Topping From the Bottom or From Beneath You It Devours

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Topping from the bottom is condemned hard all over the place. Asshat mandoms and bimbosubs, I’m sure, riff on it in their own annoying ways. But they interest me only up to a point. (that point is usually ‘why don’t I get porn like that? *killstabkill*)

Most of the emails dominant women receive from submissive men – or at least the ones that are more that one line long – in amongst all the listing of their boring fetishes and the promise of total submission (total submission that can only be achieved by indulging these boring fetishes) will often be the proclamation ‘I never top from the bottom, ever.’ My first response is of course yes you fucking do, and the second would be that bearing in mind that most dominant women actively loathe the way submissive men treat them, and particularly the way they email them online, topping from the bottom, really, the least of our concerns.

Also, it’s a dead giveaway that you have learned everything about approaching dom women from prodom websites. Because prodoms tend to trot out the line ‘I never tolerate topping from the bottom’ all the jolly time.

They say this because they are asshats trying to create a smokescreen around the fact they are service providers.

Because kinking about sometimes involves the kind of paradoxes that make it seem less like a sexuality and more like a philosophical thought experiment - and no one falls down the paradox crack as often as the pro. Which is why the pros that always seems the sanest and most tolerable are the ones that talk happily and proudly about providing a great service to facilitate clients fantasies, rather than the ones who try and make out they are queens of the lair of the bitch and you’re just paying her to have her do whatever she would be doing anyway and ‘I believe in female supremacy and the total mastery by women of the male species.’

Ick.

Also, male ‘species’? Are they a different *species*? Would that make procreation impossible? Isn’t that one way of defining ‘species’. Okay, fine, it could just be an innocent mistake (although making dumb mistakes while proclaiming your half-baked asshat gender superiority – not a good look) but, chanow, if you are going to re-write language with a precision syntax that caps up ‘woman’ and ’she’ for no reason (other than the half-baked asshattery ones) of course you might extend the same precision to your fucking word usage, milady.

But, topping from the bottom and - more importantly – me. I am very straightforward. Sexually, I mean. Other parts of my psyche are a raving nightmare, but this is of course how it should be for an artistic genius such as me: queen of the dominoes, prophet of femdom.

But, yes, sexually, easy fucking peasy. Once you get past the weirdness of it, it all makes perfect sense. I also have it all written down in handy overly thoroughly cross-referenced blog form.

I like men suffering for me. I like pretending I control other people for sex. I like making and faking a status difference between me and the person in the room I find most attractive. I like climbing onto Jack’s lap and telling him he is ‘filthy’ and ‘just for sex’.

Because I am so straightforward, I am therefore easy to manipulate. If you know what a person most wants – and it’s something you can supply - you can control them. Most of my partners have been able to control me pretty easily, if they’d’ve wanted to.

One time X said to me, ‘If you let me wear my leather skirt I won’t have a safe word.’

Guh!

But that’s very obvious controlling. In fact, the truth is, in any relationship where both people love and care about each other one can manipulate the other one pretty easily.

If you love someone you want their attention, you want to make them happy, you want them to enjoy having sex with you.

The whole vanilla dom conversion project idea rests on these facts (rather than – as it would like to think – on the fact that all women are secretly dominant)

These facts are why women so often give it a go when presented with their partner’s submissive nature. This is why the kink world is full of women who are dominant in that way that seems to suggest that it doesn’t really drive them and that they wouldn’t carry on wanting it if their relationship changed. There’s a lot of that about.

I am super-sceptical of the whole making women into doms thing. That’s not how paraphillias work. That’s not how sexuality works. If you believe you can change people’s sexualities by talking at them you better also believe that people can be ‘made gay’. (Or made straight, even.)

But the whole making women into doms thing seems to be so rife that the other day I read a thing online about female dominance that listed the various stages a woman goes through when doing the dominance and calmly pointed out that after a woman begins dominating a man she may discover she likes it. *After*? Why the fuck does she do it if she doesn’t know she likes it.

Well, in those cases, because she was manipulated.

(Various disclaimers apply here – a subset of women will be dominant but squishing it because of not wanting to be aligned with asshats. And some will like it a bit because there have surely been enough psychology experiments to say that anyone can get freaky kicks out of sadism and control of another person – that’s not the same as being wired like me, though.)

Manipulating the people you love, is , yuh-huh, bad. But everyone does it. And I’m poly which means every aspect of my sexay relationships are filleted with a scalpel into microfiche and blown up a zillion times and projected on the ceiling and then we all take a PhD in communication every night. And even then.

Manipulating your partner happens in all relationships. Not just d/s ones. There is nothing to gain by giving it a special name when the sub does it to the dom. And the really tricky thing here is that horrid manipulating is on a continuum that has at the other end sheer communication (yep – that thing I have a PhD in)

So pronouncements against topping from the bottom are dangerous/stupid/boring because they can be a pronouncements against communication. And - because it’s all about negotiation - therefore pronouncements against how this stuff actually works in reality. Of course the masturbatory stuff is different. Course in that she strides in and just sets about weaving him into a fabric of pain with no account taken as to whether he is even interested in that.

But in real life there are far more factors to contend with. Trust me. I know. I live there

Real d/s couples are ones where he has ideas too. Where the one who likes to be spanked is trigger-happy on ebay looking for pervertables. Where there is mutual truth, encouragement, endorsement.

Real d/s couples are the ones feeling guilty about the fact they allow all this topping from the bottom (i.e. talking about stuff)

And by ‘real’ here, I don’t mean ‘better’ I just mean actually existing.

This stuff is hard. Who doesn’t need feedback?

Look, there isn’t really topping from the bottom. There is communication, which is good and there is unreasonable manipulation of the other person which is always bad. There is no world in which the bottom has no say ever – except in fantasies (- unless that is something you’ve both agreed, in which case *that* is them having their say – and, god, that really is *demanding* quite a lot more than a guy who pushes for nipple clamps once in a while.)

Topping from the bottom is just talking. And, you know, the people I have sex with are smart and funny. I like to know what they think. I like their ideas.

Maybe my defence of the entire concept of topping from the bottom rests in my strong suspicion that I bottom from the top as much as I can. I am lazy enough to be a submissive any day. There’s a lot I don’t like about the idea (boredom, cramp, not being able to scratch, asshat mandoms) but, my god, I do like the lying down not moving aspects. And the not deciding aspects.

(This is where submissives come along and say, huh, Beej, submission is so not like that.

In fact, this is where Jack comes along and says huh, Beej, submission with you is *so* not like that. There is very little lying down involved – at least on my part

And I’d say, what about when we watched Torchwood?

And Jack’d say, well, I was going to say that wasn’t submission, but really that was probably the worst thing you have ever made me do.

(Jack is out tonight being polyamorous – so I am resorting to having imaginary conversations with him on my blog.))

I’ve said it before. I am silly, scared and shy. Just because male sacrifice and suffering is hot for me, just because controlling another person is hot to me, doesn’t mean I have complete self-confidence about those things, or doing them, or that the things I want to do will even work and be sexy. Most of the tropes of femdom do nothing for me – in fact most of them leave me vomiting bloody bile – so I’m out on my own. I forging a whole new form of sex. (Oh shut *up* - I am a bit.)

That’s why – to me – anyone who uses the phrase ‘Topping from the bottom will not be tolerated. Ever.’ Can have a stupid biscuit and a badge that says asshat. Because that’s like saying ‘No one tells me what to do.’ And that’s the kind of thing people say on TV before they make it obvious that someone should.

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