The New Topping Book
Read The New Topping Book Online
Authors: Dossie Easton,Janet W. Hardy
© 2003 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, P.O. Box 5280, Eugene, OR 97405,
www.greenerypress.com
.
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.
C
ONTENTS
2. What
Is
It About Topping, Anyway?
4. Rights and Responsibilities
5. How Do You Learn To Do This Stuff?
10. And If It Doesn’t Go the Way You Planned?
16. S/M Spirituality: From the Top
17. The Light That Shines In the Darkness
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our deepest thanks go to the following wonderful people, who have bottomed to us, topped us, given us wonderful ideas and just plain been our friends:
| Akasha | Goddess Lakshimi |
| Mic Bergen Tom B. | Ruth Marks Master Max |
| Bill Brent | Amy Marie Meek |
| Kaye Buckley | Midori |
| Lady Cassandra | Mo |
| BC Cliver | Paul Romano |
| Derek | Snow White |
| Francesca Guido | Jay Wiseman |
| Irwin Kane | Joi Wolfwomyn |
foreword
R
E
-V
ISIONING
W
elcome to
The New Topping Book
. About ten years ago, we published a small volume called
The Bottoming Book
, which took the revolutionary stance that bottoming was as high an art as topping and that skilled and ethical bottoms were integral to hot play. No sooner had it come out than we started hearing from tops who wanted to know when we were going to do the same thing for topping. Hence
The Topping Book,
originally published in 1994.
But in the last eight years we’ve seen huge and important changes in BDSM culture (including the popularization of the very word BDSM!). Our communities have grown tremendously – largely due to the Internet, which was in its toddlerhood at our last writing – and become much more visible. And we, your authors, are proud to have been part of this evolution. So:
The New Topping Book
.
W
HAT’S
C
HANGED?
As we wrote in
The New Bottoming Book:
S/M culture has massively emerged from the closet. There are dozens of books, endless information on the Internet, national and international conferences publicly held in major hotels, support groups everywhere – we are no longer the ghettoized subculture that we used to be. More people are connecting to S/M, finding others like themselves, and realizing that they are very much not alone with their kinky fantasies.
T
HE
I
NTERNET
.
The ’Net has become a major player in the BDSM scene. Along with providing lots of information about kink and connection to like-minded people, the Internet is also exerting a major influence on the content of BDSM. Many things can be done in virtual play that would be difficult to manifest in reality: for instance, we know individuals who are engaged in ownership relationships with people they have never met in person. And so new ways of playing are being devised, and participants are engaging in ever deeper explorations of the psychological aspects of S/M, including extensive dialogue about how our fantasies can inform us about ourselves. The challenge of interacting with people all over the world, people that you’ve never seen face to face, has created a whole universe of possibilities for relationships, interactions and new knowledge. We’ll discuss the ’Net and its ramifications at much greater length later in this book
D&S.
Over the last ten years, we have also seen rapid growth and evolution of the dominance and submission aspect of BDSM, with extensive discussion of how the relationship dynamic between two or more persons can be expanded, intensified and eroticized by a conscious and consensual shift in the workings of power and control. We’ve included a lot more information about D&S in its various forms in this book.
M
ORE OF
U
S
.
Meanwhile, as the scene has become more accessible, more and more new people are joining. This growth in population has made its own changes to the scene, and there is increased market for products and services, which offers much more support for the teachers, artists and craftspeople of our community.
For us this growth has offered an expanded opportunity in the form of a much wider audience for our writing. When we wrote the initial
Bottoming Book
, publishing in this area was so economically constrained that we had to keep the book under 120 pages because if it got bigger than that we couldn’t afford to print it. How’s that for basic? We are proud to announce that our books are now widely distributed, our publisher well established, and we can afford to speak our minds at whatever length we choose.
L
ANGUAGE
.
One thing we learned in writing and selling
The Bottoming Book
and
The Topping Book
was that many potential readers were overlooking the books, feeling that the terms “dominant” and “submissive” were a closer fit for their experience of BDSM. We certainly never intended that, nor do we think it appropriate. Semantics vary widely throughout the kinky world, from one region to the next, one sexual orientation to the next, one playstyle to the next. The way we learned the terms when we first came out into this wonderful and varied world, “top” is an umbrella term that includes people who like to play on the giving end of sensation and pain, bondage, control and discipline and all the other activities that make up the universe of BDSM. And “bottom,” of course, is the umbrella term for all those who like to be the lucky recipients of such attention. Whether you consider yourself a master or mistress, an owner or trainer, a dominant, a sadist, a daddy or mommy, or any other terminology that fits your community and your life, you’ll find something for you in this book.
Indeed, as more and more people want to talk about kink both in the cyber- and real worlds, we are constantly evolving new language and terminology to describe our experiences. And do we all agree on what these new terms mean? Of course not! A definition can be visualized as a way to make a fence around a word so that we can clearly distinguish what is inside and what is outside the meaning of the word. This works great for science and mathematics, but can be a problem when we are describing our physical, sexual and emotional experience – especially the experience between two or more of us. (See? We can’t even assume that a relationship means only two people.)
So our approach to language in this book is to assume inclusive rather than exclusive meanings for all the words we use. Furthermore, we acknowledge more than two genders, and also that many of us explore more than one sense of gender. Common language usage has very few ways to denote the full range of gender expression. In the first edition of
Topping Book
we wrote “s/he” in an attempt to include everybody. In our later books, we alternated using he or she, mostly by paragraphs, which seemed to read more smoothly and provide interesting opportunities to challenge gender stereotyping, so we have rearranged this edition accordingly.
On another linguistic front, here is much public discussion and dissent about what to call what we do. Variously our activities have been described as: BDSM, perversion, sadomasochism, S/M, dominance and submission, D/S, altsex, bondage and discipline, B/D, leathersex, kink, erotic power exchange, fetishism, wiitwd (what it is that we do), powerplay, shadowplay, topping and bottoming, sex magic and radical perversion. Similarly, the people who do these things are known as: perverts, tops, bottoms, masters, mistresses, slaves, dominants, submissives, daddies, mommies, pitchers, catchers, boys, bois, girls, babies, pets, ponies, puppies, sissies, leatherpeople, players and more.