The New Bottoming Book (7 page)

When it comes time for an actual play date, we counsel the use of a "silent alarm" (sometimes called a "safe call"). You make arrangements with a trusted friend: the friend knows who you're with, where, and for what purpose.

Your play partner knows you've made this agreement with an outsider.

You agree to call your friend at a time after you're sure your date should be over. You may want to agree on a "code word" you can include in your conversation to let your friend know that you're OK, and a different "code word" that says "I'm in trouble, get help." If your friend doesn't receive the call at the appointed time, he is to assume you need help and act accordingly: you and the friend should decide together ahead of time what kind of action is appropriate, up to and including calling the police to go make sure that everything's OK.

Do It Yourself. Another way to find a top is to "build your own." If you are already partnered and your partner is open to experimentation, or if you live in an area where there is no S/M community and thus little to no chance of finding an experienced and self-realized top, this may be your best bet.

If your top-to-be is a little freaked out by the whole idea, you'll have to move slowly. Our book When Someone You Love Is Kinky is designed to help explain kinky play to vanilla folks and may be a good way to open up a discussion. It will also help you think through how you want to proceed if your friend/lover/partner/spouse wants nothing to do with the whole idea - which we hope won't happen to you.

Once you've got your potential top ready to at least give it a try, the trick is to teach gently and slowly, to setde for less than you may want as she gets a sense of what leathersex is like, and to give lots of praise and appreciation (first-rime topping can be very scary!). Be prepared to process well-meaning mistakes. Also be aware that your new top may know little or nothing about play except for the unrealistic, nonconsensual picture painted by S/M porn. Showing her your beloved copy of "Bullwhip Babes" and saying "See, this is what I want you to do to me" is almost sure to be a bad idea: learning to be a top, just like learning to walk, ride a bike or write a book, takes place one step at a time. Remember, there's always a future, and you don't have ro do it all in your first session.

We have both heard of novice tops who have trouble distinguishing between BDSM play and abuse, not because they want to be abusive, but because they figure that's what bottoms "really" want. Realistic how-to books and

magazines like those listed in the bibliography are an excellent antidote.

Its fine at first to teach your novice top exactly how you want to be topped... but realize that sooner or later, if he has any genuine top energy, he is going to want to try something that you hadn't thought of but that turns him on. If the proposed activity isn't a "hard limit" for you, we suggest you hold on tight and enjoy the ride... you might discover a whole new area for fantasy and experimentation!

Join the Community and Make Friends. For people who live in or near cities with good-sized BDSM communities, there are almost certainly support groups you can join. Such groups usually offer meetings and programs where you can learn about the games you want to play They also offer the chance to make friends with a bunch of people with whom you have perversions in common, and who may know a lot that you would like to learn. Even in smaller communities that don't have formal support groups, there will probably be "munches" and other social gatherings where you can meet like-minded folks.

Joining the community is about a lot more than just finding the top of your dreams, so we don't recommend that you walk into a kinky environment solely looking for Mr. or Ms. Right. Meet as many people as you can: they may or may not be folks you will actually play with, but if they've been around the community for a while, they can probably make introductions, fill you in on gossip and background, and maybe even get you parry invitations. Friends can "mentor" you through difficult phases with support and advice. 1 hey can also get the word out regarding your skills and charms as a bottom and as a person, and can tell you about tops whose playstyle might be a fit for yours.

Janet's life partner started out as her friend and mentor; since both of them were at that time exclusively top, it didn't occur to her to look at him as a possible partner until a bit later. They've been together for well over a decade now.

The moral to this section: joining the community is a key step in making your dreams come true. Find it. meet everyone and be as friendly and pleasant as you can. We guarantee you will learn a lot and have fun - let the play partners fall where they may. Soon enough, you'll get to fall too... at their feet, perhaps?

Once you've followed one or more of the steps outlined above, you will need to start looking at the people you meet with an eye to choosing tops.

The first advice we could give you is to open your mind. Many bottoms come into S/M with a fantasy top in their head that they have been constructing every night at bedtime for who knows how many years. The mistake many people make, in the vanilla world as well as the kinky one, is to judge all the potential partners they see by how closely they fit their fantasy.

If you are matching up a real person with the picture in your mind, you are not seeing the person you are meeting. You can't play with a figment of your imagination... and to treat a person like an object in your fantasy is disrespectful. This kind of thinking, no matter the gender or orientation of the bottom, is objectification, and will rapidly turn off or burn out potential tops. As Janet says, "A top is a lot more than a life support system for a whip."

We do advocate cruising for tops. Waiting forever for someone to choose you is unlikely to get you what you want: remember, Sleeping Beauty had to wait a hundred years. You can look around, see who you like and introduce yourself.

Try making a list of what you're looking for in a top. Many traits on the list will be qualities you'd want in any lover: honest, caring, warm, and so on. In a top, we also want someone who makes a good emotional connection, negotiates clearly and openly, has a good understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality, takes care of physical safety, and treats bottoms with respect (except when he's not supposed to).

We may also want tops who are nasty, domineering, pushy, stern, aggressive, and a lot of similar traits that are very sexy in a scene and a very big problem in the real world. So here we come to the difficult part. Attitude is attractive, and lot of us have a taste for rough trade. So how can you tell who to trust?

Since you are seeking somebody you want to trust a lot, it's a good idea to check references - ask several people around the community, and ask the top who he has played with who you might know. Be aware that many alternative sexuality communities are rife with politics and feuds, and that a "warning" may have to do with a personal vendetta rather than an honest safety concern: it's best to check with several different people, and to pay attention to your intuition. If an alarm bell goes off, listen to yourself, and take a little more time to explore the situation. While we don't see a need to wait a hundred years, we do like to get to know someone well enough to feel safe.

The vast majority of tops we know are responsible, honorable and civilized people whom we would trust, and have trusted, with our lives. But everybody isn't nice, and some people are drawn to BDSM for the wrong reasons

— like because they really want to do that power-over stuff. And we have been attracted to them.

There are tops who try to work out in play what would be better dealt with in a therapists office. You might find them dumping a lifetime of rage and frustration on you, and you'll hate it a lot.

There are tops who think it's hot to play dangerously. Now, we like risk as well as the next bottom, but when you hear a top speak with scorn of safewords, sobriety, safe sex or safety in general, don't play with that one.

There are tops who are rigid, cold and rejecting, unwilling or unable to make connection. You can often recognize them by their refusal to drop role, insisting on acting like a top all the time. This works for them because people who are afraid of connection feel safer when they push people away. And we have been attracted to them too.

What a challenge, to try to warm up a cold-blooded creature: aren't reptiles sexy? But too many times, you're just asking for rejection after rejection after rejection. We recommend you chase tops who are already warm and friendly.

When something goes wrong in a scene, the quality of your top is not judged by the fact that she tried something that didn't work out (within the limits of physical safety and consensuality), but by her willingness to listen to you when you tell her about it. A top whose ego is invested in always being right cannot hear feedback, and a top who cannot hear feedback is dangerous. A good top will listen, be concerned about your well-being and your enjoyment of the scene, and be flexible enough to adjust to your needs to make the scene work.

A good top cares about how you feel. When you care about how she feels too, then that platform of mutual care and respect becomes a stage for outrageously hot and nasty play.

So you have dreams and fantasies of being taken, tortured, punished. Forced to submit, or submitting with joy. Being treated like a thing or an animal or a baby. Being subjected to nearly unbearable levels of stimulation. The prospect can seem overwhelming.

But we believe that you deserve to get what you want -all of it, plenty of it. And you don't need to trade off your dignity and self-respect to get it.

A lot of people who have no experience seem to believe that to get what you want as a bottom you need to give up all of your healthy individuality and strength and power: that submissives and masochists are less than complete people, especially less than the tops they play with. As we have already said, that's not how it really happens.

Even if you run into some people who operate on these beliefs, we encourage you to ignore other people's bad judgment, and continue being the strong, gorgeous and exciting person that you are today, even - maybe even especially - when you are on your knees.

Buying into such ridiculous judgments can pose serious obstacles to having a good time. Do you believe that you

won t be attractive as a bottom unless you have no limits, are heavily into groveling, are able to rocket into submissive headspace at the first sound of your mistress's voice, and are turned on to the point of orgasm by intensely painful stimulations that you never tried before? Well, nonsense.

If you give yourself permission to start out where you are ar.d learn about how to play with your fantasies in reality, you will become that bottom or submissive of your fantasies in a surprisingly short time. That is, if you take good care of yourself and insist on playing with tops who take good care of you too.

Some people believe that to achieve your bottom potential you need to approach every scene as if you were about to jump off a cliff with no bungee cord. That is not what has worked for us, and we have found very few tops who are eager to be there to catch such bottoms when they land. Give yourself permission to learn one step at a time, each new sensation, each challenge of submission, and do everything possible to make it easy on yourself so that you, and your top, have the best possible chance of succeeding at the undertaking at hand. Do the easiest thing first, and then the next easiest, and soon you will be dancing through the tough stuff.

Some people seem to think safety is for sissies, but we have become eager, popular and well-respected bottoms by taking care of ourselves, and our tops, every step of the way. And it didn't take us very long to get there.

The real skills of bottoming lie in how you interact with your partners - what kind of communication you do and what kind of support you give to the wonderful people you play with. A good bottom does his end of the work of developing a scene.

So who is responsible for what? You are responsible for knowing your limits and making sure your top knows them, for communicating clearly, explaining what you want, keeping agreements, supporting your top, and helping your top get his needs met. Your top is responsible for knowing and setting her limits, respecting yours, maintaining safety, and communicating his wants and needs. Both of you are responsible for scripting, for clear negotiations, for maintaining scene space, and for closure after the scene is done.

A responsible bottom figures out what she wants, and what her limits are, and communicates this information to her top. If you're a novice, you may not have all this information just yet - but you still have to communicate what you do know about your fantasies and limits, and to share new information and insights as you gain them.

Right inside you, where it always is.

A bottom's power may not always look like power. Sometimes being powerful is about triumphing over a difficult stimulation or struggling heroically against impossible odds. Sometimes it's about calm, competence and devotion. Sometimes it's about being secure enough to let yourself feel scared or vulnerable or small, knowing that more conventional power will be there for you when and if you need it.

Whatever kind of power bottoming brings to you, that is where you'll find your center. When you grasp your power firmly as you enter a scene, you may be surprised to discover that your sense of your own power intensifies as you play. Submission, sex, pain play: all raise power. Maybe it's part or the endorphin effect, or maybe when we feel so extremely sexy we cant help but feel magnificent. So when you are a mass of nerves contemplating your first attempt at bringing your fantasy into reality, remember this: as the power of the play overcomes the

self-consciousness, as you and your top get more excited, as the juices begin to flow, you will feel incredibly powerful.

We grasp our power in order to share it. We share our power when we give the control over to the top, and together we become enormously potent.