skin flush with the lightest touches, bringing the blood to the skin, very patiently. I watched the bottom slowly become engaged in the sensation, swaying slightly, breathing deeper, getting turned on, all while the crop’s touch was very sensual, very light. Very gradually, the top began to hit a little harder. As soon as the bottom began to jerk a little at the blows, he held steady and set up a rhythm for a while, not increasing the intensity, just staying right where it was beginning to hurt. I watched the bottom become entranced. Again and again, the top increased the intensity by just one notch, and the bottom became more and more responsive, both of them obviously in perfect communication with each other, almost as if they were dancing. Eventually, the top was striking with all the force he could muster, and the bottom was thrashing and yelling with wild abandon – they stayed there for a while too, savoring the experience as long as possible before it was time to come back down.