The New Topping Book (8 page)

Even if you’re doing a scene that isn’t particularly emotional, we think tops should expect to provide plenty of support, praise and affection – before, during and particularly after the scene. (If your bottom doesn’t like this kind of nurturance, she should tell you so.) Taking good care of your bottom helps both of you to process the scene and nourishes both of you, so you can go on to do more and better scenes together in the future.

1. Pat Califia

5

H
OW
D
O
Y
OU
L
EARN
T
O
D
O
T
HIS
S
TUFF
?

O
kay, so you’re interested. You have fantasies, you’ve thought about it, maybe you even have somebody who wants to play with you. So now what? Do you just rear up and snarl “On your knees, bitch” (or “boy,” as the case may be)? Well, please don’t – until you have a clear idea about what happens next.

How do you learn to do all this complex, sexy, arcane, and potentially dangerous stuff? How to tie someone up, preferably without damaging their nerves… how to build a structure that keeps your D/S connection hot
and
healthy… how to give someone a flogging without breaking any bones… how to give commands in an obey-me-now tone of voice… how to use an enormous range of implements to inflict all kinds of different and unimaginable sensations,
and
be deft enough not to drop any of them on your own toes,
and
still feel like a top?

For the novice top, there is a lot to learn. Start by giving yourself permission to be ignorant: it is not a crime to not know something. And even though your fantasy top may be omniscient,
you
are going to have to get down and learn. The more you can learn, and the more you are willing to learn, the better a top you will be. We feel sure you can have fun while you are learning to do all these wonderful things –
we
sure do.

If you live in or near a city that has a BDSM support group, join it. Support groups regularly put on demonstrations by experienced players of various skills, like flogging or play piercings, where they talk about the safety information and show you what to do. At such groups, you can also meet and ask questions of experienced players, or perhaps join forces with another learner to share experience and support each other in your explorations. You may find a mentor. You may find an experienced bottom who wants to play with you and is willing to show you a few things.

Unfortunately, as the BDSM scene grows, we are seeing more separated populations emerging. Support groups now are often targeted to very specific members: gay men, dykes, heterosexuals (with bisexuals and transgendered folks welcome to some degree in most if not all of them), with even smaller groups for crossdressers, fetishists and the like. While it may be nice to be able to join a support group exclusively composed of people like yourself, we mourn the loss of diversity. When we were coming out, we learned so much from people who were different from ourselves, and we miss the sense of a larger community and the stimulation and adventures we encountered.

Please don’t let your top attitude get in the way of learning from your bottom. The bottom knows these sensations and emotions from the inside, and knows more than anyone what works and what doesn’t. Also, tastes and limits vary from bottom to bottom, so even when you become experienced you’re still going to need to find out what works and doesn’t work for each bottom you play with.

If you have friends who are seasoned players, you can try out activities you would like to do to someone else by getting someone to do them to you. A friend of ours learned massage by getting a lot of massages and remembering what she liked: you can learn topping by bottoming, and paying attention to what works, and asking the top questions afterwards if you were too distracted (or happy) to pay attention to the technical details. It’s not uncommon for dominants to learn their craft by serving under a more experienced dominant for a prearranged period of time, often six months to a year; this way they can start by learning what submission feels like, move onward to assisting the dominant during play with other submissives, and eventually “graduate” as experienced dominants, ready to take on submissives of their own.

What, you say, me bottom? But I’m a top! (Dossie once had that last sentence printed on a T-shirt as a present for a top of hers.) Some people hold that it is not possible to become a good top without bottoming, without direct personal experience of the sensations you like to inflict on others. We do know good tops who never bottom, but we find them to be the exception rather than the rule. Most good players, both top and bottom, have some history of switching, and many identify as switches.

We’ve told you already that this book is not an instruction manual, and we have listed several good books to read in the Bibliography that will tell you how to perform various S/M activities safely and well. Be careful when reading books, especially pornography – many books are written by people with little or no experience, for fantasy purposes only, and you can’t learn how to do the real part from them.

People all over the world join in conversations on the Internet or on computer bulletin boards, where you can pick up a lot of information and ask questions – but please remember to check things out because you have no way of knowing whether your source has real experience or is just dreaming. Here in San Francisco there are publicly advertised classes on BDSM techniques and philosophies from basic through very advanced; other cities have similar institutions. More sources of information are listed in the Resource Guide.

D
O
I
T
Y
OURSELF.
Another resource for learning about new sensations is yourself. Try things out on yourself and see how they feel. Put a clothespin on the web between your thumb and your forefinger to find out how intense the sensation is, or put it on your chest, or your nipple, or…. If the sensation seems too intense, see if you can eroticize it by masturbating. Does this change how it feels? Are you still reading this book?

Oops! We got carried away. Here we were telling you about trying things out at home. What we
meant
to say is that we want you to practice hitting a pillow with your new whip till you can hit the same spot with all the tails together every time, experiment with bondage ideas to find out if a particular sash, belt or rope will cut off circulation or abrade the skin if you yank on it, kneel on a hard floor for a period of time to see what parts of your body feel strained or uncomfortable… in short, do your homework.

Start any new endeavor by thinking about what you are doing. With a new whip, for instance, think about what parts of the body have enough padding to strike safely – the ass, thighs, shoulder muscles and other well-padded parts with no exposed underlying organs can be struck with most kinds of whips, whereas backs of knees, faces and necks can only be tapped lightly… get the idea? And each person has different sensitivities on different parts of their body. How will you find that out?

A basic rule of starting out doing anything new: you can’t go wrong by starting out very lightly and working on up. Dossie remembers:

When I was a real neophyte, at one of the first occasions where I saw experienced people play, I was watching two leathermen, dressed head to toe in black leather with nickel studs gleaming everywhere, aviator sunglasses – I was completely intimidated. They were the most menacing-looking human beings I had ever been in the same room with. The top had a riding crop, and the bottom bent over a table, and I expected mayhem. What actually happened was that the top took the crop and went tap tap tap as lightly as rain over that bottom’s ass. He made the skin flush with the lightest touches, bringing the blood to the skin, very patiently. I watched the bottom slowly become engaged in the sensation, swaying slightly, breathing deeper, getting turned on, all while the crop’s touch was very sensual, very light.
Very
gradually, the top began to hit a little harder. As soon as the bottom began to jerk a little at the blows, he held steady and set up a rhythm for a while, not increasing the intensity, just staying right where it was beginning to hurt. I watched the bottom become entranced. Again and again, the top increased the intensity by just one notch, and the bottom became more and more responsive, both of them obviously in perfect communication with each other, almost as if they were dancing. Eventually, the top was striking with all the force he could muster, and the bottom was thrashing and yelling with wild abandon – they stayed there for a while too, savoring the experience as long as possible before it was time to come back down.

It’s tough to go wrong by starting light, and some of the best floggings and canings start out as sensual scenes. Some may stay sensual, enjoying the dominance and control and the sensation without a need for intense pain. But however far you are going to go, starting any sensation at the lightest possible level allows the bottom to work his or her way into it as it allows you to get accustomed to the implement, work into a rhythm and get your aim adjusted so that if and when the scene escalates to a more intense level you will have, essentially, practiced.

Same goes for scenes that are more about control than sensation. A scene can go badly awry if the dominant starts right off the bat giving orders that she knows are going to be emotionally very challenging to the submissive. We recommend starting with the easy stuff. Of course, what feels easy is going to vary from one submissive to the next – you need to find out about such things during negotiation – but many dominants start scenes by having the submissive remove her clothes or assume a certain position like kneeling. As the submissive begins to relax and become a little entranced, you can add more challenging forms of control.

Helpful hint number two: take your time. A fantasy top may dash in and tie up his or her victim in three seconds, but that’s fantasy. What is actually very sexy is to put someone in restraints very slowly, in a ritual pace, so you can savor the entire process, and have enough time to get the knots right without fumbling. Take your time approaching your bottom’s body – just because he is all tied up doesn’t mean you should leap on his or her genitals with little glad cries and no foreplay. Spend some time touching skin; it will bring you into synch with your bottom and take him further down into bottom space. And when you do get to the erogenous zones, take a lot of time. Enjoy yourself. After all, your bottom can’t stop you, right?

Another hint: get comfortable. If you are going to spend a nice long time doing something exquisite to another person’s body, you don’t want to have to stop because your back hurts, so be aware of the position you are in when you start up and make sure it’s going to be comfortable for a while. Some tops wear weight-lifting belts to protect their backs when they play, others recommend shoulder-stretching exercises before doing a flogging.

And don’t forget to make the room comfortable. You might be wearing more clothes than your bottom, and you might also be moving around more, so remember that naked people who can’t move get cold, and turn the heat up. Floggers create a wind chill factor, so turn the heat up even further – you don’t want your bottom distracted by the wrong kinds of discomfort. Check to make sure lights are not in your or your bottom’s eyes (unless you’re doing an interrogation scene), and make sure candles are safely placed where you aren’t going to knock them over. Have towels, rubber gloves, condoms, lube and whatever toys you may be using laid out where you can reach them without losing contact.

A final suggestion: when it starts getting good, when you start getting response, when your bottom starts breathing hard or maybe writhing a little, that means that you are doing something very right and you should keep on doing it. Many people make the mistake of speeding up at this point, or hitting harder, or otherwise upping the intensity, which can immediately take the bottom beyond the place where she was having such a good time. You’ll develop a feel for when it’s time to turn the volume up another notch – and stay with
that
another while – and this is how you can get to spend a very long time having lots of fun while you work your way to Nirvana.

And if you only get partway to heaven this time, please remember that there is always the future. You can choose to worry about what didn’t happen in a scene, and if you wish, you can feel like a failure if the scene you play today doesn’t get as far as you wanted it to. But those two leathermen we described earlier had almost certainly played before and not gotten anywhere near that far. So value the pleasure you had today, and have confidence that you have also gained knowledge and expertise that will take you further down the road the next time you play.

As you can see, there is a lot to learn, but be reassured that most of the details will become second nature to you very quickly. The examples listed here are not a complete list, but a few ideas to get you started. And once you get started, we hope you will have a very good time learning new and wonderful ways to play for the rest of your life.

interlude 2

A scene at a party, played by our friend Bill and a stranger.

We don’t say a word. We’ve never met before. We’re just two horny guys at a sex party. He wanders into an empty room, giving me that “Come hither” look recognized by queer men everywhere. In the room, he is seated on the couch, legs spread, touching himself through the one-piece latex suit covering his trunk. It has short sleeves and legs.