Submissive or Bottom?
» Emotional Health
There’s no getting away from the need of words for what it is that we do in BDSM. Nor getting away that seemingly conventional terminology can be a trap. It is easy to forget the cultural baggage you bring to the meaning of a word may not match another’s.
And many of us just aren’t simple enough to match simple conceptions.
This distinction — what my esteemed co-author would call “creeping binaryism” — is one that I dislike a lot. There are those who get the greater part of their charge from controlling or being controlled; there are those who enjoy giving or receiving sensation. There are also those who enjoy the presence of a fetish item or attire… those who like to attain or give extreme emotional states… those who enjoy role-playing as other ages, genders, races or species than their own… and a rainbow of others. Why must we all attempt to plot ourselves along some Procrustean vector of “bottom/top” and “sub/dom”? It’s not a good fit for me, nor for most of the other players I know.
Depends on personal perspective:
One sees a top and a bottom, the other will see a slave and a master. The people involved could call themselves a masochist and a sadist, or any number of permutations of these things.
I know how *I* can learn to be a good bottom *for my girlfriend*. For me, that may include levels of submission at times, or it may not. To be a good bottom for my toppy friends may involve something completely different. What I try and do is be the best bottom I can be for myself first, that way at least one of the people involved (me) gets satisfied. I am unhappy with myself if I know I haven’t put in my best effort, regardless of how much fabulous topping energy the top may have put into the scene. Anyway, I digress. I guess to start with, you have to think about what you want out of bottoming and how you can go about getting it.
But both terms are such weak reeds. A “submissive” can be anything from someone who enjoys wearing a collar while s/he gets a whipping, to someone who prefers to spend every waking hour under an owner’s direct control. A “masochist” can hate clamps but love whips, yearn for TENS units but safeword on violet wands. And that doesn’t even begin to approach the huge number of people who fit under neither umbrella — the bondage bunnies, the latex fetishists, the terror junkies, the sissy maids and many many more.
As a joint enterprise:
When I bottom, personally, I don’t approach it from the point of view of being property, of desiring only to please the top, or of letting him have his way with me. I look at it as a cooperative enterprise, where I want to have fun, and want my playpartner to have fun, and want both of us to want to do it again in the future. In some ways, I do surrender to the scene, but I don’t surrender my *self*, if that makes sense.
Spectrum sometimes phrases this in terms of strategic vs. tactical control: I get to decide where I’m willing to go, and he gets to decide how we’re going to get there.
The ease of simplicity can be deluding. Nuances and shading are all important.
However, sentences are often better than words, and paragraphs better than sentences. Depending on shared meanings in a situation where there is no central authority to assign meanings (French Academy, anyone?) is a risky business at best.
Then again there may be at least one handy catchall term.
Laura Antoniou:
I say that I am a “sadomasochist” because no matter what stage in my life, what partner I was with (or lacking) or what I did or how, or how often, there is one common element. What makes me orgasm, what makes me arroused, what makes sense in my imagination and in real life, as activity and identity, are acts of sadomasochism.
