I had the chance to bottom to a big guy specialized in what I like best recently, and posted a tweet saying “Most people think of me just as Scary Top, but for a long time I was a lot more Badass Bottom. I miss that.” A couple different women I like responded with ‘ooh, I’ll top you!’-type comments. I was commenting on how weird that felt to one of my partners, and she said “Well, most people think of you as het.” I’m not heterosexual, but I have very different play relationships with women versus men.

I grew up thinking of myself as more or less het. All but one of my long-term sexual relationships have been with women. For the first couple years when I started doing SM though, mostly I played with men as a bottom. I eventually started topping, both men and women, and have shifted mostly into that role instead and am not entirely satisfied with it.

What I mostly do right now is top women. I get a lot of sexual gratification out of that, and I’m really good at it. I sometimes top men, and I’m pretty good at that too. I’m not as in touch with how it feeds me sexually, but I get other things out of it. There’s an expression I’ve heard that ‘we top the scene we’d like to bottom to’. I don’t think that’s strictly true, but it’s very true for me when I’m topping men. I provide an experience that I can really get into their head for, giving both catharsis and nuturing in a particularly male way, and doing that supports me.

Bottoming to men feels emotionaly safer to me than bottoming to women. Girls are mean- “hit like a girl” is not a diminutive. My experience differs in a more important way, though. When I’m bottoming, I want someone who will push me hard, and be right there with me every step of the way. I want someone that hurts me in a way that says they like me. I think guys somehow learn the trick of that, communicating affection through violence. My experience of bottoming to women is more (but not entirely) of moving back and forth between the two, not using the one to directly communicate the other. I want the vibration moving through my bones with each strike or each piece of fear to say “you’re awesome.” I try to give that when I play with any gender, but I seem to be better at receiving it from men.

tl;dr: girls are scary.

(I’ve played with plenty of folks who are nonbinary on the gender spectrum, but writing about that would make this post even longer and lose the point. Sorry!)