The New Topping Book (2 page)

All these words have slightly different meanings, and you will definitely meet people who choose one of these terms and not the others because that is what best describes their desire. We, however, enjoy all of these aspects of our play, and would be very distressed to have to choose only one category. Thus, as we see it, pigeonholing limits our experience, and we are explorative girls who always want more. So in this edition, we will use all of these terms to describe the whole world of S/M play, except when we are focusing on one particular aspect of play, and we will use these terms, as we do the gender pronouns, interchangeably throughout the text.

T
HE
I
NTERLUDES.
Since no amount of abstract instruction carries the same weight as the stuff that happens in the real world, throughout this book we’ve included a few stories of wonderful scenes we’ve done, watched or heard about, just to give you an idea of the wide range of activities that can be included under the umbrella term “topping.”

Please don’t take these scenes as blueprints, or even as ideals of “perfect” scenes. They’re just representative of a few different playstyles, ways of building energy and connecting and having hot sexy fun together.

W
E’VE
C
HANGED
T
OO.
The two of us have matured, which we hope would happen for any of you in ten years. Our children are no longer children, our careers have ripened, our bodies have aged.

In fact, one of us has changed so much that even her name has changed. The one of us who wrote the first
Topping Book
as “Catherine A. Liszt” did so under a pseudonym, because at the time she had minor children whose boundaries she wanted to protect. Now that her children have grown to adulthood, “Catherine” is now writing and publishing under her real name, Janet W. Hardy.

And we know more than we used to. So the final reason to make a new edition of
The Topping Book
is to share with you everything new that we have learned in the last nine years about our beloved world of BDSM.

1

H
ELLO
A
GAIN
!

W
e love tops.

We love tops who are vicious and nasty and turn their bottoms into cringing mounds of adoring submission. We love tops who are nurturing and sweet while they inflict the most amazing agonies. We love tops whose aura of command is so straightforward and matter-of-fact that their bottoms can completely forget, for a little while, that the world is a complicated place.

We love top daddies and top mommies, top nurses and top interrogators, sweetheart sadists and control queens, nurturing dominants and mean mistresses, nasty kids and mad scientists.

We love tops so much that we’re writing a book to help make sure there are more good ones: tops who glow with the pure white light of control, power, intimacy and love; tops who are skilled at their craft and passionate about their art; tops who pour themselves into their bottoms, beat well, and create a dish as fiery as curry or as sweet as pie.

Y
ES
,
IT’S US AGAIN
. Hello. We’re Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. Some of you met us in our earlier books,
The New Bottoming Book, The Ethical Slut
and
When Someone You Love Is Kinky.

Dossie is a three-decade veteran of S/M play who identifies as a dyke queer bottom, but who tops beautifully: as of this writing, Janet has the cane marks to prove it. She works as a therapist in San Francisco. A poet, teacher and performer, Dossie was one of the first members of the Society of Janus in San Francisco, and has been a leader in the S/M spirituality community.

Janet started doing S/M about 15 years ago, exclusively as a heterosexual top. Today, she identifies as a bisexual switch, playing both as a top and as a bottom, and with both men and women. Under her pen name “Lady Green,” she wrote several how-to manuals for beginning players and has published many articles on S/M practice and philosophy.

Both of us have spoken and taught, individually and together, at dozens if not hundreds of conferences, gatherings and workshops.

W
HY
W
E’RE
W
RITING
T
HIS
. In
The New Bottoming Book,
we did our best to explain what makes people decide to try bottoming in a BDSM interaction, and the attitudes and techniques that make up a brilliant bottom. We looked at matters of the body, the emotions, the intuition and the spirit.

In this book we will do the same for tops. In some ways, we expect this to be a trickier task. While outsiders often assume that any player in his right mind would be a top – “Wow, you mean people will do anything you want them to? Cool!” – the reality is that the joys of topping are often more abstract than those of bottoming, and that its responsibilities and burdens are great.
The New Bottoming Book
was, as we wrote in the introduction, “an unabashedly bottom-centrist book.” We expected howls of protest from tops over our insistence that bottoms are powerful, beautiful and irreplaceable… and we heard back from a whole bunch of tops saying “Well, it’s about
time
.”

So
The New Topping Book
will be a
top
-centrist book. While we will, of course, expect responsible behavior from all you tops and wannabe-tops who are reading this, we honor and applaud your willingness to venture out on the thin, scary ice of taking control of another’s sensations, emotions and spirit. In this book, we’ll encourage you to insist on being recognized for your humanness as well as for your toppiness, to demand the nurturance and support you deserve, and to find ways to get your sexual needs met. We’ll do our best to hold your hand during the scary parts of your top journey, and to wave an encouraging bye-bye as you venture out into that wide, welcoming world of eager bottoms.

T
HIS
I
S
N
OT A
T
ECHNICAL
M
ANUAL
. We’re not going to spend a lot of time in this book teaching you bondage knots or clamp placement or the technical nuts and bolts of topping. We think there are several other good books out there that teach such things, and we’ve listed them in our Resource Guide. Please read at least one of them before you play.

H
OW
W
E
V
IEW
BDSM

If you turned to this section hoping to find the ultimate incontestable answer to the question “What is BDSM?” we’re afraid we’re going to disappoint you. We don’t know, either.

We do believe that consensual, ethical kink has a valid place on the continuum of human sexual behavior – that it’s not an expression of pathology. We also do not see S/M players as a distinct sexual minority, somehow different from other folk; we think S/M may be further along one road of sexual exploration, but that many if not most people play with some forms of S/M energy.

S/M is sex that involves all of our faculties: minds and bodies, imagination and intellect, hearts and souls. To those who call what we do “unnatural,” we like to point out that we do what comes naturally: nature gave us opposable thumbs, so we use tools.

As we said in
The New Bottoming Book
: “S/M is play, theater, communication, intimacy, sexuality. It combines the child’s urge for make-believe with the adult’s ability to take responsibility and the adult’s privilege of sexual reward. S/M at its best represents a remarkable convergence of civilized agreements and primitive urges. We believe it to be a very high achievement of the human body, mind and spirit.”

Y
ES
, BUT W
HAT
I
S
I
T
?
We argued for hours as we worked on this book, and we weren’t able to come up with a definition that we thought accurately encompassed all of what we know as BDSM. Here, though, are some of the definitions we and our friends use and like.

A lot of folks use the phrase “consensual power exchange” to define S/M. We’re not entirely happy with this phrase – we think using the word “power,” that so often means nonconsensual force and coercion, can be misleading. In fact, what we do in S/M is that we
act as though
we were giving up or taking real-world power, while retaining the ability to keep as much power as we need to feel safe, or to take no more than we feel OK about having.

Another way of looking at BDSM – which unfortunately has many of the same problems – is to call it “negotiated codependence,” in which we can enjoy the pleasures of nurturance and control without harming ourselves or our bottoms.

Janet’s working definition of what we do is:

An activity in which the participants eroticize sensations or emotions that would be unpleasant in a non-erotic context.

We’ve heard some objections to the word “eroticize” in this definition – not everybody who does S/M connects their activities to genital sexuality. But we prefer to use the word “erotic” to refer to a wide spectrum of emotions and sensations that are arousing, awakening, enlightening and stimulating – whether or not they make your dick hard or your pussy wet.

Our friend Mic says:

S/M is what happens when the top takes more than the bottom offers, but less than the bottom is willing to give
.

We think that this thought does a nice job of expressing the tension that often happens in good S/M – the “oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don’t-stop” energy that we all know and love.

Another good thought we’ve heard is:

S/M takes place when the top trades his or her energy for the bottom’s armor.

All these definitions convey good information, but none of them seems to us adequate or comprehensive.

One thing we
do
know is that BDSM play is completely and qualitatively different from abuse. What we do bears the same relationship to abuse that consensual sex does to rape: a photograph of lovemaking might look exactly like a photo of a rape, but what is going on in the hearts and minds of the participants is entirely different. Hence, we say:

In S/M, the participants have one another’s wellbeing as their paramount goal.

Some folks get confused because the fantasies they use to get turned on are not about consensual play. (Ours certainly aren’t!) If you feel disturbed by this seeming contradiction, let us remind you: everyone in your fantasy exists only inside your head. Since they are all aspects of yourself, they have all given their consent to be there. One of the characteristics that defines safe play is a recognition of the boundaries between our fantasies and our realities. A lot of this book will be devoted to helping clarify those boundaries.

In general, though, we’d say that if it feels like S/M to you, then it’s probably S/M – or at least something close enough that you can learn more about it by reading on.

H
OW
D
O
Y
OU
K
NOW
YOU’RE A T
OP
?

Many tops remember having toppy fantasies for as long as they can remember anything. It’s not uncommon for a top to remember talking neighborhood kids into playing cops-and-robbers with lots of bondage, or teacher-and-student with lots of spanking. On the other hand, some people have their first top fantasies at puberty and some during young adulthood. Some excellent tops don’t remember ever having had a top fantasy until a partner talked them into trying a light scene – and a whole new world opened up to them.

These fantasies may have caused the top lots of pain and worry. One top of our acquaintance recalls having his first bondage fantasy in the late ’60s, shortly after the Tate/LaBianca murders – and spending anxious months worrying that he was turning into a mass murderer.

Janet remembers:

I can remember having top fantasies since very early childhood, but I was well into my twenties before I recognized that these diverting thoughts – which were obsessing me to the point of making it difficult for me to function in the real world – were actually sexual in nature. And once I figured that out, it took me even longer to grasp that these marvelous, dirty, nonconsensual stories didn’t have to stay fantasies, that there were people out there who would be interested in acting them out consensually with me.

So the easiest way to know if you’re a top is to take a hard look at your fantasies. Being a dominant person in real life doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a top – many people who are hard-driving type As prefer to bottom. Nor does being a bit quiet and withdrawn in real life mean that you’ll turn into Attila the Hun in scene.

On the other hand, if the idea of giving direction, taking control, inflicting strong sensation sends you into a panic, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re
not
a top. Even the most experienced tops suffer from what performers call “flop sweat.” The question is: while you’re jittering at the very thought of topping, is your dick getting hard or your pussy getting wet?