The New Bottoming Book (8 page)

When we fail to grasp our power, we may become overly passive or overly directive, either too needy or too

demanding. The passive bottom fails to grasp his power, and the demanding bottom, clutching shreds of power for dear life, disempowers her top: neither situation could be described as an erotic power exchange.

Bottoms who get stuck at the passive end of the spectrum come off sounding whiny, dependent, needy, clinging - tops may feel claustrophobic around them. They are often reluctant to let a top know what they like or want ("I just want to please you!"), which leaves the top out on a limb, without a clue as to what will work for this bottom, and stranded with the entire responsibility for deciding how to play. The top in this position is not adequately supported by the bottom.

Bottoms who err at the overly directive end of the spectrum can be bossy, entitled, nagging, sometimes childish, demanding "do-me queens." You have a right to get your needs met, and the responsibility to get those needs met by grownup tactics and straightforward communication. When you manipulate your top, you fail to support his role as top, undermining his authority and ultimately the scene.

If you feel you are being overly passive or directive, what can you do? We suggest you start by asking yourself: Why am I not giving myself permission to ask for what I want directly? Do I have some fantasy that nothing counts unless my top spontaneously wants to do exactly what I want? This is a common hitch for some folk.

Be reassured - smart tops discover early on that when they are willing to honor and acknowledge their bottoms' fantasies, they get hotter scenes and happier bottoms for their trouble. Most tops welcome constructive suggestions — they generate new ideas for more and better play.

Your tops cannot read your mind. They can, however, enjoy hearing about what interests you, and can also tell you what interests them. When everyone puts their desires on the table, it becomes easy to figure out how to script a scene that will make everyone feel good. (The Yes/No/Maybe exercise from Chapter 3 can be of particular help here.) And when you feel secure about getting what you want, you can afford to feel generous about what your partners might want.

We will point out again that its not just okay to want your wildest fantasies, but it's actually necessary — with no desires, there would be no hot scenes at all! Remember, greed makes you generous.

Now that you know a lot more detail about your desires and your limits, you are well along the road to realizing your fantasies. Look at your Yes/No/Maybe list one more time from a different perspective, and see if it answers these questions: What are my goals? What are the rewards I'm looking for? This list contains the items that make up your fantasy; you will construct it step by step, like a puzzle.

And here we are back to looking at the big picture: your actual fantasy or fantasies. At this point many people, experienced players as well as novices, get really embarrassed and begin to believe that their fantasy is particularly juvenile, selfish, stupid, boring, primitive, trite, or whatever other judgments they have about themselves. The truth is that Iocs of fantasies are rather primitive, and many come from very young parts of ourselves, so they are juvenile. Fantasy is also the material from which we construct our movies, TV shows, books, songs and videos, so fantasies may also seem trite... you've probably seen them before.

It helps to understand that fantasies have a lot in common with mythology: they are stories that people become attached to for a variety of reasons, they satisfy some sexual or psychological need or want in our (probably only partially conscious) minds, they are rich in symbolism and emotional texture. These are the stories that dreams are made of.

So here are your dreams, and how are you going to use them as information to set up the scenes that you want? We've already discussed the physical issues... now let's look at the less tangible rewards of play, which, although they can be harder to define, are the clearest description of who you want to be as a bottom.

If you tell us that all you want is to make your mistress happy, we'll send you back to the blackboard to try again.

Many tops feel completely lost with bottoms who don't have the faintest idea of what they want, and, as we have said, it's irresponsible for bottoms to expect the tops to do all the work. And there is no way to choose a top or negotiate play with a top until you have some idea of what it is you want to get from your play.

A good question to start with is: What's in it for me? What is the reward I would like to get out of this scene? Do I want to be punished? Praised? Show off? Become invisible? Who am I as a bottom? How do I want to feel?

We need to understand that there are lots of different states of consciousness we move through every day - waking and sleeping, for instance. Being turned on is a state of consciousness, and all the parts of the sexual response cycle are too. Pain play in S/M generates states of consciousness that probably relate to how our bodies produce endorphins in response to pain. Submission is, we believe, a trancelike state of consciousness which includes heightened suggestibility and a sense of calm and Tightness. And all of our scenes, physical, emotional, mental, can be looked at as efforts to get into a particular state of consciousness.

So when you understand what you're looking for from a scene - what you want to be happening in your mind, body and soul as you connect with this wonderful person who wants to take you on this fabulous journey — you'll be all set to explain your desires and move forward to the play of your dreams.

Here we are going to share some examples of what has worked for various bottoms based on how they want to get to feel in a particular scene. There will be a lot more detail about how to explore these rewards in actual scenes later in the book, in Chapter 10.

Getting "In the Flow": There is a sense in BDSM play of getting to a place where everything flows, a sort of slow-motion world where you feel quite sure you are doing it all just perfectly. There is a sense of rightness - everything is as it should be. We can feel the power flowing through both of us, feel all the players in the scene connected in the How of power, we are all flying together. When we get in the flow we feel that we can take any risks, and communication seems easy and obvious.

One friend of ours, a service-oriented submissive, told us: "When I'm serving, I know what I need to do, it's uncomplicated. 1 love service because its not about me — its about the other person. I seek to make service into an act of love. It turns off all my self-focus and lets me exist in a separate space. When I'm serving at my very best, I'm invisible — an extension of the will of my master."

Catharsis: Tears of grief tears of joy. Sometimes what you want out of a scene is a purging, to go into overload and let it all out. Maybe there is something happening that you need to cry about, or maybe you just need to clear your feelings out in general. We have deliberately negotiated to play scenes to vent anger or other difficult emotions. Sometimes catharsis is found by bringing out a forbidden part of ourselves, like for instance the crybaby that we were teased for being in childhood. We all value these scenes for the emotional release they bring, and our partners usually value sharing in the process. Next time it might be our partners turn - catharsis works from the top as well as from the bottom. It helps to let prospective partners know that if you burst into tears, or become enraged, its what you want, and that whatever they are doing, its obviously working.

For example, Dossie recalls an intensely emotional flogging scene at a party that was fueled by the fact that a close friend of both Dossie and her top had died that week of AIDS. She had been an important member of our community, indeed the founder of the Society of Janus, and virtually everybody at the party knew her and was moved by her death.

As David flogged me, I felt myself go into intense sadness, almost crying, and then felt overtaken by equally intense rage, that seemed to have nowhere to go until I reared up, turned to my top in the presence of a lot of people, and screamed: "You stupid fuck can't you hit any harder than that?" This would be a seriously rude maneuver in most scenes, but we were in the flow and David understood perfectly. Grinning wolfishly, he swung his arm back and gave it all he had. I let my rage pour out, and fell again into sadness, then reared up again screaming in rage, with David flying right along with me. Round and around we went until the rage was satisfied and I fell down crying - he fell right on top of me, and we both cried until we were satisfied. And both agreed that there was something magically right about this scene, that in struggling against each other we had done just what we needed to do for funeral games.

Spiritual States: Many players report that the feelings they have in playing a great scene can only be described as spiritual. Some people may feel they leave their body, others feel an intense psychic connection, or perhaps an awakening of kundalini, the snake that represents the spiritual energy that can be felt in the spine. Sometimes we may envision ourselves shape-shifted into a totem animal, and writhe like a panther under the whip. Another time we may become a god. Or maybe our top becomes goddess.

If this is where you go when the play goes well, it's a good idea to discuss it with your top beforehand, especially if you tend to leave your body during play. Some tops love It, and feel like they fly right along with you - others may feel abandoned, and want to stay connected in some more tangible way.

Getting Bigger, Getting Smaller: Some bottoms see themselves as warriors, conquering an ordeal, an initiation, triumphing over the obstacles presented by their top. They want to find their strength in an ordeal, and they want their tops to be strong enough to challenge them. Others, or maybe the same people at different times, want to get small. They want to become invisible, helpless, overwhelmed, they want to dissolve. They love to enter into struggle and lose, to be conquered, to give it up to a powerful and inexorable top.

Whether you like to get bigger or smaller, you need to cooperate with your top. Your top may have her own limits about playing with unconquerable or invisible bottoms, and she need:* a chance to figure our what's coming and express her own needs. The following story will illustrate the importance of negotiating the direction of the scene beforehand.

A friend of ours was topping an interrogation scene in which she set out to conquer the bottom and get him all soft and squishy, as she imagined was her task. The bottom in this case, however, in his own fantasy saw himself as nobly suffering and refusing to give in no matter how hard it was: in short, wanted to conquer an ordeal. It soon became obvious that they were working at cross purposes in the scene, and the bottom eventually, and appropriately, safeworded out. 1 he fact that wc can even relate this story to you illustrates an important point - these two people didn't just end the scene, they talked about it later and figured out what went wrong.

Willingness to get together and unscramble what happened when a scene went wrong is another mark of a great player.

Submissive States: In the submissive mode - you may recognize a lot of this from your fantasies - the desired state of mind is one of will-lessness, receptiveness, passivity, even selflessness. In giving over as much of your own choices as feasible to a trusted top, you can allow yourself the luxury of turning your brain off. Everything becomes really simple: will my dominant like this or not? Nothing else to worry about.

There are two distinct modes of submissive consciousness (well, probably lots more but these arc the two we want to tell you about). In one, the bottom is a sort of tabula rasa blank slate who waits for input. The bottom in this state is totally receptive, obedient, with no worries about whether or not he is doing something right because he will be told exactly what is required. Some of us like to be corrected, reined in, contained - it tells us someone is paying attention. Or receptivity might involve being acted upon while having no actions whatsoever to perform yourself, as in a bondage scene: this allows an intense focus, free of distraction, on whatever sensational or emotional exchange you and your top have chosen. The selflessness here involves giving yourself over to another so completely chat you effectively leave your self behind.

A second state is the submissive who likes to please, who takes the initiative to have that cup of tea ready before the master is even aware he wants one. The rewards of the pleaser include being recognized: thanked, stroked, petted, appreciated, rewarded for competence and graciousness. The selflessness comes from putting yourself into the service of someone else's goals and having none of your own. The selflessness of the submissive can become like a meditative state, very quiet, tuned in, serene.

Do keep this distinction in mind when you negotiate for a submissive scene. One friend of ours tells us she was once playing with two doms, one of whom loved service, the other, the blank slate. Our friend eventually figured this out - she tells us it was a challenge to remember what she was supposed to do in each circumstance.

Fighting Back: The resistance scene is a tremendously collaborative scene, because if you fight hard enough you can probably discourage any reasonably ethical top from continuing. So if your fantasy is all about struggling, resisting, needing to be conquered or forced to have a good time, you need to work that out with your top in advance, and maybe set up a safeword for the top so she can tell you if you're fighting harder than she can stay on top of. A lot of us really love the thrill of being forced against our will, so we collaborate to fight over some hot scenes - Janet once bottomed in a scene where her hands were tied with about eighteen inches of slack rope

between them, so she could fight back like she meant it and still be pleasantly certain of losing.