The New Topping Book (23 page)

It’s not a bad idea to include in your contract, if you have one, some provisions for how often play will happen in the relationship – and then stick to them. Obviously, we all go through periods when we’re feeling sick, depressed or overworked, and it’s reasonable to allow yourself some downtime in your contract. But if for some reason you’re not feeling like playing at all, ask yourself why: are your needs not being adequately met? Is there something you’re missing that your play should be providing and isn’t? Or is something missing that can’t be taken care of in play, that needs to be addressed by you and your partner dealing with each other as equals? If you’re suppressing anger, frustration, sadness or other difficult emotions, it’s unlikely that you’ll be up for frequent or hot play.

It can be difficult to view your submissive with the thrill of domly lust you felt when you first met him; after all, may of us love novelty. But lifestyle couples can benefit by the same advice often given to vanilla couples: treat each other the way you did when your relationship was new and passionate. When you’re going to spend time with your submissive, be as present for him as you can: take time to prepare yourself physically and mentally so that you’re as sexy and dominant as you know how to be. Touch each other often. Remember the things that made you think he was so hot in the first place. Think of new ways to express your feelings toward him, and that he can express his feelings toward you – after all, one of the perks of being a dominant is that you can demand what you want.

We observe that people who do well at lifestyle relationships usually have very clear boundaries, even if they don’t call them that, and can readily describe how they know when they are in and out of role, or which roles, or how deeply. They tend to be good at signals, and slide in and out of role with facility. They have respect for everybody’s roles, submissives and dominants alike, and take pride in playing their part well. The reward is the opportunity to delve into yourself with tremendous intensity and manifest your dominant persona in a very complete way – to be truly the master or mistress of your own domain.

15

S
HADOW
P
LAY
: D
ARKSIDE
S/M

W
HAT
I
S
I
T
?
Shadow play is our name for scenes that delve into deep psychological territory. It is our understanding that all BDSM involves explorations of parts of ourselves that we may have previously been aware of only in deep shadow. As you learn your emotional limits, you may find yourself wanting to push those limits by deliberately setting up an scene to travel in forbidden territory. Such scenes may involve emotions like rage or misery that can cause dysfunction if allowed to run free in our real lives. Adopting parent/child roles is often deep play, as is playing out personal trauma like child abuse, molestation or rape. Some players may use a scene to explore historical social oppression, like slavery, witch-burnings, the Inquisition or the Holocaust.

Dossie had a powerful experience of reclaiming a piece of her history after the scene with Janet that we told you about before, where Dossie was a poor waif in a Victorian workhouse. She recalls:

Janet had cleverly gotten around my limit about playing with punishment by caning me “to show you what would happen if you ever did do something you shouldn’t.” My role required nothing of me but to whimper and be pathetic for about three hours, a feeling I found to be curiously luxurious. Wondering about this the next day brought to mind a time in my life when I really was pathetic – in my early twenties I had to leave a violent partner when I was pregnant, with just about no resources. I used to hang out at this ecumenical ministry in the Haight because they gave me free yogurt, which for a few weeks was my primary source of protein. I’m sure I looked pretty pathetic to them, but that’s not how I felt. I was furious at myself, blaming myself for having gotten into this situation in the first place, and I was ferociously determined to be strong enough to pull my life back together and raise my baby, which I did. I couldn’t afford to be pathetic back then. It took an S/M scene 25 years later to bring me to compassion for my younger self and become able to empathize with how pathetic my situation really was. The scene gave me permission to give myself comfort, which I found very healing. Now when I remember that time in my life I no longer feel ashamed.

The Shadow.
Our experience in the aftermath of that scene, which we played while we were writing this book, also led us to coalesce a theory about how S/M works as a healthy drive toward healing and integrity. Carl Jung envisioned the human psyche kind of like this diagram, only more dynamic, of course. The
Conscious
mind is what we are familiar with: me at my computer, you holding this book. The
Preconscious
is about what we are only partly, or perhaps occasionally aware of, like dreams, or fantasies, or long-ago fuzzy memories – images and ideas that come and go like the tide. The
Unconscious
mind is that reservoir of instincts, archetypes, primal process that shows up in our dreams and desires, but of which we are only indirectly aware. And Jung placed the spiritual sense, which he thought of as the
Collective Unconscious
, at the very bottom of that ocean.

He also posited a realm of the mind, sometimes conscious, often not, called the
Shadow
, drawn in this diagram like an iceberg floating on the sea. We all know that the part of the iceberg that we can see is only the smallest part. Jung thought the function of the Shadow was to shut away thoughts, memories and feelings that we had forbidden to consciousness for one reason or another. This forbidding happens not only in our individual histories, but in our family’s notion of what is and is not okay to discuss or acknowledge, and in our social and cultural paradigms of the same. An example for many of us would be the taboo against talking about sex, or even being aware of sexual energy except under very restricted conditions.

Individually, we may banish memories of trauma, embarrassment, fear, awareness of the less acceptable parts of ourselves – needy, yearning, pushy, cruel. We may banish desires we have been taught are inappropriate. And we may banish feelings that have been so scary, or responded to in such a negative fashion, that we decided, perhaps when we were too small to be making adult sense, that we must never feel that particular way again. Forbidden emotions sent to the deep freeze commonly include pathos, anger, shame, terror, villainy and victimhood. Starting to sound familiar?

So our thesis is that it just might be that our kinky desires, the drives that lead us to enact our dark and dangerous fairy tales, may very well be the longing to reunite with a part of ourselves that we have lost in the Shadow. Perhaps we yearn to bring that part back into consciousness, in the validating presence of another who can mirror us, and in this terrible state find us desirable. As we eroticize these tales from our own deepest personal mythology, we inject our self-rejection with the healing energy of the life force, with Eros, and confirm our newly enlarged sense of self with the affirmation of orgasm. As we welcome back our own lost parts, we become more whole – increase our integrity – with the healing power of S/M.

P
LAYING
I
N THE
S
HADOW
.
The charge that each of us as individuals may feel about a particular scenario is what makes it deep. Many of us play rape scenes, and more than a few of us have actually been raped, so for some a rape scene is very deep play, searching for understanding, catharsis, healing or resolution.

Play can be deep for the top or the bottom or both. If we reenact a scene of abuse, it is not only the bottom who may be playing deep. Survivors of child abuse frequently carry with them what they learned from the adults, engraved into their psyches as the internalized abuser. Tops may experience profound emotion in playing the role of molesting bully or punitive parent.

People are attracted to playing in their shadows because it is very hot, intriguing, sexy. Please don’t think that we are robots doomed to reenact the dysfunctions of our childhoods over and over without release, but rather that we seek out opportunities to struggle with these conflicts so that we have a chance to make the story come out differently.

If we let these desires drive us without our awareness, they may manifest in destructive ways. This is why we may repeatedly pick the partner who makes us the craziest. Dossie used to express this desire by hunting down rough trade in the streets of New York (she found lots of it, too); Janet used to have such a profound need to be needed that she drove herself and her partners crazy by insisting that they need her even when they didn’t. We find it a lot safer and more constructive to play out our old tapes with full awareness, within the boundaries of a scene. We can relive our old dramas to our heart’s content, only this time we control the outcome. In this lies empowerment, with great potential for healing and transformation.

P
LAYING
W
ITH
C
ULTURAL
T
RAUMA

Some of us like to play with cultural trauma, take the scripts for our psychodrama from the horrors of humanity’s more brutal histories: war, genocide, torture, enslavement. The Holocaust, African slavery, the Spanish Inquisition, the rape of Nanking. These scenes are more than merely hot. They can be a constructive way of dealing with a history of oppression of our ancestors, our class, our race – or, for that matter, a history of being the oppressor. More dirt to dig up from the Shadow and plow into fertilizer for new roses.

Playing with cultural themes is highly controversial. Many people, including many S/M players, are of the opinion that no one should play with these ugly realities. Some see such play as insulting, or belittling to their serious struggle to heal from historical oppression and to refuse to be victimized in the present. History offers us many emotional minefields, and a lot of us don’t want to have our buttons pushed, because we don’t want that particular kind of overwhelming emotional pain happening in our sexual sanctuary.

Playing with the horrors of history brings up all our current struggles with racism, sexism, classism and so on. Bringing historical play into the S/M arena also challenges the secrecy and mistrust that oppressed people use, for good reasons, to protect themselves in potentially hostile social environments – which means letting go, for the sake of the scene, of some very crucial defenses. For those of us dealing with racism and the history of slavery in the United States, the issues of submission and dominance are especially loaded.

Everybody has a right to protect their feelings. If you don’t want to enter into playing with cultural trauma, we support you in that choice. And if you do want to travel in that difficult territory, we support you too.

W
HAT
I
S
THE
A
TTRACTION
?
The horrors of history comprise our cultural Shadow, and many of us are drawn to it just as we’re drawn to our individual and family Shadows – like finding yourself sucking on an aching tooth. The motivations might be something we discover in our fantasies, or out of curiosity – what might it be like to go there on purpose, how would it come out? Or the sense that there’s something in that Shadow that we need to know, and a willingness to deal with the consequences. Maybe we want to face our fears, get pushed into seeing, find our power, transform pain into wisdom. Maybe that sexual draw represents the need to bring that terrible history into consciousness, in clear focus, to end repression and start healing.

F
ROM THE
B
OTTOM
.
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.