The New Topping Book (5 page)

S/M folk sometimes describe people who play in that blurry area as “edge players.” But we think
all
players are edge players.

We’re all playing in a topsy-turvy world where pain equals pleasure, where fear equals arousal, where “no! no!” equals “YES!!!” Each of us may be, in our own way, trying to define the boundary where our bottoms’ enjoyment of “not wanting something” turns into
really
not wanting it, and trying to explore and, perhaps, alter that boundary. The player whose play seems so light that you wouldn’t even define it as S/M is an edge player when she is in her own way doing something that’s difficult or scary or painful, in an attempt to turn the unacceptable into the erotic: playing at his or her edge.

Janet once did a scene with a novice bottom:

He’d never played at all before, and so I set his first scene up to be
very
lightweight: I tied him to the bed, blindfolded him, and simply gave him mild, sensuous sensations with different textures – fur, leather, my fingernails and so on – all over his body. If you’d asked me beforehand, I’d have told you such a scene would not be much of a turn-on for me; I was doing it as a favor to him. But as I caressed him, he began to release some deep emotions: he giggled, he writhed, he sobbed… he was just one great big live nerve ending. And I found that I was getting
very
turned on, because while the sensations I was giving him weren’t much, they were eliciting such powerful and primal responses from him. He was getting stroked with a scrap of fur, but it was edge play for him – and that made it edge play for me too.

We deplore what Dossie has dubbed “the hierarchy of hip about heaviness.” In this form of craziness, a player whose forays into branding/bullwhips/whatever have been only moderately successful is deemed superior to one whose light spankings or erotic bondage sessions have left his or her partner glowing like a 200-watt bulb. To us, the only criterion for good play is: did everyone involved get what they wanted from it? If the answer to that question is “yes,” the session gets an automatic A-plus – whether it was a handspanking or a needle suspension.

We know one player whose mantra is “This is not a contest. This is not a contest” – repeated to himself every time he begins to try to exceed another player’s accomplishments. We think this is a good mantra for us all.

S
AFEWORDS
.
A safeword is a word agreed upon by the players in a scene that means stop, there’s a problem, we need to change something, something isn’t working, someone’s in trouble. We establish a code word because many of us become incoherent when we are very excited – we recommend safewords that are short and easy to pronounce when breathing hard. We use code because many scenes are based on a fantasy of nonconsent, and yelling “nononononono” may be part of the script.

Tops safeword too. Dossie tells the story of a time when she safeworded out of a major scene:

My lover had wanted me to brand her for a long time, and we had planned, collected information, researched everybody else’s experience and our own personal symbolism, and set up to do a ritual branding. We lived in the country, and had invited friends to come down to support this event, so there were witnesses. I had been practicing branding and felt somewhat insecure about my facility with the procedure, but spent the morning up in the ring of redwood trees over a very hot hibachi gamely branding slices of potato and turkey parts until I felt I could touch her with hot metal and not burn all the way through her. During this time, the houseguests were keeping her amused, and when we started up she was already entranced. Our ritual included a flogging to bring up the endorphins before the actual branding, but when I started to flog her it became apparent that something was wrong. Nothing I did seemed to be right for her, a very gentle stroke was too hard, she was not comfortable and neither was I. She wanted to go ahead anyway, but I decided that I could not brand her when I couldn’t make connection, and that there was no way that I was going to put a serious and permanent mark on her body when things were feeling unpleasant. So I safeworded, big bad brander that I am. I felt like an idiot. Here we had brought all these people together and I had chickened out. And my lover wasn’t happy about it, and it took awhile to bring her back down onto the planet from her tranced-out space – it was dire. I must have apologized forty or fifty times to our guests, who were very supportive and reassuring, bless their hearts. I reminded myself over and over, as I remind you now: it is possible, actually not very difficult, to have an experience of extreme public embarrassment, live through it, and be fine afterwards. Which we were. I now think the first time was a rehearsal, and perhaps we both needed to know that we could back out. About a month later, we got together with two friends and pulled the branding off without a hitch, and with much delight.

Whenever a player safewords, this is an occasion for mutual support. We understand that nobody safewords from a happy place, and that all of our egos feel frail and kind of runty when we need to back out of a scene. It is completely unethical to respond with scorn or ridicule to a person who has safeworded: S/M is not a competition, we are not playing against each other.

As tops, we have noticed that if we are having a good time and our bottom safewords, our initial feelings may not be happy. Whaddaya mean you don’t like that? I do all this work and you don’t appreciate it? I’m hot for being in control and you want me to stop? We have felt real anger and felt challenged in our top role… and, on a deeper level, we have felt put down, hurt and rejected. It is okay to have these feelings. It is not okay to act on them. Take three deep breaths and everybody start taking care of each other.

Sometimes bottoms get so deeply engaged in a scene that they fail to safeword, or forget, or so profoundly believe in the fantasy that it doesn’t occur to them: many of the techniques we play with, like interrogation, function in the real world to undermine volition. Dossie remembers a scene in which a top offered her a choice of something or other: “I felt very confused. Some distant part of me vaguely remembered having made choices, but the response from my state of consciousness at that time was, Choose? I am not a thing that chooses.” So then what is the top’s responsibility?

If a bottom does not safeword and you don’t pick up on what’s going on, and this
will
happen if you play long enough and well enough, there is no blame. However, it is still your responsibility to monitor for physical safety as best you can. As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms. To this end we check in regularly to make sure that things are going the way we think they are, and we constantly monitor the physical and emotional safety of our bottoms. If a bottom is beyond safewording, and you as the top feel unsure about how far you should go, it is your responsibility to slow down or stop the scene and get into communication with the bottom to make sure you have informed consent. If you have to bring the bottom back into reality to do this, please remember that you helped get them into that altered state in the first place, so presumably you can help get them back there again as soon as you are sure of what’s going on.

And just because someone safeworded doesn’t mean that the scene has to be over. There may be times when the problem that brought either of you to safeword is so overwhelming that carrying on doesn’t feel like the right thing right now – but most often we find that after we’ve dealt with whatever the difficulty is, we’re still terrifically turned on, with the added bonus of a shared intimacy.

W
HEN
Y
OU
I
TCH TO
G
O
F
URTHER
.
Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between “enough” and “too much,” between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we’re craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.

We will assume that you who are reading this book are not about to do any such thing: if you feel that you are in danger of actually harming someone, please seek help from a therapist or counselor right away. But when you’re feeling frustrated by partners who want to stop before you’re ready to, or who don’t want to play the way you want to, it’s easy to let the fantasies grow so strong that they begin to seem like realities. The good news is that, with patience, skill, mutual knowledge and trust, and sometimes a bit of compromise, there are usually ways to indulge those desires without harming, alienating or losing your partner.

We suggest that you spend a little time thinking objectively, if you can, about the fantasies that are driving your desire to push limits. In your fantasy, what is the turn-on? How can you tell, for example, that the bottom has been driven past limits? Is she begging, crying, screaming? Is there physical evidence – blood, urine, tears?

When you have a pretty clear picture of what that turn-on looks like to you, you get to the embarrassing part: describing it to your partner. You may find, to your surprise, that your bottom has been having similar fantasies, and needs only your permission to go into the headspace you’ve both been craving. (Begging for mercy, for example, is difficult for many bottoms, who may be worried that they will beg so effectively that you’ll actually stop. Knowing that you’re willing to keep going unless you hear a safeword can feel very freeing.) Or your bottom may be willing to play-act the fantasy in the way that turns you on – he may find that the role starts to seem very real and very arousing once he gives it a try.

We sometimes meet tops and bottoms who want to do scenes without safewords, reasoning that it is impossible to “really” push limits when the bottom can stop the scene anytime she wants to. A safeword is simply a code we use to communicate the status of consent. Responsible tops play consensually – the safeword is your safety net, to let you know that’s what you’re doing.

In our experience, the most common problem is the opposite one: bottoms who earnestly hang in there way beyond their limits and safeword too late rather than too soon. But remember – bottoms are there with you because they want to explore their limits, and they, not you, are the best judges of where those limits are. The safest and most growthful way to expand limits is with time, trust and practice: as partners play together and learn more about each other’s communications style and physical limitations, they tend to use encoded safewords less and less frequently. But even partners who have been together for years need safewords to signal the rare but critical situations where one partner or the other has a genuine physical or emotional emergency such as illness, injury, unexpected rage, age regression and the like.

I
F
Y
OU’RE
D
OING
I
T
, I
T’S
“R
EAL
”

Both of us cringe, and have been known to get a bit snappish, when we hear phrases that start with “real” or “true” – “real submissive,” “true Master” and so on. When you hear someone say one of those phrases, we suggest you mentally translate them into what they really mean – “someone who plays in a way I approve of.” Usually, the next thing we hear is that so-and-so is not a “real” top or not “truly” submissive. Ick.

Often, people who dismiss others as not being “real” are expressing scorn for limits which are both real and realistic, and which exist (acknowledged or unacknowledged) in all safe play. When you set yourself up an unattainable ideal role, and subtract points from your estimation of your friends and yourself whenever anyone falls short of that ideal, we think you are setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment.

The player who does a light session twice a year is doing something extremely “real” – she is giving away or taking as much power as feels safe, healthy and sexy to him or her. So is the most extreme 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week owner and slave couple.

S/M is about contradiction, about paradox. A bottom who is (or pretends to be) without desires, fantasies or power is an unsafe and unhealthy bottom. A top who is (or pretends to be) without vulnerability, compromise or connection is an unsafe and unhealthy top.

If you can’t understand these paradoxes – the ways in which symbolic powerlessness can empower and symbolic cruelty can sensitize – please sit down and think them through carefully. We hope that when you’re through thinking, you’ll realize how destructive concepts like “real dominant” and “true slave” can be, and discover the far greater joys that lie in play in which everybody’s needs and wants are acknowledged, honored and enjoyed.

interlude 1

A sensation scene at a party, played by Janet and a female friend.

B. and I are close friends, but had played together before only once, in a very limited way; this would be our first full-on scene together. We are both het-identified bi women, both experienced players, and while we’re both switches, she is more comfortable in the bottom role. I knew from our discussions ahead of time that she enjoyed flagellation of all kinds, particularly on her butt, and that she was fond of play piercing and of both vaginal and anal penetration. While she is comfortable with dominant/submissive roleplay, she doesn’t need it to enjoy straight sensation play; since it isn’t a preference of mine, we decided to pass on any kind of mental control and simply go for the “high” of strong sensation. We agreed on safewords and were ready to go.