I Don’t Talk About Topping Much

Partly, that’s because while in practice I switch, I identify more as a bottom. Partly, it’s because, even writing pseudonymously, my spouse prefers that I not talk about what I do with her as a top. What I do as a bottom is personal to me, and I can talk about it as I see fit; what she does as a bottom is personal to her, and she doesn’t want to see the details in the blogosphere.

People who top in various aspects of BDSM play do so for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to attempt a typology of topping. Since our experiences are highly individualized, it’s tough to say much more than, “this is what I do, this is how I feel about it.” And my freedom to do that is limited, so I tend instead to talk about my experiences bottoming.

I did, however, run across someone saying a lot of things about topping that resonated with me, and that I will share for that reason.

The Right To No

In response to Kathryn Holmquist’s execrable notion of “too late to say no”, Amanda Hess at the Washington Citypaper has already done a full takedown, but I felt compelled to add what I think ought to be a basic bottom line:

Anyone ought to be able to refuse to be sexual, in any way, with any other person, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason.*

The whole concept of “Yes Means Yes” is to move past “No Means No” to a more thoroughgoing and positive sexual ethic. But that is not to say that “no” becomes unnecessary or unimportant. In fact, without “No”, there is no “Yes.”

*I’m consciously leaving aside the question of consensual nonconsent among BDSMers — whether I can decide ahead of time that a later decision to change my mind won’t be binding — because it is the most narrow and deliberately separate kind of special case. Discussion of c/nc is O/T on this thread.

Disclosure And Material Information

Over at Feministing Community, there is a thread about trans folks, disclosure and consent . I find much of the comment thread upsetting. Obviously there is a lot of transphobia, but also a lot of misinformation and assumption.

I’m not going to trans 101 here, mostly because that’s not the purpose of this thread but also because I’m not qualified. What I want to do here is set out a view that covers most information about one’s sex partners. Some may disagree, but I think it’s a very useful view.

I’ll borrow a concept from law here: materiality. In securities law, “material” is that which a reasonable person would think it important to know, as part of the total mix of information, in making a decision.*

Reductio

Lauren reviewed this survey and said:

Because mothers are more than their children or grocery shopping habits, I’d imagine they tend to check their email, conduct business, and make phone calls too. Was that on the survey?

The answer is that it isn’t. That’s what this culture does to women. It reduces them to component parts, pidgeon-holes them and refuses to recognize or respect the whole woman.

Yes Means Yes Is A Book Of The Year!

Our little book is a Publishers’ Weekly Book Of The Year. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that I am very impressed with the essays my co-contributors wrote for the book, and with the tireless work of Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, without whom none of it would have made it onto the bookstore shelves.

h/t Jill.

If She’s Not Having Fun You Have To Stop

This is about the nuts-and-bolts of how the work gets done. This is about parenting the next generation.

A boy and a girl run around on the grass at the park. The boy tackles the girl. The girl laughs. She gets up and runs away. She loves to run. He chases, she turns and they grab eachother, tumble and land in a pile, giggling. After a few minutes, he tackles her again and she lands a bit hard. She is bigger and physical, but he more than holds his own in roughhousing. She pauses for a second. Then she laughs again; she’s still having fun.

Dad gets his attention, and says, “If she’s not having fun, you have to stop.”

Bracing For The Rape Apology

Sadly, this is probably only the first of several posts about the story of a fifteen year old who was gang-raped outside a school dance in Northern California.

I think we all know that an avalance of apologism, victim-blaming and concern trolling is coming. The only way to head that off would be to change the culture.

Since it will be practically impossible for the defendants and their defenders to deny that anything happened, I expect the most openly nasty response to be along the lines of the Haidl defense: straight-out slut baiting. (The defense said she wanted to be a porn star and therefore consented to get passed out drunk and repeatedly violated on video — some history here.) If we can’t even keep people from doing that to Polanski’s victim, who was 13, we are almost guaranteed to see it used against a fifteen year old.

I Am For Those Things

The State of Maine is near and dear to my heart. My mother’s family is from there, and I have spent more time there than in any state except the state of my birth and the one I live in now (with New Hampshire a close second. I have a tremendous affection for Northern New England).

Marriage equality is also near and dear to my heart. Not because marriage is a panacea for anything or even the most important right, but because the glaring inequality is a continuing and blatant symbol of exclusion and second-class citizenship. We do not extend civil rights to some of our people because it would offend the religious and social mores of the majority: that may be the way the Puritans did things in their theocratic monocultures* but it is not the system we codified in the Bill of Rights, where the First Amendment has an establishment clause that prohibits the state from taking a side in religious disputes and a free exercise clause that provides that my mother’s Unitarian church should be able to marry who it believes it should without the fear or favor of the State.**

All of Northern New England is there.*** They have marriage equality by legislation. Bigots in Maine are trying to reverse it at the polls. The excellent polling-and-quantitative-poli-sci blog Fivethirtyeight (were we not all glued to it last year about this time? Nate hasn’t quit) is
all over the story.

Nate, who is firmly on the pro-equality side of this, got an email to marriage equality opponents, and he summarized the talking points like this:

Boundaries

I said in the Shroedinger’s Rapist post that it was part of a larger idea and might be Part I of two. Here’s Part II.

It’s all about boundaries. The Shapely Prose post started with a discussion of women’s fear of rape, and moved from there to public spaces, interruption, intrusion and boundaries. My post focused on public transit as a particular case of public spaces, and staked out the position that bothering a woman whose activities and body language are not inviting interaction is a violation of her boundaries. I’m saddened to see pushback on that.

Shroedinger’s Rapist And The Imagined Right To Intrude

This may be Part I, because there’s more to this than I have time to flesh out right now.

[Added: Part II is Boundaries.]

First of all, this is full of win. Phaedra Starling guest-posted it over at Shapely Prose, and I just can’t say enough about it.

For the cis- het- men out there, I want to talk about what she says about approaching strange women: