FROM THE BOTTOM. If you choose to bottom to a script based on cultural trauma, you may be aiming at becoming a warrior by surviving an ordeal, conquering from the bottom by having the emotional strength to deal with oppression, finding out how your ancestors survived. Conquering might mean feeling free to cry for a long time, or beg for mercy, or it might mean stoicism, surviving. It most certainly could involve coming face to face with your own internalized oppression, your own racism. We all have racism, even those of us who are oppressed by it. Playing with it could bring about dissociation, flashbacks, open up wellsprings of rage, and it’s possible to fall into really believing in the moment that the top is angry, despising, sees you as less than human.
Remember, you get to write the script, you get to choose the outcome. You get to conquer, and you get to be received, in the full emotional complexity of all this, as beloved and desirable.
FROM THE TOP. Very scary. As a general rule, in any kink grouping there are a lot more eager victims than there are Simon Legrees. So how would you feel if your friend asked you to call her a nigger? A filthy Jew? A faggot? Tops worry about hurting their bottom’s feelings, being seen as racist or sexist, bearing the guilt of our ancestors or shame for our privilege. And what if we like it? What if we get turned on by playing this horrible person?
For the top, playing with cultural trauma offers the opportunity to meet our internalized abuser. We all have one: it’s not if you discover your precious inner bully, it’s when. When you play the oppressor as a gift to your bottom, you will find out what your own hooks are to that role. When tops invoke the spirit of bigotry or brutality, what shocks us is how real it can get, how strongly we can feel it. Are we willing to be conscious of that?
Janet recalls what it felt like to play a sexist brute:
I felt myself in the teeth of the fantasy, hurtling as if I were on a steep ski slope, unintentional space opening up before me. The momentum of the scene took me skidding into dark, unexplored, frightening territory.
And let’s not assume, as we talk about this, that all the bottoms are members of an oppressed minority, or that all the tops are white and middle-class. What would it be like to be an African-American topping a slavery scene? Or a revenge fantasy? Or a German pretending to be a victim of the Holocaust?
HOW DO YOU DO IT? Negotiate with extreme care, follwing the suggestions in the next section on emotional safety for deep scenes. Expect a deep emotional charge for both bottom and top. Show a lot of respect for safewords – you may need them. Tops should check in more often than usual, because if the scene really begins to roll, the bottom may forget that there is a safeword, or that there is any consensuality at all. And remember, both top and bottom are playing into shame – so before and after, outside the scene, you want to be very sure to establish mutual respect, regard and affection.
When you are choosing your script, think about the distance or closeness your scenario holds to your actual experience. For most people, further away in history feels safer – so a scene from the Spanish Inquisition may feel less terrifying than one from the Holocaust. Some people choose to play with someone else’s cultural trauma rather than their own.
Do remember, when choosing your historical horrors, that you get to do this more than once. So select something relatively easy for the present, and if all goes well, you can take on something more challenging next time. Leaping off cliffs is optional.
The characters we play in these scenes are usually stereotypes. While stereotyping is an active form of societal oppression, stereotypes in scenes are more like archetypes, the icon of the oppressed or oppressing person. The roles act as containers, boundaries that say very clearly, “This is not who I am all the time.”
Stereotypes, especially as you are starting up the scene, can easily look more like caricatures, and you may have a hard time keeping a straight face. Just ride it, continue, and let the turn-on gradually draw you into the drama.
An important point of negotiation: white people can’t really initiate racial scenes, at least not with anybody they don’t know really really well. A question arises for the bottom: would I want to bottom to someone I suspect is genuinely racist, sexist, a conscious oppressor? Or for the top: If I truly believe in some other people’s inferiority, is it okay for me to play this out in scene? We hope not. Ideally, the top is pretending to be an oppressor that she doesn’t identify with.
AFTERCARE. Plan on aftercare for both or all parties. Everyone in this kind of scene is playing into their own shame and their own Shadow, everyone is terribly vulnerable. Plan for time after the scene, and to talk the next day, and to talk again two or three days later, to see how things are shaking out. If you are partners who live together, it is particularly important to set aside time for these discussions. Making assumptions that everybody is fine is dangerous. It can also be helpful to have some neutral friends that you didn’t play with who you can talk to.
PUBLIC PLAY. Cultural trauma scenes are not always appropriate for public play parties. We need to respect the limits of those who haven’t consented to play with us, and who have no way to close their ears to shouted slurs. It can be hard to predict what is and is not okay with others around you. And sometimes this can feel like another kind of oppression, when your fellow perverts think your particular scene is disgusting. There is, in our opinion, no one right way to deal with public reaction to highly charged scenes. The problem is not simple, and all we can really do is negotiate as best we can to make room for everybody’s needs, and respect everybody’s vulnerabilities.
HEALING. Many years ago, we knew a black woman and a white woman who lived together in a full-time owner-slave relationship in which the white woman was the master. They were healthy, happy people, proud of their partnership; eventually they moved to the country to bear and raise their child. Some years later, we had the opportunity to talk with the top in this relationship, and, knowing they were still together, ask how the slavery question had worked out. She told us that her lover had, after some years, learned what she needed to know from playing into the history of slavery and gotten the healing she was seeking, so they stopped playing such scenes. Now, still together and raising their child, they play other games.
When we painfully seek a deep emotional experience of enslavement, oppression, terror and helplessness, when we bring the horrors of history out of the Shadow and into clear consciousness, when we light up those terrible shadows with love, determination and the sweet fire of erotic energy, we can begin to heal our histories and ourselves.
DEEP EMOTIONAL SAFETY
In a previous chapter we told you how to handle psychological emergencies that might come up when your play accidentally sets off somebody’s emotional land mines. In shadow play, you go into that same territory on purpose, and these skills will be your safety net, enabling you to get back out whenever you want to, no matter how deeply you have gone in.
This is advanced play, and we do not advocate shadow play with new partners or with unfamiliar physical techniques – this is no time to fumble. And let us remind you that just as we deplore values that add up to a hierarchy of hip about heaviness in stimulus play, there is no status value in playing deeper than the next guy – play at the depth that feels right to you.
There are still limits, there are always limits – but it may be trickier figuring out what they are. Both of us, for example, have limits about face-slapping because our parents used to do that, so we only allow face-slapping in scenes that are planned to be deep. Janet tells potential tops, “If you slap my face I may come unglued; don’t do it unless you’re willing to help put me back together again.” Punishment for real or imagined naughtiness may be hot for one player, too sensitive for another.
You may discover a limit you didn’t know you had. Dossie remembers:
My partner had been playing Mommy to my very young baby, personae that we had fooled around with while snuggling, but never in an actual S/M scene. When we discussed playing a scene w
ith the baby, we decided that it was too scary to hurt her, but that sex might be okay. In scene, I got deeply into my baby role, being fed ice cream, playing with toys, sucking on everything. When we progressed to the sexual part, though, I got confused, overwhelmed and profoundly disturbed. I began to cry in a strange and mournful way, and my partner responded by stopping the sex and comforting me. What I got from the scene was that the baby was not big enough to have sex, and that, since my family was very stern and intolerant of crying children, it was incredibly healing to be comforted when I was upset, with no justifications needed. So in one way this scene was a disaster, and in another way it was a healing experience. A new outcome, and a chance to reclaim a part of myself: the baby who wasn’t allowed to cry. In case you were worried, the baby is fine and just learned to say “doggie.”
When you play with emotional risk, plan to spend some time talking about feelings. Honor your feelings, whatever they may be, as the scene reveals them to you – there is no way that you are “supposed” to feel.
Also remember that you already have psychological defenses that have been protecting you from your own painful stuff. S/M technique may bypass these defenses for a while, but will not disable them. Your normal defenses will return in due time and continue to protect you as well as they always have. Above all, stay conscious and respect the fragility with which you are playing. Deep scenes connect to unmet wants we had long since given up hope of ever fulfilling: take care to honor the terrible vulnerability of yearning. Shadow play requires a commitment from all players to serious exploration, and a willingness to give that exploration the time, energy and respect it deserves.
HOW DO YOU DO IT?
So you have inklings of some part of yourself that you or your partner wants to explore. The next question becomes: how do you get there?
If you discovered this space in play by accident, you can return by the same route that got you there in the first place: a role, a script, a costume, a phrase, a whipping or whatever. You might be surprised to find it less scary this time – when you make the choice to walk a risky path, you are much more in control, and it’s amazing what the light of consciousness can do to defuse old fears.
You may already have a script in mind, an old fantasy, something you read that turns you on. A lot of S/M erotica has the primal intensity of myth, because fantasies often express the dynamics that run our unconscious minds.
If you want to build a fire, first you should build a fireplace. Negotiate. Talk a lot. Obsess a little. Put out your limits, make a place for your bottom’s limits. This could be your story, or your bottom’s, but you both need to be safe. Talk about fears, fantasies of what might go wrong. Talk about safewords, and what you will do if something in the scene doesn’t work out, a fallback position. Remember that practice makes perfect, and if you try something that doesn’t work, you will both be more experienced the next time. Don’t forget to negotiate time for closure, connection, the gradual return to everyday reality. Negotiate how you will deal with any aftershocks: a phone call? A dinner later in the week?
BEGINNING. Negotiate how you are going to start. You can approach psychological depths by going through old wounds, reenacting abuse, becoming parent, child, perpetrator, bully, brat, crybaby and vicious schoolmarm. You can act out forbidden feelings – angry, amoral, cruel – and their equally forbidden opposites, pathetic, needy, frightened, ashamed. Physically, you might gather up the power with bondage, a collar, a blindfold, the order to kneel. Find the feelings that are most powerful for you by going for the juice, the charge, the place where your emotions are strong and scary: this is your fire. You built your fireplace when you negotiated your scene, so you are safe, and you can explore one step at a time. To increase the intensity, you can make heat with friction, tension, resistance – pushing against each other to amplify, blow up flames from coals.
MIDDLE. What do you do when you get into those intense roles and feelings? Let your physical script support you. For instance, if you and your bottom have agreed on a flogging, as the heat rises you can imagine running your intense feelings down your arm and out the end of the whip into your bottom – believe us, she will feel it, and you will too.
You can use any activity as a focus for your energy, and to get more fully into your role. You know your bottom: limits, preferences, what gets the endorphins running, what arouses, what triggers an orgasm.
Who says you have to be consistent? Tops can play from multiple positions in the same scene, from torture, wickedness and betrayal to support, love and nurturance. We see no contradiction in a big bad mean top who has just tortured some poor bottom, now patting that bottom on the back while murmuring “there, there, poor baby, you’re all right now.” The inquisitor who tortures the sinner must have great love to go to such lengths to save that immortal soul, right?
Techniques of interrogation can be used to confuse and liberate the bottom by generating a double-bind, like ordering someone to tell the truth as you insist that he lie, just like real brainwashing. For betrayal, you can make your bottom struggle to meet your demands and then punish him for succeeding. The ways to create no-win situations for mindfuck are endless, and most of them are based on intensely polarized contrast between hurting and caressing.
ENDING. We empower ourselves when we replay old scripts and arrange for them to come out differently. Ideally, all scenes end in a win for both players. The successful completion of a scene gives feelings of competence, mastery, control and empowerment, and as the top you can reinforce those feelings in your bottom by offering praise for how well she took the sensations, or followed your orders, or by letting your bottom know how good you feel, how turned on you are. He can tell you how wonderful you are too.
Most of what we dig up from our shadows consists of feelings or roles that we have some shame about, so sharing that piece of ourselves is powerfully intimate. We are letting another person into a part of ourselves that we ourselves may have rejected. And when that person accepts us, complete with our old tapes, and responds with erotic enthusiasm, then we get the ultimate validation: love given to the part of ourselves that we may fear the most.
You close a deep scene just as you close any other scene, only make sure you do it. Don’t skimp on time and energy for the return trip to the so-called real world. When you prepare for voyaging in the shadows, discuss how much time you will have afterwards, if anyone thinks he may want time alone, if you will sleep together, whatever feels most comfortable. Do allow lots of time for snuggling and good feelings, and do check back in over the next several days so you both can talk about any aftershocks you may experience.
WHAT ABOUT THERAPY? Does deep psychological play make the top into a therapist? Emphatically not. Shadow play can be therapeutic, and indeed healing, but is very different from a therapeutic relationship. Ideally, your relationship with a professional therapist is an island where you can explore your inner truth with no consequences in the rest of your life. A BDSM scene is also an island, but with very different rules and boundaries.
If you find yourself digging up a profound conflict, maybe in the form of intense emotions, panicky feelings or flashbacks to old trauma, you might well want to seek therapy, whether or not you plan to play with this dynamic in S/M. When an old conflict opens up, there is opportunity for healing, and therapy will not only protect your partner from having to be your therapist, but will allow you to work on your issues at a time that is very likely to be profitable for you. In the Resource Guide, you will find a website that lists BDSM-friendly therapists and a couple of books that can help you find and talk to one.
SHADOWS AND REBIRTH
There is a Native American medicine story about Crow who dances between the worlds. At one time Crow became fascinated with her shadow. She could not leave it alone. She kept looking at it, scratching it, poking at it, pecking it, until her shadow woke up and came to life. Then Crow’s shadow ate her.
In this story, Crow gets chewed up to emerge transf
ormed, with the ability to travel between the everyday world and the spirit world. Many myths feature heroes and heroines who travel into the shadows, get destroyed and then reborn, transformed and enlightened by the experience. These stories warn that travel in the shadow is both dangerous and rewarding. We have written here what we know about how to travel as safely as possible in your precious darkness. If your intuition tells you that this kind of play does not feel safe or growthful to you, we suggest that you trust your inner wisdom and refrain. Perhaps later you may feel differently, and perhaps you will not. Perhaps another path will work better for your journey to self-knowledge.
Once again, all BDSM play is shadow play – when we play together, we find acceptance for emotions and behaviors that would be unacceptable outside scene space. And we believe that all play is potentially, and potently, healing and growthful. When we venture purposefully into our darkest shadows, we get to write our own script, determine the outcome, validate forbidden and rejected parts of ourselves, reclaim parts of ourselves that we had lost or buried, and find ways to grasp all the parts of ourselves, every single one, in a profound act of self-acceptance through which we may become whole.
The New Topping Book Page 17