The New Topping Book Read online

  © 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.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: Re-Visioning

  1. Hello Again!

  2. What Is It About Topping, Anyway?

  3. What Do Tops Do?

  interlude 1

  4. Rights and Responsibilities

  5. How Do You Learn To Do This Stuff?

  interlude 2

  6. Soaring Higher

  7. BDSM Ethics

  8. On Your Mark… Get Set…

  interlude 3

  9. Go!

  10. And If It Doesn’t Go the Way You Planned?

  11. Toys for Tops

  interlude 4

  12. Finding Others

  13. Special Cases

  14. Full-Time D/S

  15. Shadow Play: Darkside S/M

  16. S/M Spirituality: From the Top

  17. The Light That Shines In the Darkness

  Resource Guide

  Poem: Scream

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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

  RE-VISIONING

  Welcome 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.

  WHAT’S CHANGED?

  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.

  THE INTERNET. 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.

  MORE OF US. 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.

  LANGUAGE. 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.

  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.

  THE INTERLUDES. 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.

  WE’VE CHANGED TOO. 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

  HELLO AGAIN!

  We 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.

  YES, 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.

  WHY WE’RE WRITING THIS. 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.

  THIS IS NOT A TECHNICAL MANUAL. 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.

  HOW WE VIEW 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.”

  YES, BUT WHAT IS IT? 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.