The New Topping Book Read Free Page B

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.
    S O W HAT’S I N I T F OR Y OU ?
     
    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