Input:
 1. Q: What is the title of the section?
A: The title of the section is "2: WHAT IS IT ABOUT TOPPING, ANYWAY?"
2. Q: What is the first line of text in the section?
A: The first line of text in the section is "In the so-called "real world," most of us constantly struggle with power, working to empower ourselves, and to protect ourselves from being overpowered by others. This is serious business."
3. Q: What is the second paragraph of text in the section?
A: The second paragraph of text in the section is "But power can be sexy as well as serious. In S/M, we imitate the outward appearance of those grim real-world struggles for power, while building in the safeguards we need to keep us from being genuinely harmed. We believe that one purpose of S/M is to give us a way to enjoy the "upside" of power – its sexiness and drama – without bringing along its "downside." We've heard people say, "S/M is power games for fun instead of profit," and we agree."
4. Q: What is the third paragraph of text in the section?
A: The third paragraph of text in the section is "BUILDING YOUR HEARTH. But isn't this desire for power potentially destructive? Good question. We live in a culture of powermongers. We see all around us the ways in which power is misused to abuse those who lack the power to protect themselves. So how can we, as tops, justify wanting to get our rocks off feeling like the most powerful person of all?"
5. Q: What is the fourth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The fourth paragraph of text in the section is "The popular stereotype of an S/M top is of an amoral, irresponsible and destructive person: that's what you'll see in the movies. But in our world, we find that playing with power is like playing with fire: yes, there is the possibility of destruction if we are not careful… and there is also enormous potential for constructive heat that warms and heals."
6. Q: What is the fifth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The fifth paragraph of text in the section is "One way we make it safe to play with fire is to build an adequate fireplace, a container, a hearth. We call it "scene space," and we'll tell you about building it later. Another way we make it safe is to become wise in the ways of power (in BDSM, we have lots of opportunity!). An ethical top understands power and wields it constructively, responsibly and safely."
7. Q: What is the sixth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The sixth paragraph of text in the section is "IS ALL POWER THE SAME? From feminist theory we have learned to distinguish between power-over and power-with. Power-over is a behavior pattern in which a person measures personal power by his or her ability to control others – you increase your own power by stealing power from somebody else. You can see this dynamic anywhere you see rigid hierarchies or chains of command, like the military or the corporate ladder."
8. Q: What is the seventh paragraph of text in the section?
A: The seventh paragraph of text in the section is "In our experience, if your goal is to build yourself a sense of empowerment and solid self-esteem, stealing power doesn't work very well. You can't build a solid sense of self-esteem by stealing someone else's. When people strive to empower themselves this way they behave like addicts, constantly scheming to replenish a supply of power that never was truly theirs."
9. Q: What is the eighth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The eighth paragraph of text in the section is "On the other hand, there is power-with. Power-with enables us to get more power by sharing our power with others. The more I have, the more you have. By supporting one another in our power, we get more for ourselves."
10. Q: What is the ninth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The ninth paragraph of text in the section is "In any S/M exchange there is a sharing of power – the bottom lends his power to the top for the duration, the top adds power, and together they make a lot of voltage. The top gets to wield all this power, a form of extreme empowerment that is exciting, thrilling, hot, erotic, and, as we said before, very, very sexy."
11. Q: What is the tenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The tenth paragraph of text in the section is "So the first big payoff for topping is that we get to ride a whole lot of power, and to be, within the agreements and boundaries of a scene, enormously powerful."
12. Q: What is the eleventh paragraph of text in the section?
A: The eleventh paragraph of text in the section is "SO WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?"
13. Q: What is the twelfth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twelfth paragraph of text in the section is "We asked a number of tops what rewards they found in topping – thanks to all of them for the following list. Remember, when you read a list of other people's turn-ons, some of them will work for you and others will not. Don't worry – hardly anybody could like every single thing on this list; there are certainly a few that we ourselves have not experienced."
14. Q: What is the thirteenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirteenth paragraph of text in the section is "> • Empathy. Near the top of most people's lists is the "contact high," the turn-on we feel in empathy with the bottom's response to the physical, emotional and sexual intensity of the scene. One top describes this feeling as getting to surf the bottom's sensations."
15. Q: What is the fourteenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The fourteenth paragraph of text in the section is "It is certainly a truism of S/M that the bottom is on the receiving end of most of the stimulation. If empathy didn't work so well we wonder if anybody would get turned on to topping in the first place, or if we would all decide that topping is all work and no fun. But the happy truth is that we can indeed get intensely stimulated from what our partner is feeling. Both of us are amazed, after a few hours of highly technical topping, when we get to the part of the scene where the focus is on our orgasm, to experience an enormous orgasm (or several of them) – as if it had been building bigger and bigger inside us, just waiting for us to have the time to have it."
16. Q: What is the fifteenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The fifteenth paragraph of text in the section is "Empathy in BDSM presents a wonderful paradox: as tops in role, we are often called upon to present ourselves as cold, cruel and unfeeling, when in fact we are getting our rocks off on an empathy so profound that it can approach the telepathic. So we believe that, contrary to the opinions of the uninformed, consensual sadism, dominance and topping are primarily empathic activities."
17. Q: What is the sixteenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The sixteenth paragraph of text in the section is "> • Creativity. Another frequently cited delight of topping is the opportunity for creativity. We get to be the playwright, the producer, the director and the lead actor all at once. We are presented with a lump of malleable clay – the bottom – with which we can create the sculpture of our fantasies. We get to enjoy our inventiveness, our resourcefulness, our competence and our flashes of genius. We get to exercise our intuition as we figure out what will get to this particular bottom, or how to get them where we want them. We get to have our fantasy our way, to play dolls with real people: for a while we get to make the world look just the way we want it to. We play God."
18. Q: What is the seventeenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The seventeenth paragraph of text in the section is "> • Bigness. When we top we get to feel big. It may not be okay to act huge in ordinary social interactions, and you're usually not allowed to overwhelm people without their permission. When we top we put on a role that is about being important and powerful. And when our bottoms respond to us in our role as giants, when they offer us their trust, their adulation, and their belief in us as we see ourselves in our fantasies – when we see ourselves enormous in our bottoms' eyes, what a blazing hot mirror!"
19. Q: What is the eighteenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The eighteenth paragraph of text in the section is "> • Nurturing. Janet remembers some of her childhood fantasies in which she was doing really terrible things to very small people, so she could cradle them like dolls afterwards. Nurturing is a big part of much of what we do, and the combination of kindness and cruelty is one of the fastest ways to take a bottom down the deepest."
20. Q: What is the nineteenth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The nineteenth paragraph of text in the section is "How does nurturing reward the top? Well, the nurturer, again, is big, and in play gets to be even bigger as we practice a kind of hyper-nurturance, enveloping our bottoms, almost as if we could engulf them. As nurturing tops we may play out the roles of Good Mommy or Good Daddy, maybe in a way we didn't get to experience in our childhood, so we get a chance to rewrite history. In scene space we can elicit and reenact trauma and also be the good parent who heals the wounds. Many of the most profound psychological scenes include intense nurturance. And in a world in which nurturing energy can be in short supply, it can be a delight to create an environment in which we get to taste a whole lot of it."
21. Q: What is the twentieth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twentieth paragraph of text in the section is "> • Bullying. In BDSM we get to act out from parts of ourselves that could not be described as nice: the bully, the villain, the inquisitor, the brute, the betrayer. Wicked, wicked, wicked. And popular. Check out mainstream movies, or fiction from best-sellers to classical mythology, for verification that everybody adores a really good villain. Those bad guys are big. Big enough to carry all the world's ills, and create all the pain and trouble a hungry bottom could want to suffer."
22. Q: What is the twenty-first paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-first paragraph of text in the section is "And what could be more forbidden than our own nastiness? Most of us learned things from our families and our culture, or perhaps from our more primitive and essential natures, that aren't very civilized. Many people view almost all relationships as interactions between victims and oppressors, so in topping we manifest our oppressor so the bottom can be in victim role, and both of us can have a powerful and erotic experience. S/M provides a safe way to be in the world for our internalized oppressor, the precious bully within."
23. Q: What is the twenty-second paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-second paragraph of text in the section is "> • Control. Another powerful reward we get from topping is the opportunity to be in control. We can be control queens with permission – even encouragement. If you enjoy being served, the world seems like a much happier and calmer place when your morning cup of coffee is exactly the strength and temperature you prefer, with just the right amount of sugar and cream. And there's a keen joy in knowing that your needs and desires are echoing in your loved one's head, even when you're not there to express them."
24. Q: What is the twenty-third paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-third paragraph of text in the section is "> • Competence. Many tops who used to be primarily bottoms report a strong motivation in the chance to do it right: if you've ever been on the bottom thinking about how that knot is too loose, and if you ran another rope from just here to over there then the tension on that thigh would be released and the legs would be held perfectly open, you'll understand some of the joys of control."
25. Q: What is the twenty-fourth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-fourth paragraph of text in the section is "S/M is a technical sport, and a lot of us eroticize the chance to be competent, to generate perfectly balanced rope bondage, or an exquisitely timed sensory deprivation scene, or to choreograph a profound psychological journey. And when we do that well, we get to ride the scene and our bottoms – with our universe, for the moment, exactly as we want it. How gratifying."
26. Q: What is the twenty-fifth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-fifth paragraph of text in the section is "> • Self-knowledge. A familiar story – "helpless captive," "shopping in the slave market," "punishing the naughty boy," those good old stories that snuggle us to sleep at night – can be the tip of the iceberg of profound psychological archetypes that we don't see clearly, like a dream or a vision. Playing these roles out can be the way in which we clarify our vision, and developing an S/M persona can become the process by which we learn more about who we are. Then our bottom's response becomes the mirror in which we see ourselves more clearly, and as we choreograph the bottom's experience and stretch both of our limits in scene, we constantly create new mirrors in which we can see yet more. The possibilities are indeed endless."
27. Q: What is the twenty-sixth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-sixth paragraph of text in the section is "WHAT ABOUT BOTTOMS?"
28. Q: What is the twenty-seventh paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-seventh paragraph of text in the section is "If some of the above tickles your fancy, chances are you would enjoy topping. So what about bottoms? What do they get out of this? Why would a person want to be beaten, humiliated, ordered around and otherwise inconvenienced so that you can feel big? Well, because bottoming is very, very sexy too. There is tremendous luxury in giving up responsibility and power to a top, in being small, possibly childlike, in having your behavior controlled, in getting nurtured while being subjected to all kinds of intense stimulations."
29. Q: What is the twenty-eighth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-eighth paragraph of text in the section is "Fear can be arousing… the subjective experience of bondage can be so sensual as to approach a trance state… the chance to devote yourself to another's pleasure can soothe away your own cares… the controlled experience of pain in a safe and consensual scene can be tremendously rewarding."
30. Q: What is the twenty-ninth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The twenty-ninth paragraph of text in the section is "Many of our activities enable us to use our bodies' ability to produce naturally occurring morphine-like neurotransmitters called "endorphins" in response to intense stimuli. In The New Bottoming Book we described in detail how sensations can be processed through the body to create an endorphin high, and how ecstatic experiences of intensity and openness transmute strong physical and emotional sensation into an altered state of consciousness that we experience as extreme pleasure."
31. Q: What is the thirtieth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirtieth paragraph of text in the section is "Other rewards of bottoming include getting lots of attention, as well as acting out fantasies of helplessness and other forbidden emotions (needy, pathetic, dependent, guilt-ridden) that, like their toppish counterparts, would cause lots of trouble in the real world."
32. Q: What is the thirty-first paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-first paragraph of text in the section is "HOW ARE TOPS AND BOTTOMS INTERRELATED?"
33. Q: What is the thirty-second paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-second paragraph of text in the section is "So tops and bottoms are interdependent – we need each other to play out our fantasy roles as well as to perform the physical acts that make us so happy. Bottoms need tops to push them off cliffs so they can fly, and tops need bottoms so they can ride the same winds, and that's how both can have their dreams come true. This is obvious… but the fantasies we play with are not necessarily obvious."
34. Q: What is the thirty-third paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-third paragraph of text in the section is "The nature of the dance of BDSM tends to polarize our roles to a greater extent than might be possible or healthy in the rest of our lives. Play pushes both top and bottom out to the far ends of the spectrum. Each player, in traveling further out, supports the other in going yet further. Thus as a wonderful scene progresses, the bottoms get smaller, the tops get bigger, and the larger the territory we encompass: we move to the outer ends of the spectrum, generating something like centrifugal force, spinning further and further out while holding each other safe and tight."
35. Q: What is the thirty-fourth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-fourth paragraph of text in the section is "WHOSE FANTASY?"
36. Q: What is the thirty-fifth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-fifth paragraph of text in the section is "We want to mention here that not all scenes are based on fantasies, and especially not on fantasies that have detailed scripts or stories. Often the scene is based on an image, a feeling, an emotion, or a specific activity like bondage or flogging or anal sex."
37. Q: What is the thirty-sixth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-sixth paragraph of text in the section is "One question that comes up when we actually sit down to negotiate a scene is whose fantasy are we playing, the top's or the bottom's? The answer is either, or both, or whatever the two of you together decide will work the best. Some bottoms are not comfortable talking about their fantasies for fear of seeming too directive, but we believe that it is a requirement for a skilled and supportive bottom to be able to tell you about her desires – as a top, you need some information to figure out what will make this scene work."
38. Q: What is the thirty-seventh paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-seventh paragraph of text in the section is "Good tops learn to support bottoms through the embarrassment of revealing their fantasies – and isn't embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with? Force that shy little thing to tell you what she wants!"
39. Q: What is the thirty-eighth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-eighth paragraph of text in the section is "Similarly, tops need to learn to speak comfortably about their fantasies and desires. As we'll see when we talk about negotiation, tops don't just walk up to bottoms and do whatever comes to mind. Scenes are negotiated, and constructed to satisfy both bodies and imaginations while remaining within the limits of both top and bottom. And to find out if your fantasy is within your bottom's limits, you have to discuss it at least enough to establish those limits (everybody enjoys a surprise, but it's not kosher to tattoo "Kilroy Was Here!" on your friend's ass without permission)."
40. Q: What is the thirty-ninth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The thirty-ninth paragraph of text in the section is "Some tops feel they lose authority as a top when they agree to play all or part of a bottom's fantasy, and are offended by the idea that they may be "servicing" the bottom. We think it's inappropriate to get your ego invested in your bottom's having no desire but to please you, or no ideas of his own. We would be equally critical of a bottom who didn't want to hear about the top's desires and needs, or was not interested in trying out his fantasy."
41. Q: What is the fortieth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The fortieth paragraph of text in the section is "New players often start out with one fantasy they have desired and elaborated on for years, while more seasoned tops and bottoms may enjoy many roles in many scenarios. So when we play out a bottom's fantasy we have little to lose and lots to gain. When we stretch to realize someone else's story, we get to enlarge our repertoire, learn new skills, and perhaps discover yet more ways to get turned on. Sounds like a win-win situation to us."
42. Q: What is the forty-first paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-first paragraph of text in the section is "So we see no need to compete over whose game we are playing – we'd rather play your wonderful ideas tonight and mine tomorrow, regardless of who's in charge. Once again, we see this as a collaborative endeavor, in which we play with power that is shared, for the pleasure and benefit of all parties in the game."
43. Q: What is the forty-second paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-second paragraph of text in the section is "SYMBOLISM AND STRUCTURE"
44. Q: What is the forty-third paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-third paragraph of text in the section is "As Sir Stephen remarked in The Story of O, we are indeed fond of rituals. BDSM is often characterized by a certain formality or ritual quality that reminds us of opera gowns, dress uniforms, nuns' habits and other formal signifiers."
45. Q: What is the forty-fourth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-fourth paragraph of text in the section is "That's because play is to a very real degree about symbolism. The "kidnapping" we do for erotic pleasure reflects an arousing fantasy (since in our fantasy, the kidnappers do exactly what we want), and when we play we make sure the "kidnappers" are actually doing exactly what we want, a ritual of helplessness in the face of overwhelming stimulas. An actual kidnapping, with no concern for the feelings of the victim, would be a life-shattering reality. The symbol enables us to confront our simultaneous fear of, and attraction to, the genuine horrors of the world. But we need form and structure to clarify the distinction between the symbol and the thing itself."
46. Q: What is the forty-fifth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-fifth paragraph of text in the section is "The structure we build around our play creates a "firewall," a boundary that enables us to take vague and abstract ideas, emotions, roles and dynamics and pull them upwards into reality, where we can explore them and get turned on by them. We learn a lot about what the limits are, and where the boundaries are between scene space and the rest of our lives."
47. Q: What is the forty-sixth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-sixth paragraph of text in the section is "Wise players study the play of those who have gone before us, just as art students study the Old Masters (interesting choice of name, don't you think?). By building on the foundations that others have developed, we can build taller and stronger fireplaces for our flames so they can leap higher, hotter and safer."
48. Q: What is the forty-seventh paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-seventh paragraph of text in the section is "Sometimes costumes help define our structure, telling us what role we're playing – both from the archetypes expressed (cop, pirate, doctor) and by the function of the garments (the daddy's belt, the vampire's fangs, the goddess's sky-high heels). These symbols are also a reminder that the top has made a commitment to remain aware, contained, in control of both partners – that she has agreed not to fall down on the floor and thrash in ecstasy until it is safe and consonant to do so. The bottom may not dress at all, indicating vulnerability and availability, or may have his essential nakedness accentuated by symbols like collars or corsets, or by clothes which can be removed by the top as part of a spiritual and physical stripping away of defenses."
49. Q: What is the forty-eighth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-eighth paragraph of text in the section is "Bondage, even symbolic bondage such as a loop of thread holding thumbs together, creates a structure which controls the bottom's behavior and defines roles. So are the names which we call one another – "sir" and "boy," "mistress" and "slave," "milady" and "sirrah," "Spot" and "woof woof!""
50. Q: What is the forty-ninth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The forty-ninth paragraph of text in the section is "Sometimes our structure is defined by logistics: time, physical abilities, environments. We enter the dungeon and become our "other selves," then leave it and become our day-to-day selves again. Our time agreements may be our form: we'll play until 3:00, then go get something to eat. Or we may agree to play until one or the other or both of us has had an orgasm, or has reached some mutually agreed upon level of stimulation."
51. Q: What is the fiftieth paragraph of text in the section?
A: The fiftieth paragraph of text in the section is "All these structures are there to help you get as big as you can, and your bottom as small as he can, while ensuring your safe return to your normal size when you need to go back. Like Alice's looking glass, they enable you to wander safely through the topsy-turvy dreamscapes of fantasy, where pain is pleasure and cruelty is love."

Response:
2

WHAT IS IT ABOUT TOPPING, ANYWAY?

In the so-called "real world," most of us constantly struggle with power, working to empower ourselves, and to protect ourselves from being overpowered by others. This is serious business.

But power can be sexy as well as serious. In S/M, we imitate the outward appearance of those grim real-world struggles for power, while building in the safeguards we need to keep us from being genuinely harmed. We believe that one purpose of S/M is to give us a way to enjoy the "upside" of power – its sexiness and drama – without bringing along its "downside." We've heard people say, "S/M is power games for fun instead of profit," and we agree.

BUILDING YOUR HEARTH. But isn't this desire for power potentially destructive? Good question. We live in a culture of powermongers. We see all around us the ways in which power is misused to abuse those who lack the power to protect themselves. So how can we, as tops, justify wanting to get our rocks off feeling like the most powerful person of all?

The popular stereotype of an S/M top is of an amoral, irresponsible and destructive person: that's what you'll see in the movies. But in our world, we find that playing with power is like playing with fire: yes, there is the possibility of destruction if we are not careful… and there is also enormous potential for constructive heat that warms and heals.

One way we make it safe to play with fire is to build an adequate fireplace, a container, a hearth. We call it "scene space," and we'll tell you about building it later. Another way we make it safe is to become wise in the ways of power (in BDSM, we have lots of opportunity!). An ethical top understands power and wields it constructively, responsibly and safely.

IS ALL POWER THE SAME? From feminist theory we have learned to distinguish between power-over and power-with. Power-over is a behavior pattern in which a person measures personal power by his or her ability to control others – you increase your own power by stealing power from somebody else. You can see this dynamic anywhere you see rigid hierarchies or chains of command, like the military or the corporate ladder.

In our experience, if your goal is to build yourself a sense of empowerment and solid self-esteem, stealing power doesn't work very well. You can't build a solid sense of self-esteem by stealing someone else's. When people strive to empower themselves this way they behave like addicts, constantly scheming to replenish a supply of power that never was truly theirs.

On the other hand, there is power-with. Power-with enables us to get more power by sharing our power with others. The more I have, the more you have. By supporting one another in our power, we get more for ourselves.

In any S/M exchange there is a sharing of power – the bottom lends his power to the top for the duration, the top adds power, and together they make a lot of voltage. The top gets to wield all this power, a form of extreme empowerment that is exciting, thrilling, hot, erotic, and, as we said before, very, very sexy.

So the first big payoff for topping is that we get to ride a whole lot of power, and to be, within the agreements and boundaries of a scene, enormously powerful.

SO WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?

We asked a number of tops what rewards they found in topping – thanks to all of them for the following list. Remember, when you read a list of other people's turn-ons, some of them will work for you and others will not. Don't worry – hardly anybody could like every single thing on this list; there are certainly a few that we ourselves have not experienced.

> • Empathy. Near the top of most people's lists is the "contact high," the turn-on we feel in empathy with the bottom's response to the physical, emotional and sexual intensity of the scene. One top describes this feeling as getting to surf the bottom's sensations.

> It is certainly a truism of S/M that the bottom is on the receiving end of most of the stimulation. If empathy didn't work so well we wonder if anybody would get turned on to topping in the first place, or if we would all decide that topping is all work and no fun. But the happy truth is that we can indeed get intensely stimulated from what our partner is feeling. Both of us are amazed, after a few hours of highly technical topping, when we get to the part of the scene where the focus is on our orgasm, to experience an enormous orgasm (or several of them) – as if it had been building bigger and bigger inside us, just waiting for us to have the time to have it.

> Empathy in BDSM presents a wonderful paradox: as tops in role, we are often called upon to present ourselves as cold, cruel and unfeeling, when in fact we are getting our rocks off on an empathy so profound that it can approach the telepathic. So we believe that, contrary to the opinions of the uninformed, consensual sadism, dominance and topping are primarily empathic activities.

> • Creativity. Another frequently cited delight of topping is the opportunity for creativity. We get to be the playwright, the producer, the director and the lead actor all at once. We are presented with a lump of malleable clay – the bottom – with which we can create the sculpture of our fantasies. We get to enjoy our inventiveness, our resourcefulness, our competence and our flashes of genius. We get to exercise our intuition as we figure out what will get to this particular bottom, or how to get them where we want them. We get to have our fantasy our way, to play dolls with real people: for a while we get to make the world look just the way we want it to. We play God.

> • Bigness. When we top we get to feel big. It may not be okay to act huge in ordinary social interactions, and you're usually not allowed to overwhelm people without their permission. When we top we put on a role that is about being important and powerful. And when our bottoms respond to us in our role as giants, when they offer us their trust, their adulation, and their belief in us as we see ourselves in our fantasies – when we see ourselves enormous in our bottoms' eyes, what a blazing hot mirror!

> • Nurturing. Janet remembers some of her childhood fantasies in which she was doing really terrible things to very small people, so she could cradle them like dolls afterwards. Nurturing is a big part of much of what we do, and the combination of kindness and cruelty is one of the fastest ways to take a bottom down the deepest.

> How does nurturing reward the top? Well, the nurturer, again, is big, and in play gets to be even bigger as we practice a kind of hyper-nurturance, enveloping our bottoms, almost as if we could engulf them. As nurturing tops we may play out the roles of Good Mommy or Good Daddy, maybe in a way we didn't get to experience in our childhood, so we get a chance to rewrite history. In scene space we can elicit and reenact trauma and also be the good parent who heals the wounds. Many of the most profound psychological scenes include intense nurturance. And in a world in which nurturing energy can be in short supply, it can be a delight to create an environment in which we get to taste a whole lot of it.

> • Bullying. In BDSM we get to act out from parts of ourselves that could not be described as nice: the bully, the villain, the inquisitor, the brute, the betrayer. Wicked, wicked, wicked. And popular. Check out mainstream movies, or fiction from best-sellers to classical mythology, for verification that everybody adores a really good villain. Those bad guys are big. Big enough to carry all the world's ills, and create all the pain and trouble a hungry bottom could want to suffer.

> And what could be more forbidden than our own nastiness? Most of us learned things from our families and our culture, or perhaps from our more primitive and essential natures, that aren't very civilized. Many people view almost all relationships as interactions between victims and oppressors, so in topping we manifest our oppressor so the bottom can be in victim role, and both of us can have a powerful and erotic experience. S/M provides a safe way to be in the world for our internalized oppressor, the precious bully within.

> • Control. Another powerful reward we get from topping is the opportunity to be in control. We can be control queens with permission – even encouragement. If you enjoy being served, the world seems like a much happier and calmer place when your morning cup of coffee is exactly the strength and temperature you prefer, with just the right amount of sugar and cream. And there's a keen joy in knowing that your needs and desires are echoing in your loved one's head, even when you're not there to express them.

> • Competence. Many tops who used to be primarily bottoms report a strong motivation in the chance to do it right: if you've ever been on the bottom thinking about how that knot is too loose, and if you ran another rope from just here to over there then the tension on that thigh would be released and the legs would be held perfectly open, you'll understand some of the joys of control.

> S/M is a technical sport, and a lot of us eroticize the chance to be competent, to generate perfectly balanced rope bondage, or an exquisitely timed sensory deprivation scene, or to choreograph a profound psychological journey. And when we do that well, we get to ride the scene and our bottoms – with our universe, for the moment, exactly as we want it. How gratifying.

> • Self-knowledge. A familiar story – "helpless captive," "shopping in the slave market," "punishing the naughty boy," those good old stories that snuggle us to sleep at night – can be the tip of the iceberg of profound psychological archetypes that we don't see clearly, like a dream or a vision. Playing these roles out can be the way in which we clarify our vision, and developing an S/M persona can become the process by which we learn more about who we are. Then our bottom's response becomes the mirror in which we see ourselves more clearly, and as we choreograph the bottom's experience and stretch both of our limits in scene, we constantly create new mirrors in which we can see yet more. The possibilities are indeed endless.

WHAT ABOUT BOTTOMS?

If some of the above tickles your fancy, chances are you would enjoy topping. So what about bottoms? What do they get out of this? Why would a person want to be beaten, humiliated, ordered around and otherwise inconvenienced so that you can feel big? Well, because bottoming is very, very sexy too. There is tremendous luxury in giving up responsibility and power to a top, in being small, possibly childlike, in having your behavior controlled, in getting nurtured while being subjected to all kinds of intense stimulations.

Fear can be arousing… the subjective experience of bondage can be so sensual as to approach a trance state… the chance to devote yourself to another's pleasure can soothe away your own cares… the controlled experience of pain in a safe and consensual scene can be tremendously rewarding.

Many of our activities enable us to use our bodies' ability to produce naturally occurring morphine-like neurotransmitters called "endorphins" in response to intense stimuli. In The New Bottoming Book we described in detail how sensations can be processed through the body to create an endorphin high, and how ecstatic experiences of intensity and openness transmute strong physical and emotional sensation into an altered state of consciousness that we experience as extreme pleasure.

Other rewards of bottoming include getting lots of attention, as well as acting out fantasies of helplessness and other forbidden emotions (needy, pathetic, dependent, guilt-ridden) that, like their toppish counterparts, would cause lots of trouble in the real world.

HOW ARE TOPS AND BOTTOMS INTERRELATED?

So tops and bottoms are interdependent – we need each other to play out our fantasy roles as well as to perform the physical acts that make us so happy. Bottoms need tops to push them off cliffs so they can fly, and tops need bottoms so they can ride the same winds, and that's how both can have their dreams come true. This is obvious… but the fantasies we play with are not necessarily obvious.

The nature of the dance of BDSM tends to polarize our roles to a greater extent than might be possible or healthy in the rest of our lives. Play pushes both top and bottom out to the far ends of the spectrum. Each player, in traveling further out, supports the other in going yet further. Thus as a wonderful scene progresses, the bottoms get smaller, the tops get bigger, and the larger the territory we encompass: we move to the outer ends of the spectrum, generating something like centrifugal force, spinning further and further out while holding each other safe and tight.

WHOSE FANTASY?

We want to mention here that not all scenes are based on fantasies, and especially not on fantasies that have detailed scripts or stories. Often the scene is based on an image, a feeling, an emotion, or a specific activity like bondage or flogging or anal sex.

One question that comes up when we actually sit down to negotiate a scene is whose fantasy are we playing, the top's or the bottom's? The answer is either, or both, or whatever the two of you together decide will work the best. Some bottoms are not comfortable talking about their fantasies for fear of seeming too directive, but we believe that it is a requirement for a skilled and supportive bottom to be able to tell you about her desires – as a top, you need some information to figure out what will make this scene work.

Good tops learn to support bottoms through the embarrassment of revealing their fantasies – and isn't embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with? Force that shy little thing to tell you what she wants!

Similarly, tops need to learn to speak comfortably about their fantasies and desires. As we'll see when we talk about negotiation, tops don't just walk up to bottoms and do whatever comes to mind. Scenes are negotiated, and constructed to satisfy both bodies and imaginations while remaining within the limits of both top and bottom. And to find out if your fantasy is within your bottom's limits, you have to discuss it at least enough to establish those limits (everybody enjoys a surprise, but it's not kosher to tattoo "Kilroy Was Here!" on your friend's ass without permission).

Some tops feel they lose authority as a top when they agree to play all or part of a bottom's fantasy, and are offended by the idea that they may be "servicing" the bottom. We think it's inappropriate to get your ego invested in your bottom's having no desire but to please you, or no ideas of his own. We would be equally critical of a bottom who didn't want to hear about the top's desires and needs, or was not interested in trying out his fantasy.

New players often start out with one fantasy they have desired and elaborated on for years, while more seasoned tops and bottoms may enjoy many roles in many scenarios. So when we play out a bottom's fantasy we have little to lose and lots to gain. When we stretch to realize someone else's story, we get to enlarge our repertoire, learn new skills, and perhaps discover yet more ways to get turned on. Sounds like a win-win situation to us.

So we see no need to compete over whose game we are playing – we'd rather play your wonderful ideas tonight and mine tomorrow, regardless of who's in charge. Once again, we see this as a collaborative endeavor, in which we play with power that is shared, for the pleasure and benefit of all parties in the game.

SYMBOLISM AND STRUCTURE

As Sir Stephen remarked in The Story of O, we are indeed fond of rituals. BDSM is often characterized by a certain formality or ritual quality that reminds us of opera gowns, dress uniforms, nuns' habits and other formal signifiers.

That's because play is to a very real degree about symbolism. The "kidnapping" we do for erotic pleasure reflects an arousing fantasy (since in our fantasy, the kidnappers do exactly what we want), and when we play we make sure the "kidnappers" are actually doing exactly what we want, a ritual of helplessness in the face of overwhelming stimulas. An actual kidnapping, with no concern for the feelings of the victim, would be a life-shattering reality. The symbol enables us to confront our simultaneous fear of, and attraction to, the genuine horrors of the world. But we need form and structure to clarify the distinction between the symbol and the thing itself.

The structure we build around our play creates a "firewall," a boundary that enables us to take vague and abstract ideas, emotions, roles and dynamics and pull them upwards into reality, where we can explore them and get turned on by them. We learn a lot about what the limits are, and where the boundaries are between scene space and the rest of our lives.

Wise players study the play of those who have gone before us, just as art students study the Old Masters (interesting choice of name, don't you think?). By building on the foundations that others have developed, we can build taller and stronger fireplaces for our flames so they can leap higher, hotter and safer.

Sometimes costumes help define our structure, telling us what role we're playing – both from the archetypes expressed (cop, pirate, doctor) and by the function of the garments (the daddy's belt, the vampire's fangs, the goddess's sky-high heels). These symbols are also a reminder that the top has made a commitment to remain aware, contained, in control of both partners – that she has agreed not to fall down on the floor and thrash in ecstasy until it is safe and consonant to do so. The bottom may not dress at all, indicating vulnerability and availability, or may have his essential nakedness accentuated by symbols like collars or corsets, or by clothes which can be removed by the top as part of a spiritual and physical stripping away of defenses.

Bondage, even symbolic bondage such as a loop of thread holding thumbs together, creates a structure which controls the bottom's behavior and defines roles. So are the names which we call one another – "sir" and "boy," "mistress" and "slave," "milady" and "sirrah," "Spot" and "woof woof!"

Sometimes our structure is defined by logistics: time, physical abilities, environments. We enter the dungeon and become our "other selves," then leave it and become our day-to-day selves again. Our time agreements may be our form: we'll play until 3:00, then go get something to eat. Or we may agree to play until one or the other or both of us has had an orgasm, or has reached some mutually agreed upon level of stimulation.

All these structures are there to help you get as big as you can, and your bottom as small as he can, while ensuring your safe return to your normal size when you need to go back. Like Alice's looking glass, they enable you to wander safely through the topsy-turvy dreamscapes of fantasy, where pain is pleasure and cruelty is love.


Input:
 Title: "Understanding the Role of a Top in BDSM: Finding Your Top Persona and Setting Boundaries"

Prompt:

Write a detailed section for a nonfiction book about the role of a top in BDSM. The section should discuss the following:

1. Finding Your Top Persona: Explain how a top's persona in a BDSM scene can come from various sources, such as deep-seated fantasies, popular culture, real-world torture, and childhood memories. Encourage readers to overcome any embarrassment they might feel about their fantasies and to explore their imagination. Provide an example of a situation where a seemingly simple fantasy led to an enjoyable scene.

2. The Importance of Roles: Although not all scenes require a specific role, they often have a certain flavor or atmosphere that can be described using role-playing terms. For instance, a scene with a harsh tone and pushed limits might have the flavor of a torture or interrogation scene, while a nurturing scene might have a nice-mommy or nice-daddy flavor.

3. Boundaries: Discuss the concept of edge play and how every player is an edge player in their own way, trying to define and explore the boundary between enjoyment and genuine discomfort. Emphasize that the only criterion for good play is that everyone involved gets what they want from it, regardless of the intensity level.

4. Safewords: Explain the importance of safewords as a way to communicate when there's a problem or when something isn't working during a scene. Encourage the use of short, easy-to-pronounce words and remind readers that tops can safeword too. Provide an example of a situation where a top had to safeword and how it was handled.

5. Dealing with the Desire to Push Limits: Address the common desire for tops to come closer to the gray area between consent and nonconsent as they gain more experience. Suggest ways to indulge these desires without harming or alienating their partner, such as spending time thinking objectively about the fantasies driving the desire to push limits and communicating openly with their partner about them.

6. The Dangers of Labeling: Caution against using terms like "real submissive" or "true Master" and explain how these phrases often mean "someone who plays in a way I approve of." Encourage readers to acknowledge and honor the limits, desires, fantasies, and power of both themselves and their partners.

Response:
3

WHAT DO TOPS DO?

FINDING YOUR TOP PERSONA. As a top, you might be a sadistically vicious interrogator, or a sweetly sorrowful parent who's only spanking this naughty boy for his own good. You could be a mad scientist out of a horror film, an eight-year-old girl blackmailing her babysitter, Simon Legree, the Phantom of the Opera, or the evil caliph keeping his harem in order. You could be Captain Bligh, Captain Picard, Captain Hook, Captain America or even Captain Kangaroo, because the ways to be a top are limited only by your imagination.

Most of our fantasies come from very deep places inside us – Janet blushes to admit that she still has toppy fantasies about the villains on the old campy "Batman" TV show that aired in her impressionable adolescence. We draw our fantasies from the powerful archetypes found in popular culture, like movies and TV shows; from the real-world torture and rape that simultaneously fascinate and horrify us; from well-thumbed reminiscences of our own childhoods – in short, from almost any place our monkey curiosity carries us.

Fantasies are seldom sophisticated, ambiguous or even very pretty. They almost never contain negotiation or safewords (these are "safety nets" that get built into our real-world play to help make our fantasies safer to enact). For these reasons, and because we know that wanting to hurt, control or humiliate people is not OK, we may feel very ashamed or embarrassed about our fantasies. But once we overcome that embarrassment, and discover how many other people have similar feelings, our fantasy world becomes a hot and happy playground.

> During one of our play dates, we originally had no particular scenario in mind. But during the one-hour drive between our houses, Janet was idly fantasizing about being the matron in a Victorian workhouse full of girl orphans. With no small embarrassment, she shared that fantasy with Dossie over lunch. Dossie happened to be wearing a sundress that made her look about fourteen, and the roles and scenario fell easily into place from there: Dossie became the new little orphan recently brought into the workhouse, and "Miss Janet, ma'am" spent a happy couple of hours showing her "how things is done around 'ere," and demonstrating the dreadful canings she would get if she ever misbehaved.

Advertising people refer to radio as "theater of the mind," because a few well-chosen words and sound effects are all it takes to create an entire scenario inside the head of the listener. We think S/M is theater of the mind, too. It's a rare treat when you can set up a scene with full props and costumes and dialogue; more often, a couple of items – a dashing hat, say, or a flogger that looks like something Basil Rathbone might have used on Errol Flynn – is all it takes to create and maintain an illusion. And, as the top, you get to be playwright, set designer, costume designer, director and audience.

DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE A ROLE? A lot of our best S/M scenes have been done without recourse to any particular role – we're not Harriet Marwood or Ming the Merciless, we're simply us.

Still, any given scene has a "flavor" that can often be described by describing a role. A harsh scene in which limits get pushed, in which the top acts as though she really doesn't care what happens to the bottom, may have the flavor of a torture or interrogation scene. A very nurturing scene, in which the top is giving the bottom a lot of "there, there, you can take just a little more" messages, may have more of a nice-mommy or nice-daddy flavor.

A lot of people are bashful about overt role-playing, and others simply aren't turned on by it – it seems false to them. But, just as a role-playing scene where the bottom wants to be a horsie and the top wants to be Superman is likely to run into problems, a scene where one partner wants to humiliate and the other wants to be nurtured is probably not going to work too well. So even if you're not into playing your roles overtly, it's important to be clear about what flavor of scene you want. And when we talk in this book about a "daddy scene" or an "interrogation scene," we may be talking about a scene with overt roles, props and dialogue, or we may be describing the overall flavor of the scene.

WHERE ARE THE BOUNDARIES?

As you can see, many of the roles in this book reflect real-world power relationships of various intensities. Because we are eroticized to power, we may begin to feel that we want our play to be more and more "real" – to creep closer to the edge where the realities of consent and power begin to blur.

S/M folk sometimes describe people who play in that blurry area as "edge players." But we think all players are edge players.

We're all playing in a topsy-turvy world where pain equals pleasure, where fear equals arousal, where "no! no!" equals "YES!!!" Each of us may be, in our own way, trying to define the boundary where our bottoms' enjoyment of "not wanting something" turns into really not wanting it, and trying to explore and, perhaps, alter that boundary. The player whose play seems so light that you wouldn't even define it as S/M is an edge player when she is in her own way doing something that's difficult or scary or painful, in an attempt to turn the unacceptable into the erotic: playing at his or her edge.

Janet once did a scene with a novice bottom:

> He'd never played at all before, and so I set his first scene up to be very lightweight: I tied him to the bed, blindfolded him, and simply gave him mild, sensuous sensations with different textures – fur, leather, my fingernails and so on – all over his body. If you'd asked me beforehand, I'd have told you such a scene would not be much of a turn-on for me; I was doing it as a favor to him. But as I caressed him, he began to release some deep emotions: he giggled, he writhed, he sobbed… he was just one great big live nerve ending. And I found that I was getting very turned on, because while the sensations I was giving him weren't much, they were eliciting such powerful and primal responses from him. He was getting stroked with a scrap of fur, but it was edge play for him – and that made it edge play for me too.

We deplore what Dossie has dubbed "the hierarchy of hip about heaviness." In this form of craziness, a player whose forays into branding/bullwhips/whatever have been only moderately successful is deemed superior to one whose light spankings or erotic bondage sessions have left his or her partner glowing like a 200-watt bulb. To us, the only criterion for good play is: did everyone involved get what they wanted from it? If the answer to that question is "yes," the session gets an automatic A-plus – whether it was a handspanking or a needle suspension.

We know one player whose mantra is "This is not a contest. This is not a contest" – repeated to himself every time he begins to try to exceed another player's accomplishments. We think this is a good mantra for us all.

SAFEWORDS. A safeword is a word agreed upon by the players in a scene that means stop, there's a problem, we need to change something, something isn't working, someone's in trouble. We establish a code word because many of us become incoherent when we are very excited – we recommend safewords that are short and easy to pronounce when breathing hard. We use code because many scenes are based on a fantasy of nonconsent, and yelling "nononononono" may be part of the script.

Tops safeword too. Dossie tells the story of a time when she safeworded out of a major scene:

> My lover had wanted me to brand her for a long time, and we had planned, collected information, researched everybody else's experience and our own personal symbolism, and set up to do a ritual branding. We lived in the country, and had invited friends to come down to support this event, so there were witnesses. I had been practicing branding and felt somewhat insecure about my facility with the procedure, but spent the morning up in the ring of redwood trees over a very hot hibachi gamely branding slices of potato and turkey parts until I felt I could touch her with hot metal and not burn all the way through her. During this time, the houseguests were keeping her amused, and when we started up she was already entranced. Our ritual included a flogging to bring up the endorphins before the actual branding, but when I started to flog her it became apparent that something was wrong. Nothing I did seemed to be right for her, a very gentle stroke was too hard, she was not comfortable and neither was I. She wanted to go ahead anyway, but I decided that I could not brand her when I couldn't make connection, and that there was no way that I was going to put a serious and permanent mark on her body when things were feeling unpleasant. So I safeworded, big bad brander that I am. I felt like an idiot. Here we had brought all these people together and I had chickened out. And my lover wasn't happy about it, and it took awhile to bring her back down onto the planet from her tranced-out space – it was dire. I must have apologized forty or fifty times to our guests, who were very supportive and reassuring, bless their hearts. I reminded myself over and over, as I remind you now: it is possible, actually not very difficult, to have an experience of extreme public embarrassment, live through it, and be fine afterwards. Which we were. I now think the first time was a rehearsal, and perhaps we both needed to know that we could back out. About a month later, we got together with two friends and pulled the branding off without a hitch, and with much delight.

Whenever a player safewords, this is an occasion for mutual support. We understand that nobody safewords from a happy place, and that all of our egos feel frail and kind of runty when we need to back out of a scene. It is completely unethical to respond with scorn or ridicule to a person who has safeworded: S/M is not a competition, we are not playing against each other.

As tops, we have noticed that if we are having a good time and our bottom safewords, our initial feelings may not be happy. Whaddaya mean you don't like that? I do all this work and you don't appreciate it? I'm hot for being in control and you want me to stop? We have felt real anger and felt challenged in our top role… and, on a deeper level, we have felt put down, hurt and rejected. It is okay to have these feelings. It is not okay to act on them. Take three deep breaths and everybody start taking care of each other.

Sometimes bottoms get so deeply engaged in a scene that they fail to safeword, or forget, or so profoundly believe in the fantasy that it doesn't occur to them: many of the techniques we play with, like interrogation, function in the real world to undermine volition. Dossie remembers a scene in which a top offered her a choice of something or other: "I felt very confused. Some distant part of me vaguely remembered having made choices, but the response from my state of consciousness at that time was, Choose? I am not a thing that chooses." So then what is the top's responsibility?

If a bottom does not safeword and you don't pick up on what's going on, and this will happen if you play long enough and well enough, there is no blame. However, it is still your responsibility to monitor for physical safety as best you can. As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms. To this end we check in regularly to make sure that things are going the way we think they are, and we constantly monitor the physical and emotional safety of our bottoms. If a bottom is beyond safewording, and you as the top feel unsure about how far you should go, it is your responsibility to slow down or stop the scene and get into communication with the bottom to make sure you have informed consent. If you have to bring the bottom back into reality to do this, please remember that you helped get them into that altered state in the first place, so presumably you can help get them back there again as soon as you are sure of what's going on.

And just because someone safeworded doesn't mean that the scene has to be over. There may be times when the problem that brought either of you to safeword is so overwhelming that carrying on doesn't feel like the right thing right now – but most often we find that after we've dealt with whatever the difficulty is, we're still terrifically turned on, with the added bonus of a shared intimacy.

WHEN YOU ITCH TO GO FURTHER. Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between "enough" and "too much," between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we're craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.

We will assume that you who are reading this book are not about to do any such thing: if you feel that you are in danger of actually harming someone, please seek help from a therapist or counselor right away. But when you're feeling frustrated by partners who want to stop before you're ready to, or who don't want to play the way you want to, it's easy to let the fantasies grow so strong that they begin to seem like realities. The good news is that, with patience, skill, mutual knowledge and trust, and sometimes a bit of compromise, there are usually ways to indulge those desires without harming, alienating or losing your partner.

We suggest that you spend a little time thinking objectively, if you can, about the fantasies that are driving your desire to push limits. In your fantasy, what is the turn-on? How can you tell, for example, that the bottom has been driven past limits? Is she begging, crying, screaming? Is there physical evidence – blood, urine, tears?

When you have a pretty clear picture of what that turn-on looks like to you, you get to the embarrassing part: describing it to your partner. You may find, to your surprise, that your bottom has been having similar fantasies, and needs only your permission to go into the headspace you've both been craving. (Begging for mercy, for example, is difficult for many bottoms, who may be worried that they will beg so effectively that you'll actually stop. Knowing that you're willing to keep going unless you hear a safeword can feel very freeing.) Or your bottom may be willing to play-act the fantasy in the way that turns you on – he may find that the role starts to seem very real and very arousing once he gives it a try.

We sometimes meet tops and bottoms who want to do scenes without safewords, reasoning that it is impossible to "really" push limits when the bottom can stop the scene anytime she wants to. A safeword is simply a code we use to communicate the status of consent. Responsible tops play consensually – the safeword is your safety net, to let you know that's what you're doing.

In our experience, the most common problem is the opposite one: bottoms who earnestly hang in there way beyond their limits and safeword too late rather than too soon. But remember – bottoms are there with you because they want to explore their limits, and they, not you, are the best judges of where those limits are. The safest and most growthful way to expand limits is with time, trust and practice: as partners play together and learn more about each other's communications style and physical limitations, they tend to use encoded safewords less and less frequently. But even partners who have been together for years need safewords to signal the rare but critical situations where one partner or the other has a genuine physical or emotional emergency such as illness, injury, unexpected rage, age regression and the like.

IF YOU'RE DOING IT, IT'S "REAL"

Both of us cringe, and have been known to get a bit snappish, when we hear phrases that start with "real" or "true" – "real submissive," "true Master" and so on. When you hear someone say one of those phrases, we suggest you mentally translate them into what they really mean – "someone who plays in a way I approve of." Usually, the next thing we hear is that so-and-so is not a "real" top or not "truly" submissive. Ick.

Often, people who dismiss others as not being "real" are expressing scorn for limits which are both real and realistic, and which exist (acknowledged or unacknowledged) in all safe play. When you set yourself up an unattainable ideal role, and subtract points from your estimation of your friends and yourself whenever anyone falls short of that ideal, we think you are setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment.

The player who does a light session twice a year is doing something extremely "real" – she is giving away or taking as much power as feels safe, healthy and sexy to him or her. So is the most extreme 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week owner and slave couple.

S/M is about contradiction, about paradox. A bottom who is (or pretends to be) without desires, fantasies or power is an unsafe and unhealthy bottom. A top who is (or pretends to be) without vulnerability, compromise or connection is an unsafe and unhealthy top.

If you can't understand these paradoxes – the ways in which symbolic powerlessness can empower and symbolic cruelty can sensitize – please sit down and think them through carefully. We hope that when you're through thinking, you'll realize how destructive concepts like "real dominant" and "true slave" can be, and discover the far greater joys that lie in play in which everybody's needs and wants are acknowledged, honored and enjoyed.


Input:
 Title: "A Detailed Account of a Sensation Scene at a BDSM Party"

Prompt:

Write a detailed account of a sensation scene between two experienced female players, Janet and her friend, B. The account should include the following:

1. Background: Provide some background on the relationship between Janet and B, including their sexual orientations, roles, and previous play experiences together.

2. Preparation and Consent: Describe the discussions they had before the scene, including the types of play they agreed upon, their safewords, and any boundaries or limitations.

3. Setting and Equipment: Detail the setting of the scene at a BDSM party and the bondage equipment they chose, such as a cable-spool table with handles.

4. The Scene: Describe the various sensation play activities that took place during the scene, including the use of different types of floggers, a strap, a butt plug, and a birch rod. Include details on how each implement affected B and how Janet adjusted her approach based on B's reactions.

5. Emotions and Reactions: Share the emotions and reactions from both Janet and B throughout the scene, such as moments of discomfort, arousal, and pleasure.

6. Climax and Aftercare: Detail the climax of the scene, including the use of canes and the final orgasm. Describe the aftercare that took place, including giggling, cuddling, and food/drink.

7. Follow-up: Mention any follow-up communication between Janet and B after the scene, such as an email discussing their experience.

Response:
interlude 1

A sensation scene at a party, played by Janet and a female friend.

B. and I are close friends, but had played together before only once, in a very limited way; this would be our first full-on scene together. We are both het-identified bi women, both experienced players, and while we're both switches, she is more comfortable in the bottom role. I knew from our discussions ahead of time that she enjoyed flagellation of all kinds, particularly on her butt, and that she was fond of play piercing and of both vaginal and anal penetration. While she is comfortable with dominant/submissive roleplay, she doesn't need it to enjoy straight sensation play; since it isn't a preference of mine, we decided to pass on any kind of mental control and simply go for the "high" of strong sensation. We agreed on safewords and were ready to go.

We arrived at the party somewhat early, so we had our choice of bondage equipment. To start out, we chose a large cable-spool table, padded with vinyl and surrounded by handles. B. told me that bondage makes her feel uncomfortably confined and that she would prefer simply to be told to hold still. She hopped onto the table and I told her to lie face down, placing a thick pad of paper towels under her pussy to keep her juices off the equipment. I unfastened her garters and took down her stockings, but left her corset in place; her butt was my target for this part of the evening.

I started out with a heavy soft suede flogger and began gently flogging her butt and upper thighs. I could tell she was hardly feeling these strokes, but I built them up fairly slowly anyway, swinging overhand from her left side, then from her right. By the time the strokes got fairly hard, she was beginning to get turned on, arching her butt up to meet the suede and moaning loudly. I moved down to her feet and pulled them apart to spread her legs, then began flogging her butt from below in a figure-eight configuration, quite hard. Her response grew vivid enough that I was pretty sure she'd come if I kept it up, and I didn't want that to happen yet. So I finished with a few more strokes and switched to a harsher, stingier braided cat, using the same pattern of first from the left side, then from the right, then in a figure-eight from below. I thought that this sensation would be more painful and less sexual for her, and judging from her reaction, it was… but she was obviously still having a good time. (It was somewhere around this time that I moved up to her head to see how she was doing, and she saw that I was laughing and began to get a little uptight, thinking that I was laughing at her. I said, "No, I'm just laughing because you're so unbelievably fucking wonderful.")

I wanted her next sensation to be solider, not as spread out as the multi-tailed implements I'd been using so far. I got out a heavy leather strap and began swinging that from the side. She was obviously working pretty hard to handle that sensation; she started rolling from side to side to avoid the blows, so I used my left hand to press the small of her back down toward the table while I whipped with my right. I wasn't sure if being held down physically would trigger her aversion to bondage, so I watched her reactions carefully. It seemed OK, and I was enjoying it, so I kept it up. The sensation of the strap didn't seem to be turning her on much, though, and I wanted to keep her sexual arousal high. I put a glove on my right hand and lubed a couple of fingers and began to explore her asshole. One finger went in effortlessly, and so did two. She was moaning and wriggling against my fingers – OK, great. I got a medium-sized butt plug out of my bag, stretched a condom over it, lubed it up, and inserted it. It went in with no difficulty at all, and she reacted with dramatic and visible arousal. I resumed strapping her, pausing to wiggle the plug a bit whenever the balance between pain and arousal seemed to be tipping too far.

Next I got out an experiment – a birch rod (a bundle of long whippy birch switches bound together at the handle and spreading out into a broomlike spray). She'd never felt a birch before, and I'd only used one a couple of times before, so we weren't sure how this would work out. Since she'd been reacting more positively to thuddy toys than to stingy ones, my guess was that she'd have a hard time with something as stingy as the birch. I started hitting her ass with it. She went quite still, her back arched, hands braced against the table and shoulders and head up. Obviously I'd guessed right – this was a tough sensation for her. But she rose to the challenge. I went a little harder. Her face was working with the effort to process the sensation. I was enjoying birching her a lot, but I wanted this scene to be more about pleasure/pain than straight pain, so I didn't push it too hard. I rubbed and massaged her butt a bit to diffuse the sting, and told her she'd been great.

Time for something more fun. I took out a clublike rod of heavy Teflon – a thuddy instrument that has to be used extremely carefully, since it could break bones with a missed or overly hard blow. I tried a couple of not-too-hard strokes on her lower butt and she began to moan almost immediately. I hit a bit harder and she began to writhe. Experimentally, I tapped the base of the butt plug with the club a couple of times and she began to act like she was about to come, so I grabbed the plug and began to wiggle and thrust it. She came almost immediately, loudly and enthusiastically. I alternated hitting her with the club and getting her off with the plug a couple more times until she was panting and limp.

At last, the grand finale – the canes, which I knew were her favorite and mine. I started with my lightest cane, a medium-width whippy rattan one. I gave her one trial moderate-strength stroke, and when I saw her reaction I knew we were onto something. I hit harder, mostly giving her about fifteen seconds between strokes to process the sensation, but occasionally making her work harder by giving her two or even three in quick succession. Her moans were low-pitched and the motion of her hips told me that she was finding the cane strokes erotic. But she'd taken quite a bit by now, and since I didn't really know too much about how well her body recovered from heavy beatings, I didn't want to push my luck, so I began to think about winding the session down.

I switched to a different cane – a manmade one, a bit thicker and quite a bit heavier in weight. I gave her a dozen or so blows with it, walking from one side of the table to the other between strokes so that she had plenty of time to work with the sensation. I reached for the butt plug again, manipulating it with my right hand and pressing against her pubic mound with my left, bringing her to one final giant orgasm. Then I told her she could choose a number between two and ten to receive with the heavy cane, and then we'd be done. She chose four. I gave them to her as hard as she could take, and felt the endorphins rush in her and me as she stretched to meet my challenge. And then the scene was over.

We both got caught up in a tremendous fit of the giggles, composed of equal parts, I think, of endorphins, relief and triumph (we'd done it!). I got up on the table with her and held her and we smooched and giggled for a while. When she felt ready to get up, I helped her off the table and swept the toys any old which way into the bag (I could always reorganize them later) and went back out into the social area looking for food and drink. We spent the next hour or so cuddling, nibbling, chatting and watching other scenes together.

The next morning, before I had a chance to call her to see how she was doing, I found an e-mail waiting for me raving about what a wonderful time she'd had and how colorful her backside was looking. It felt great to receive it.


Input:
 Title: "Rights and Responsibilities of a Top in BDSM Play"

Prompt:

Write a detailed account of the rights and responsibilities of a top in BDSM play. The account should include the following:

1. Introduction: Begin with a quote about power and responsibility, emphasizing the importance of precision, fairness, and humility in wielding power.

2. General Responsibilities: Discuss the general responsibilities a top takes on when deciding to engage in BDSM play, focusing on the potential impact on both the top's and the bottom's physical and emotional well-being.

3. The Top's Bill of Rights: Present a "Bill of Rights" for dominants, sadists, and all those who engage in BDSM play, outlining the rights they have in order to create satisfying scenes and ensure mutual support and consent.

4. Specific Rights: Detail specific rights that tops have, such as the right to clear communication, support from their partner, nurturance, having their needs met, responsiveness from their partner, and constructive feedback.

5. Real-life Example: Include a real-life example of a scene where the top felt emotionally vulnerable and needed nurturing, illustrating the importance of adequate support and care.

6. The Top's List of Responsibilities: Outline the responsibilities that a top takes on when engaging in BDSM play, including knowing and stating their needs, wants, and limits, following through on promises, ensuring physical safety for themselves and their partner, being prepared for emergencies, caring for equipment, and ensuring emotional safety for themselves and their partner.

7. Conclusion: Summarize the importance of understanding and upholding both the rights and responsibilities of a top in BDSM play, emphasizing the role of communication, consent, and care in creating safe and enjoyable scenes.

Response:
4

RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

> "It is always wrong to wield power if you are not prepared to accept the consequences for your actions and do the work it takes to use your strength and authority with precision and fairness. A good leader is many people's servant. If being trained to become a perfect servant sounds too humiliating, you are not strong enough to withstand the temptations of wielding power."1

Lighting up dark places – your own and your bottom's – is a tremendous responsibility and a tremendous turn-on. While you may top playfully, you should never do so frivolously; your partner's physical and emotional well-being, and your own, are on the line. This chapter is about the kinds of responsibility you are agreeing to take on when you decide to top, and about the kinds of rewards you have a right to expect in return.

THE TOP'S BILL OF RIGHTS

We the players of the BDSM communities, in order to form more perfect scenes, establish arousal, ensure domestic titillation, provide for mutual support, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of sadomasochism to ourselves and our play partners, do ordain and establish this Bill of Rights for dominants, sadists and all those who put their self-image and reputation on the line to get themselves and their partners off.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO CLEAR COMMUNICATION. Before, during and after your play, you are entitled to receive as much information about your partner's needs, wants and limits as he is capable of giving you. He doesn't get to withhold information for fear of scaring you off, to exaggerate his abilities, or to pretend not to have limits (we all have limits). On the other hand, he can't share information he doesn't have; novices may not know much about their limits, but can still probably tell you quite a bit about their fantasies. Asking you to top without as much information as you can get is like asking a contractor to build a house without seeing the blueprint.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXPECT SUPPORT FROM YOUR PARTNER – WHETHER YOU'RE IN SCENE SPACE OR OUT OF IT. As we sit here writing this chapter, we're looking in our crystal ball, and it tells us that you're going to make mistakes. We wish the lottery were this easy to predict.

When those inevitable mistakes happen, you have the right to expect that your partner will work with you to help correct the situation promptly and efficiently, so that the two of you can go on playing – or, if things have gone too far awry to finish that particular scene, to go on being friends and to play again another time. Unless your screwup is malicious or unforgivably careless, you have the right to mutual non-blaming – to the assumption that you were doing your best and simply made an error.

And you have a right to your partner's friendship and support at those times when you don't feel like being a top: sometimes we all need simply to be held, sympathized with, taken out to lunch, or maybe even to get some pain or bondage for ourselves – and a bottom who withdraws from you the minute you take off your fetish gear or put down your whip isn't supporting those very human and essential needs.

YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO BE NURTURED. People's needs for nurturance vary widely, but most of us need to feel taken care of at least sometimes – even, perhaps especially, tops. We remember a scene we did together:

> In this scene, Dossie was a prom queen, all in taffeta and rhinestones, and Janet was the street hood who kidnaps her from the prom at knifepoint to torture and rape her. It was a very hot scene, played at a party in front of dozens of eager spectators. Janet found herself becoming a very scary "hoodlum," conscienceless and full of anger, and the scene became charged with frightening, sinister – and very hot – energy. After duly binding, stripping, beating, torturing and fucking Dossie, Janet held her and brought her nicely back down to earth. Then we went upstairs for something to eat. In the food room, Janet, who was by this point trembling and a bit weepy, sat at Dossie's feet and said plaintively, "Could you just pet me for a while, please?" Dossie stroked Janet's hair and rubbed her neck and shoulders until Janet felt quite sure that Dossie wasn't still seeing her as the nasty hoodlum, and still accepted and liked her after experiencing such a dark and shadowy self.

The moral is that accessing your shadow, as a top or as a bottom, can put you into a state of tremendous emotional vulnerability, and you may need lots of nurturing and acceptance while you are in that state. If you're not getting the kind of nurturing you want, you should ask for it – needing to be taken care of does not make you less of a top, it makes you more of a human being.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO GET YOUR NEEDS MET. A footrub? A sinkful of clean dishes? An earful of shrieks? An orgasm? Whatever it is that you need to feel like topping has been worthwhile for you, you're entitled to get that (the reverse, of course, is also true – your bottom has the right to expect to get his or her needs met as well).

But you can't expect your bottom to read your mind. If you like to hear begging, for example, say so – your bottom may have previously played with a top who insisted on stoical silence, and only be doing what she thinks is right. Some tops may have come of age in a milieu where genital sex is an expected part of S/M, and be dismayed and annoyed by a bottom who doesn't automatically work to get his or her top off – others could be outraged by a bottom who tries to get inside their leathers without express direction. You have to ask if you expect to get.

It sounds obvious to say that a top should tell his or her bottom how to meet his or her needs – after all, isn't that what a top does? But we've found it isn't necessarily that simple: asking for what you really want, particularly if it isn't part of a standard S/M scenario, can feel vulnerable and embarrassing. All we can tell you about that is that the payoff is, or should be, worth the vulnerability: that a scene where you and your bottom both get your needs met is almost certain to be more satisfying for both of you, and to lead to more and hotter scenes later.

YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO RESPONSIVENESS. Very few tops enjoy pouring their energy and toppiness into a bottom who's so stoical that they can't tell whether or not he's enjoying it. When we top, we enjoy a bottom who gives us lots of hot sexy screaming, moaning, trembling and/or writhing, preferably with a wet pussy or hard dick for reinforcement. Other tops like watching a bottom struggle to maintain composure under stress (although a bottom who maintained composure too perfectly probably wouldn't be very much fun to play with). Again, ask for what you want.

You also have a right to verbal response during the scene if you want it. When we ask "How are you doing?" or "Is this working for you?," we all like to hear answers in the affirmative. However, always getting an affirmative answer, or getting an affirmative answer in the face of evidence to the contrary (wrap marks on a belly, for example), leaves us clueless, foundering and frustrated. If having a bottom chirp "Pardon me, sir or ma'am, but could you hit a little lower, please?" seems disrespectful to you, tell him or her to ask permission to speak first – and, upon receiving it, to give you the information you need. (We like to thank our bottoms when they give us important information.)

YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK. At some point within a day or two after your scene, you and your bottom will probably want to do some talking about how it went – what worked and didn't work for you and for her, what you might like to do differently next time, and an overview of how the scene was for both of you. During this "debriefing" – which we think is essential to both your relationship with your partner and your growth as a top – you have a right to helpful, constructive criticism. Your bottom should tell you about anything that didn't go well in such a way that you know how you can do it more successfully next time, and she should also tell you about the stuff that did go well, giving you lots of nice ego strokes along the way. Similarly, any feedback you have for your bottom also needs to be supportive and constructive. A bottom who blames you for your mistakes, tears down your performance without offering constructive suggestions, or shuts down and simply won't tell you what his or her experience was like, is not a bottom we suggest you play with twice.

THE TOP'S LIST OF RESPONSIBILITIES

Like all rights, top's rights carry a burden of responsibility. Here are some of the responsibilities we think you take on when you agree to top:

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR KNOWING AND STATING YOUR NEEDS, WANTS AND LIMITS. When you're pretending to be Attila the Hun, Scourge of the Dungeon, it can be easy to forget that tops have limits too. But doing scenes that make you feel incompetent or disgusted or like a bad person is a really good way to lose track of the fact that we're supposed to be having fun here, and to burn yourself out.

Everybody has needs, wants and limits. If you're new at this, you may discover some of yours by tripping over them – by doing a scene and discovering that you feel just awful, either because of something you did that you shouldn't have, or because of something you didn't do that you should have. But even if you're an old hand, your limits may change over time: Janet spent years with a strong limit around breaking skin during play, but then discovered play piercing and started sticking needles into her friends every chance she gets.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR FOLLOWING THROUGH ON YOUR PROMISES. When your play date is coming up, you may hear a chorus of "yahbut" voices in your head – "Yah, but I'm not feeling toppy." "Yah, but I didn't get a good night's sleep last night." "Yah, but I've got a lot to do afterwards and I don't want to tire myself out." "Yah, but what if I fuck up?" While we understand that pre-scene nervousness (which is often the part of you that's literally "scared of your own shadow" – see Chapter 15) can be daunting, bottoms are driven insane by tops who promise playdates and don't follow through; this sort of approach/avoidance behavior is unfair and irresponsible.

If you're feeling like you want to cancel or no-show on a playdate, please don't, unless your reasons are excellent. Go, and use some of the suggestions you'll read in Chapter 9 to help yourself get turned on and into top space. We don't think you'll regret it.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN AND YOUR PARTNER'S PHYSICAL SAFETY. Your bottom may or may not be able to tell you if something you're doing is causing physical harm. She may be so high on endorphins that he simply can't tell what's happening, or may have gotten non-verbal and forgotten how to communicate. If you're not sure whether or not your bottom is able to communicate, you'll have to take the responsibility for initiating the communication. Questions like "How are your hands feeling" or "Some of these strokes seem to be causing some bruises; is that OK" or "Are you getting dizzy" are perfectly all right, and if your bottom doesn't want to answer them, you should probably order her to.

Janet did a scene once where her top did a good job of taking care of her physical safety:

> We were at a costume party where I was wearing a dress made out of imitation chain mail with nothing underneath – so I'd been sitting on a rough surface all night. I got naked, and my friend started spanking me with his hand, then with a hairbrush. I was having a swell time and could happily have gone on all night… but suddenly he stopped, said, "I think you're losing some hide here," and ended the scene (against my vociferous protests). But sure enough, when I got home that evening, one cheek of my ass bore a large raw blister that took several weeks of cleaning and bandaging to heal properly. If my friend had kept on going as I demanded, the combination of the rough chain mail and the heavy spanking might have done serious damage to my skin – and I'd never have known it until it was too late.

Sobriety is also important. While different players' standards vary – some folks feel OK about very light use of intoxicants in scene, while others do not – it is certain that if you are too stoned or drunk to drive a car or go to work, you should not be playing. We urge extreme conservatism in the use of intoxicants during any kind of sex, and most especially during BDSM: there is probably nothing you do that demands better judgment and emotional balance, and using chemicals to impair those qualities strikes us as a very bad idea. Besides, why on earth would you want to blur such a wonderful experience?

Safer sex is a subset of physical safety. Part of safeguarding your bottom's, and your own, physical well-being is making sure that neither of you takes anything away from the session that you don't want – an unplanned pregnancy or a nuisance infection or a deadly disease. Opinions change monthly as to how risky various sexual and S/M activities are in terms of disease transmission; we urge conservatism – when in doubt, use a latex or polyurethane barrier. Don't assume that your partner's definition of safer sex is the same as yours: discuss beforehand which activities each of you thinks are risk-free enough to do without a barrier, which are risky enough to require a barrier, and which are too risky to do at all. If one of you has more conservative standards than the other, that person sets the standards, regardless of who's topping and who's bottoming – it is entirely unacceptable to subject someone to a physical risk to which they haven't consented. The important thing is not the latest statistics or scientific study; the important thing is that you both feel safe.

Take care of your own safety, too: don't play with strangers in private, and the first few times you play with a new partner, tell a trusted friend where you are and who you're with (and make sure your play partner knows that you've taken that precaution).

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS. Not everything that can go wrong in an S/M scene has anything to do with S/M. As part of taking care of your bottom's (and your own) physical safety, you should have the equipment, training and ability to handle real-world emergencies ranging from quakes and fires through heart attacks and seizures.

If you don't know what you'd do if the lights went out, if your bottom suddenly became seriously ill, or if you inadvertently started a fire in the playroom, you shouldn't do the scene until you've figured these things out.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR CARING FOR YOUR EQUIPMENT. If you own your own whips, sex toys, bondage equipment and so on, you are responsible for seeing that these items are carefully selected, well maintained and properly cleaned. Aside from the aesthetics of the situation (dirty or uncared-for toys are a sign of a sloppy top), poor quality or poorly maintained toys are downright dangerous. We know one top who broke a finger trying to grab a whirling handle on a poorly designed winch, and we've heard many stories of bottoms pulling inadequately attached eye-bolts out of the wall and sustaining nasty falls.

While the jury is still out regarding whether or not HIV can be transmitted via uncleaned sex toys, it is certain that various other nasties, including hepatitis C, can be. When you're not sure if a toy has been exposed to body fluids, assume that it's contaminated and clean it carefully. Chapter 10, and several of the books in the Resource Guide, give more detailed toy cleaning information.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN AND YOUR PARTNER'S EMOTIONAL SAFETY. This may seem a little counterintuitive – after all, in the real world, we believe that people should be responsible for taking care of their own emotions and for asking for the kinds of emotional support they need. But we believe that the implied contracts of what we do are a little different, and that the usual boundaries get shifted a bit when we play together.

If Dossie showed up for our co-authoring appointment tomorrow, and Janet said to her, "Dossie, I feel angry because of something you said last week," we would handle that in certain ways: Janet would accept responsibility for her own anger and would process it herself – with Dossie's help if Dossie cared to give that help, or without it if Dossie didn't.

But when we agree to play together, there is an assumption that those adult boundaries are going to be altered – perhaps even to some degree dropped. This is what we meant in the Introduction when we said that "BDSM is ritualized codependency." Unlike the real world, where we assume that adults are responsible for processing their own emotions and taking care of their own needs, an player – particularly a bottom – may become quite dependent. Part of our responsibility as tops is caring for our bottoms when they are in that childlike, dependent state. If you think about it, this dictum is actually similar to our responsibility to care for our bottoms' physical well-being when they may be too endorphined out or too deeply in bottom space to do so.

So we believe that whether or not a bottom has asked to have their emotional safety taken care of, our responsibilities are to provide that support. As a default, we think that a top should take the lead in discussing what kinds of stimuli are likely to trigger emotional trauma for a bottom (Was she abused as a child? Is she a victim of violent crime? Is she grieving a lost friend or relationship?), and in ending or altering a scene that seems to be pushing emotional buttons in an unexpected way. If a top and bottom agree to venture into difficult emotional territory, we also think the top thereby takes responsibility to be available to the bottom during any emotional "aftershocks" that ensue. Tops have aftershocks too, so we think this agreement should be mutual.

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