The New Topping Book Read Online Free PDF

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.
    W HERE A RE T HE B OUNDARIES ?
     
    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.
    S AFEWORDS . 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