The New Bottoming Book (13 page)

Piercings, cuttings and brands can be temporary or permanent - some people play with tattoo needles with no ink

- but It's important to remember that you can't really predict how your body will heal, so don't count on a shallow cutting or temporary piercing disappearing without a scar. Safety is a major consideration in any form of play that opens the skin, so please do not attempt this at home without taking the time and trouble to learn about how to do it right. It's best to take a workshop or consult with one of the professionals in your area to find out if your plan is feasible and safe. We are not going to tell you how to do body modification scenes in this book because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and there is a lot to know before you attempt a body modification. If you want a permanent piercing or scarification to come out well, consult a pro.

Playing with cutting might involve a shallow decorative cut, no deeper than a cat scratch, done for the experience itself and not intended to leave a permanent mark. Play piercing involves placing needles through the skin (not deeper). Thread or string can be laced around the needles to hang weights on, or to tie the needles together so the piercings get pulled every time you forget to hold still. A white paraffin candle can be used to dribble hot wax on the needles, which warms them up under the skin until the sensation is barely tolerable - oh, my!

Very elaborate play piercing scenes can be done with lots of needles and strings attached to some sort of frame that winds up being a form of sculpture. Bottoms will enjoy the sensation of being able to pull on the needles by pulling against the strings; you'll be surprised by how hard you can pull with no damage. A steady pressure can

feel very good, and to this end small weights are sometimes hung from play piercing needles.

Piercing, cutting, branding and tattooing can all give the bottom tremendous endorphin rushes. In planning this kind of play please remember that you may get very high, so plan on some recovery time when you don't have to be responsible and can enjoy the experience. Please don't drive until you come down.

Physical safety note: play clean, with sharps containers, gloves, and lots of alcohol (oooh, sting!). Emotional safety note: when you open up the body by cutting or burning or piercing the skin, there is often a genuine opening of the mind, emotions and spirit as well. This opening can make you very vulnerable, which feels wonderful and has certain inherent dangers. If you're going to be all open, with no defenses, take care to be with people that you like and trust, and make provisions for your emotional as well as physical safety. On the positive side, sharing this profound opening with people you love can be an experience of intense connection and deep intimacy.

Costumery and Drag. Lots of us love to get dressed up. Costumes we have seen and worn for public play range from a few artfully draped chains on an otherwise charmingly naked body to full military uniforms and prom queens complete with crinolines and tiaras. We call all of it drag, to honor our outspoken elders, the drag queens, who paved the way for public outrageousness through very conspicuous personal appearances. Drag is also a word that implies bringing out an alternate persona - when we do business, your authors get themselves up in corporate drag that brings out the businesswoman within. Similarly, to call forth any inner self who plays a role in our fantasies, we can wear the costume to help us become the character.

S/M drag has many forms and many purposes, and the reasons a player might choose to dress up are as diverse as our fantasies.

There arc practical reasons for dressing up. For example, some of the better play parties and clubs in San Francisco won: let you in the door in normal clothes, thus helping keep vanilla gawkers out and maintaining a festively pervy atmosphere.

Warmth is a good thing. One of your authors discovered the joys of lingerie, particularly thigh-high stockings, when she was living in the mountains and heating with wood. Lingerie was clothing you could have sex in that would also keep you warm. Another player at an S/M camp out in the high and chilly mountains found a hundred ways to eroticize a union suit.

There are other practical limits to drag that you want to keep in mind. Elaborate antique clothes are too fragile to wear for most scenes, and whatever you wear needs to be calculated to work for sexual accessibility. If you like for your partner to take your clothes off you, it behooves you to select clothing that will make this fairly easy.

Strapless dresses, for instance, are essential if you want to have your clothes removed while your hands are tied. And if your dream scene involves your wicked ravager cutting your garments off with a very sharp knife, it is accepted and conventional to pick up a set of something cheap at a thrift store for the purpose. A helpful hint: nylon tricot, the stuff most slips are made out of, is just about impossible to cut with a knife. Scissors work.

Shopping can be foreplay. If you love to shop, drag is for you. Major money is no requirement: many of the best drag queens excel at creating magnificent ensembles from the thrift store, and there are advantages to the fact that discount stores often feature rather trashy fashion. Tawdry is another fantasy, right?

Drag can be for you regardless of your age, size or gender: this is sex, and we all want to look our best. Lots of wonderful clothes and undies are designed to enhance and uncover our innate sexiness: stockings and heels, chest harnesses, corsets and codpieces, whatever makes you look, and feel, like your sexiest self. And by wearing sexy garments, we present ourselves to the world as sexual beings.

Fetish wear is fashion designed specifically to please a sexual fetish. Clothing made of leather or spandex or

rubber, chains or ropes, textures and tastes and smells can evoke a particular eroticism in the wearer or his partner. Impossibly high heels may enhance a feeling of helplessness, leather garments next to the skin may bring out the primitive. Costumes can make you very aware of your body by restricting certain movements, or by exposing parts that don't normally get out in the open air.

Clothing can shape your body and change the way you move. Corsets and waist-cinchers, push-up bras and posture collars can sculpt the body of your dreams. Broad-shouldered jackets and heavy-soled boots give the timidest wearer a powerful butch swagger. Constricting the body can also cause what feels like release of endorphins: the first time Dossie got strapped into a waist cincher, she was surprised and delighted to experience an almost instantaneous shift in consciousness, from everyday awareness to highly excited and happy.

Women's lingerie is often specifically designed to be sexual, in appearance and texture and in what is revealed: maybe that's one reason so many men love to crossdress. Many women are turned on to shorts and briefs and undershirts to express and sexualize the male parts of themselves.

We can dress for our loves. If what we wear turns our tops on, that works for us. Sometimes dressing is a major part of play. A body servant can lovingly dress and undress his mistress, a Daddy top can play dolls with her little girl. Drag changes who you are to each other, and can be a way of announcing to your lovers that you are in a particular frame of mind, or looking for a particular scene. If you wear your police uniform, does that mean you want to arrest me?

Make new connections: Dossie loves costumes, the bigger the better, drag is a necessity of life to her. She has been constantly amazed and delighted to watch the different people who respond to her in her different presentations (yes, presentation, like a yummy dish). One time she went to a play party all done up as Scarlet O'Hara in red satin, corset and crinolines, and to her amazement attracted and played with two gay men in exquisitely tailored uniforms. Surprises are so nice.

Costumes change your awareness of who you are. When you wear something out of the ordinary you get to be someone out of the ordinary. If you present yourself as the Princess of the Playroom, that is how other people will see you, respond to you, and treat you. So if you want to make your fantasies come real, dress yourself up in your favorite fantasy, and watch everybody else relate to your fantasy self.

Set the stage for drama. Players may put on costumes to play a particular scene, like the naughty schoolgirl or

-boy, the stern bitch governess, the drill sergeant, the buck (later naked) private. And putting on a costume can be a window to bring forth an alternate persona, a piece of our character, that we want to play in a particular scene. You can experiment with costumes on your own — how do you feel in a white nightie? Is there a vampire in your fantasies? A popular costume scene discussed further in the section on precious inner beasties is the pony boy or girl, tricked out in elaborate, and confining, harness bondage.

Uniforms can make you feel powerful and grant you membership into a community of like-minded souls. There are longstanding traditions of initiation in leather and motorcycle clubs, where you undergo various initiations in order to earn your leathers. Some bottoms enjoy getting initiated over and over - boot camp, after all, might be more fun than anything that comes later.

Humiliation: to be dressed up as a little girl or boy, a baby, a sex toy, a puppy dog - how delightfully embarrassing! We know a top who likes to humiliate her bottoms by dressing them in frumpy clothes they would never choose to wear. This may sound dreadful at first, but when you understand that her purpose is to take her bottoms beyond worrying about how they look by forcing them to overcome challenges in the body image department, you can see how it could be a profoundly affecting experience to be sexualized by your lover when you're looking your worst. Other tops delight in hauling their hapless bottoms to the local leather store or maybe Fredericks of Hollywood to embarrass and delight them by forcing them to try on lots of sexy stuff, and maybe making a present of a particularly fetching outfit. Poor bottoms!

Dressing and disrobing can have spiritual significance, and again support a shift in consciousness from the

mundane to the other-worldly — drag becomes vestments that heighten spiritual awareness and set the stage for ritual.

We hope that someday you have an opportunity to attend a large leather event where a group of S/M people entirely occupy a conference hotel, so there is nobody there but us chickens. The constant parade of costumes is a powerful reminder of our collectively wonderful and infinite creativity, and the marvelous ingenuity our people engage in when they set out to be the sexiest they can be.

Body Worship and Fetishes. A fetish is an object or body part that a person has eroticized and made part of his or her sexuality. Common fetishes are leather, latex, high heels, boots, gloves, fur, lingerie, handcuffs and automobiles. Mythology would have it that a fetishist is some pathetic soul who cant get off without his or her teddy bear and who also cant get off with another person. The fact is, however, that we all eroticize objects - if you have a particular item of clothing, toy, piece of furniture or whatever that makes you feel sexy, you are to some degree a fetishist. Many of us collect vibrators, whips, costumes and other sex toys. Most of us love to share our toys.

Many people also fetishize body parts: hands and feet, breasts, buttocks, male or female genitalia, hair, ears and so on. Most of us have a special affinity for some body part or another; kinkyfolk are often inveterate butt-, crotch-, foot-or breast-watchers. Keep in mind, however, that there's a person attached to the body part of your dreams, and that she may start to feel bored or left out if you pay too much attention to the body part and not enough to the human being.

Many people are eroticized to body fluids such as blood, menstrual blood, spit, piss, shit and sweat. If this is you, some research and some creativity will be involved to make sure you don't expose anyone to harmful microorganisms. We can't go into lengthy detail on safer-sex precautions here, but check with your local AIDS prevention group to learn how to play safely with other peoples body fluids — for instance, it's completely safe to taste your own blood.

"Body worship" may be a subset of fetishism, or may be a kind of service. It means playing with your top's body, either particular parts of it or the whole thing. It may be a euphemism for fellatio or cunnilingus, or it may involve worshipping - stroking, touching, licking, sucking or massaging - other body pans such as feet or breasts. Bathing or massaging your top may be a form of body worship, as may personal services such as manicures and hairbrushing. Janet has played with a bottom who delighted in sitting at her feet painting her toenails while she wrote and chatted on the phone - a charmingly decadent scene.

Bootblacking, the ritualized spit-polishing of boots and shoes, is so popular a fetish that there are public events where contestants compete for the title of best bootblack. Here a fetish is combined with service bottoming - with delightful results, including perfecty shined shoes.

Body worship can create an excellent script for bottoms to offer some sensual or sexual stimulation to their tops, and the chance for cops to lie back and get done to as though they were gods.

We feel some hesitation about putting this into a separate section, since we think all of life is a roleplay -were playing "author" right now, for instance. But scenes that are like theater, in which the players get to pretend to be someone other than their day-to-day selves and maybe to act out a hot erotic fantasy story, are a particular subset of BDSM that warrants a closer look.

Some novices think that all BDSM play has to be roleplay, with elaborate narratives, props and costumes. Since we find that roleplaying is one of the most challenging types of play, we think of it more as a special-occasion production number. Trying to remember what your role is and how you're supposed to behave, at the same time as you enact a fantasy and manage whatever props and costumes you've set up and take care of your own and your partners turn-ons, is a high art. Getting around the shy self-conscious place where you feel a little bit silly