• Emotional limits. Scenes likely to evoke profound emotional conflict require special consent, both from the bottom and from the top. Such scenes may involve abandonment, betrayal, extreme humiliation, regression to child or baby states, and real-world emotions, especially anger. These are all “button-pushers,” and can evoke much more extreme responses than you bargained for. We find it particularly important to agree that we will not take anger we have about real conflict into a scene – even if you and your bottom are in a relationship in which you have the right to punish him, it’s generally not a good idea to punish in anger.
LIMITS FOR TOPS
As tops, we have the same responsibility as bottoms to know our own limits. We can start by being honest about what we want and what we don’t want. A good exercise to clarify this is called “Yes, No and Maybe.” Make a list of all the sexual and BDSM activities you can think of, and then divide them into three categories – yes, no and maybe. Yes is what you know you like, no is what you know you don’t like, and maybe is all those things that might be hot if the time were right, or you were really turned on, or you could get someone who already knows how to teach you. This exercise can be fun to do with your partner or in a group – but if you feel that to be a real stud top you ought to be ready for anything, maybe you should try it alone the first time so you can be honest with yourself. On your yes list you will probably find plenty of things you like, and the maybe list promises plenty of hot stuff to explore. Respect your own no list as you would your bottom’s.
It is particularly important to know and honor the limits of your knowledge and skill. It can be embarrassing if a bottom approaches you with a new eight-foot bullwhip and wants you and only you to crack it over his or her ass, forcing you to admit that you have no idea how to operate that thing. But remember, it would be a lot more embarrassing if you tried to do it and failed, and even worse if you wound up injuring the bottom – a very real possibility, as throwing a bullwhip is dangerous and requires a tremendous amount of training and practice.
If your fantasy of being a top requires you to be all-knowing, that’s a fine fantasy, and you still have to know your limits. Good bottoms will respect your honesty – at least, if we said we’d never done something before and were feeling uncertain about it, and a bottom said “Aw, c’mon,” we would wonder a lot about that bottom’s respect for safety.
MAKING ROOM FOR YOUR OWN NEEDS. Where do sex and physical stimulation for the top fit into your scene agenda? Many of us have some difficulty feeling like a big bad top when we are on our backs with our legs in the air squealing in ecstasy. Some tops like to focus on what they are doing to the bottom during the scene, and arrange for their own orgasm afterwards. Some of us top first, then switch to the bottom role to get stimulated. Some of us order our bottoms not to touch us at all during a scene because it is distracting.
Here’s an intriguing script for a switching scene that was negotiated by a top who had a yen for some downtime:
A hapless bottom has been kidnapped into the harem of hte Sultan Of Whatever to be trained as a pleasure slave. The training begins with innocence violated, our heroine bound and chained, helpess to resist the sensual invasion of the skillful slave trainer, etcetera. Then, somehow, the erstwhile slave escapes and manages to tie up her master, and (with a surprisingly active imagination for such an innocent maiden) takes her revenge by winding leather cords tightly around his cock and balls, and hanging weights from his scrotum with mean little clothespins.
Then, the evil slave master gets loose and again, our poor heroine is bound, subjected to terrible punishments and thoroughly ravished, to the satisfaction of both the players on this private stage.
Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?
You can make a space during your scene for your own stimulation, and you can negotiate that with your bottom. For instance, you might like a butt plug in your ass and a vibrator on your cock or clit while your pleasure slave pulls on the chain between your nipple clamps – so why not? Bottoms may or may not have access to a whole lot of initiative while they are in role, but most of them are good at following directions. So make a clear agreement with your bottom before the scene starts, untie your bottom and order him or her to molest you in your favorite way when the time is right, and remember that your bottom, just like you, might need to focus on what he is doing to you – so this might not be the best time to yank off a clamp while your tender parts are between his teeth. Or then again..
interlude 3
A role-play scene, played by “Akasha,” a novice top friend.
I woke up with great difficulty and realized my mind was full of thoughts of domination, weird fantasies about devices that I did not own but wished I did. I thought of my friend Richard, and a wonderful night we had shared many months before.
I called him and found him still in bed. I said, “God, I am really having a problem today.”
He shifted in his sheets, I could hear it, and said, “Hungry?”
I was doodling, cracking pencil leads and then throwing them away. “Yes,” I said, and I was sort of half shaking, just wanting to make him beg on the phone, make him get out of his warm bed and kneel down, make him whimper, do anything. But I wanted more, so I held back and asked him to see me.
He half moaned and sighed, yawned again, and told me he had class that night. I told him to meet me afterward. He paused, and I felt like I was going to die.
“Richard, please. I’m going crazy. Do this for me, OK?”
“You want to hurt me?” he said softly, making me face it. This was back when it was still hard for me to accept that I enjoyed making men suffer.
It’s difficult to describe what a day like that feels like, waiting for the hours to go by, trying to concentrate on work, going one step at a time. When I am in that mindframe I can smell everything in the air, I can feel mist against my face in the cold air. The moon is more illuminated, the sound of my feet in puddles as I walk somehow thrills me with a feeling of authority.
I arrived at the cafe a few minutes early and waited in the lobby. Richard arrived a few minutes late. When I stood up and hugged him he laughed softly into my ear, “How’re you doing?”
I just moaned and started fingering his hair, tugging at it a little. We parted and I looked at him again, blinking. I felt weak, numb. I wanted to take him by the hair and force him to his knees. Instead I said weakly, “You probably haven’t eaten yet. Can I buy you dinner?”
When his food arrived I stole his silverware and he laughed. “I’m serious,” I told him in a low voice. “I am feeding you this entire meal.”
His eyes searched around the room and he lowered his voice, “Come on, people will see. We can take care of you when we get home. Let me eat.”
Any other night I wouldn’t think twice about him eating dinner across from me. But in that mood, on that night, I wanted to be the one feeding him. I wanted to make him part his lips each time I lifted the spoon. I wanted to make him beg with his eyes for more, or look at me longingly. Or I wanted to force him to do it.
I leaned over the table and we argued a bit about it, finally compromising in that I would feed him the first few bites and then let him finish. Knowing that he hated doing it but would submit to it for a few minutes was enough for now.
When we got into my room he sat on the edge of my bed then finally lay down, spreading his arms out and sighing tiredly. I slid down and moved on top of him, moving my hands up to his wrists and holding them down there. His eyes flickered open and he stared at me expressionlessly, waiting.
I consider it true, deep headspace when I am capable, without hesitation, of exercising acts of cruelty or power as if they were second nature. These are things that I would never do in a normal state of mind. On that night I slipped into it relatively easily, maybe because I had been lingering around the edges of it for so long.
I set up a series of short scenes, because my appetite was varied and I wanted to satisfy it all
. Sometimes I want total resistance, sometimes I want fear, sometimes I want pathetic, eager submission. That night I wanted them all.
I used every single restraint device on him that I had, in every position I could imagine. I kept a hand over his mouth most of the night and wrestled him to the ground three or four different times, ordering him to feign resistance until I hurt him into submitting.
I roleplayed kidnapping him, interrogating him, seducing him, and fucking him. I had an orgasm just from the way he felt against me as I took him against his will, one hand holding his head back by a fistful of hair and the other over his mouth to muffle his protests.
For the grand finale I put him in my chair and handcuffed his wrists behind his back, taking my wall mirror down and putting it behind him so I could see his wrists and enjoy the way they looked while still facing him.
I put water in his hair to simulate sweat and messed it up, tied his ankles together, and told him I was going to kill him.
He put his head down solemnly and I walked around a bit, touching his skin gently, telling him how pretty and helpless he looked. He shifted, and struggled uselessly, then lifted his head to me and looked at me with his teeth clenched, saying “You have to let me go. Don’t do this to me.”
I leaned down and held his face in my hands, putting my lips close to his, licking them gently. “Kiss me goodbye, my tortured slave.”
He shut his eyes and leaned forward to kiss me, hungry, passionate, as if to seduce me with his mouth and tongue. This kiss was long, desperate, and when I broke from it he was breathing hard.
His eyes were pleading, yet strong. “I’m not afraid to die,” he said softly.
He always knew the things to say. He was begging, yet he was strong. He was submitting, but he was still powerful. He amazed me.
We had played these execution scenes before so I didn’t need to give him any instruction. He was to pretend he had about three minutes left to live, locked in some airtight chamber or given some poisonous gas, and he was to struggle yet remain brave until the moment I came to save him from his fate.
And he really knew how to play it. Perfectly, yet differently every time. The way he pulled at the handcuffs, letting them cut into his wrists as if it didn’t matter,. The way he threw his head back to breathe with such pained difficulty, the way he looked at me through wet bangs with desperation, his lashes damp with tears.
I felt so close to orgasm, but it was a different sort of satisfaction. I just watched, emotionless, as his struggles became weaker and his breathing more labored.
Then it hit me, at once, it was like a sensual overload, like an orgasm but of the mind. I shivered, I felt a cold sweat on my body and suddenly I wanted to cry, I thought, “God, what am I doing to him?” I unfastened him quickly and slid into his arms, shaking, telling him I was sorry. He laughed softly into my ear and told me it was okay, that he was acting, and that I needn’t feel bad.
But feeling bad makes me feel better, so I spent some time crying, letting him reassure me. We lay down in the bed together and eventually fell asleep after I had sufficient reassurance.
Waking up the next morning I felt a different kind of exhaustion. It’s impossible to explain how much dom headspace rips the energy right out of you. Sometimes it takes me days to recover.
9
GO!
All the negotiation, planning, scheming and fantasizing in the world never quite prepare you for that moment when you’re standing there, face to face with the bottom of your dreams, who is breathing a little bit fast and looking at you with an expectant gleam in his or her eyes. Omigod… now what am I supposed to do?
We suggest that before you get to that critical moment, you spend a little (or a lot of ) time thinking your scene through. Try to build a fantasy around the person you’re playing with and the kind of scene you’ve agreed to play. (Janet likes to do this while masturbating.) This doesn’t have to be a narrative-type fantasy with plots and dialogue unless you want it to be – maybe your fantasy is about a particular energy or activity. Be as far out as you like in your fantasy; you can always revise later when you bring the fantasy into reality.
That fantasy will be the core of the scene you do together. We guarantee that the scene will not go exactly the way it did in your fantasy… reality is never that willing to conform to our expectations. But if your fantasy has your gorgeous captive first kissing your boots, then getting trussed up like a Christmas turkey, then getting flogged and fucked, you have at least an outline for your scene.
Don’t script too tightly. If your satisfaction in this scene depends on your bottom saying certain words, or resisting in just the right manner, you’d better make sure she knows it, or she is very likely to react the wrong way:
As part of a public demonstration, Janet, as the sadistic butch prison warden, was threatening Dossie, as the innocent and wrongly imprisoned “good girl,” with a cavity search. It would have been very inappropriate to actually do a cavity search in front of an audience of strangers, so Janet assumed that Dossie would resist, thus giving The Warden an excuse to punish The Girl. Unfortunately, she forgot to mention this plan to Dossie, who got deeply enough into the role that it didn’t occur to her to refuse – leaving Janet standing there with a glob of lube on her gloved finger and a foolish expression on her face, frantically trying to signal Dossie that she should please for heaven’s sake resist so they could get on with the scene.
Janet made the mistake of overplanning – of making the scene dependent on the bottom’s reaction, without ensuring that the bottom would react the way she needed. If you want your bottom to resist, to capitulate, to beg or to struggle, you’d better make that desire clear up front or you’re likely to get stuck improvising in ways that might not work for either of you.
On the other hand, underplanning – going into a scene with no idea of what you’re going to do or what sequence you’re going to do it in – is a surefire recipe for what Dossie calls “blank-paperitis,” that brain-dead feeling when you look at the bottom and can’t begin to imagine what might be a good thing to do next.
We like to go into a scene with an “outline” of possible activities – a menu that we can move through or skip around or even ignore if we think of something better to do, but that’s always there to fall back on if we feel stuck. Janet likes to plan an outline with two or three times as many items on it as she could ever actually do in a single scene, so she has plenty of choices and can go with the flow of her own energy and the bottom’s reactions.
WHAT DO YOU DO FIRST?
Well, first you panic – at least a little. This is the challenging point. But have courage. Remember, we have faith in you.
In the beginning, your job is to get both yourself and your bottom into a sexy, susceptible headspace: a space in which you are powerful and terrible, and he is malleable and helpless before your implacable will.
We find that it’s a good idea to start a scene with some sort of ritual that defines the beginning of the scene and starts to get everybody turned on. A hug is good for scenes that have a nurturing, connected feeling. For a slave-type scene, you can have a ritual of putting on the bottom’s collar: many tops like to have their bottoms kneel at their feet and kiss the collar before it is placed around the bottom’s neck. Touching the bottom’s shoulders, back or neck establishes connection in a relaxed and soothing way. Simply standing the bottom a few feet away and having her hold quite still, with eyes lowered, and then turn around slowly – while you examine every inch of her body, your eyes burning with lust – can be a hot beginning. Janet sometimes likes to have the bottom leave the room and come back in, with the understanding that once she re-enters the room, the scene has begun. Putting on some bondage can be a good start for many scenes. In other words, just about any beginning can work, as long as it serves the dual purpose of connecting you and your partner and turning you on.
GETTING YOURSELF TURNED ON. If you’re lucky, you’ll already be turned on and feeling l
ike the King or Queen of Hell before you begin – but neither of us is usually that lucky; we usually have to do something to get turned on and into top space.
Is there something physical that you know turns you on, makes you feel toppy? Janet feels toppy when someone kneels in front of her and sucks her nipples. Do you like having your boots kissed? Your feet rubbed? Is there a name you like to be called? Tell your bottom how to do what you like; be specific. He’ll start to feel submissive and under your control, and you’ll start to get turned on.
Sometimes you can convince yourself that you’re a top simply by acting like one. Be bossy, be forceful – it’s okay if it doesn’t feel “natural” at first; imitate your favorite movie villain, or a top whose style you’ve admired at parties. As you start to act like a top, you’ll probably start to feel a little excited. And the more turned on you feel, the more natural the topping will seem, and the more turned on you’ll get, so you’ll do more, and get more turned on, and…
Your bottom will notice your arousal and your toppiness and start to get turned on, too, and will add his energy to the drama you’re building. And before you know it, there you’ll both be – nicely in role, wildly excited and having an absolutely wonderful time.
BUILDING. Once you’ve established scene space with a proper beginning, you can start building some momentum. For most scenes, you want to begin slowly and build gradually. (Interrogation, terror and punishment scenes can be exceptions.) If you’re playing with sensation, start with the gentlest – sensual stroking or erotic pinching, or some slow-building strokes from a nice soft thuddy flogger. If your scene is more about domination and control, you may want to start with some orders that you know the bottom will not find too intense (either too demanding or too rewarding) – some posture training, say, or an order for the bottom to lightly stimulate you to get you in the mood. Save the really difficult tasks for later when the bottom is “warmed up” and deeply into role, and the activities you know she really loves as a reward for doing the difficult ones.
The New Topping Book Page 9