The New Topping Book Quotes

“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.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“When we blame, we fail to shoulder our part of the burden; we project the responsibility for whatever is wrong onto another, usually to protect ourselves from feeling terribly guilty or anxious. When we blame, we also disempower ourselves – if it’s all your fault, then I must be impotent.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“We explained how we use S/M to explore our darkness, illuminate it with our clear awareness, and reclaim forbidden territory as psychological healing, a way of becoming whole.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“If I truly believe in some other people’s inferiority, is it okay for me to play this out in scene? We hope not. Ideally, the top is pretending to be an oppressor that she doesn’t identify with.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“the opportunity to meet our internalized abuser. We all have one: it’s not if you discover your precious inner bully, it’s when.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“The Holocaust, African slavery, the Spanish Inquisition, the rape of Nanking. These scenes are more than merely hot.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“People are attracted to playing in their shadows because it is very hot, intriguing, sexy. Please don’t think that we are robots doomed to reenact the dysfunctions of our childhoods over and over without release, but rather that we seek out opportunities to struggle with these conflicts so that we have a chance to make the story come out differently. If we let these desires drive us without our awareness, they may manifest in destructive ways.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Forbidden emotions sent to the deep freeze commonly include pathos, anger, shame, terror, villainy and victimhood. Starting to sound familiar? So our thesis is that it just might be that our kinky desires, the drives that lead us to enact our dark and dangerous fairy tales, may very well be the longing to reunite with a part of ourselves that we have lost in the Shadow.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“I’m into S/M” is a turnoff to a lot of people who have mistaken ideas about what that means,”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Temporary marks, like bruises or welts that last a few days, are common occurrences in S/M. However, some people – such as those with vanilla partners at home – might have problems with them, so it’s probably a good idea to ask about marks before you haul out the cast-iron cane.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“After duly binding, stripping, beating, torturing and fucking Dossie, Janet held her and brought her nicely back down to earth. Then we went upstairs for something to eat.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“If you can’t understand these paradoxes – the ways in which symbolic powerlessness can empower and symbolic cruelty can sensitize – please sit down and think them through carefully.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between “enough” and “too much,” between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we’re craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“For these reasons, and because we know that wanting to hurt, control or humiliate people is not OK, we may feel very ashamed or embarrassed about our fantasies. But once we overcome that embarrassment, and discover how many other people have similar feelings, our fantasy world becomes a hot and happy playground.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“and isn’t embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with?”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Other rewards of bottoming include getting lots of attention, as well as acting out fantasies of helplessness and other forbidden emotions (needy, pathetic, dependent, guilt-ridden) that, like their toppish counterparts, would cause lots of trouble in the real world.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Why would a person want to be beaten, humiliated, ordered around and otherwise inconvenienced so that you can feel big? Well, because bottoming is very, very sexy too. There is tremendous luxury in giving up responsibility and power to a top, in being small, possibly childlike, in having your behavior controlled, in getting nurtured while being subjected to all kinds of intense stimulations. Fear can be arousing…”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Many people view almost all relationships as interactions between victims and oppressors,”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“Bullying. In BDSM we get to act out from parts of ourselves that could not be described as nice: the bully, the villain, the inquisitor, the brute, the betrayer. Wicked, wicked, wicked. And popular. Check out mainstream movies, or fiction from best-sellers to classical mythology, for verification that everybody adores a really good villain. Those bad guys are big. Big enough to carry all the world’s ills, and create all the pain and trouble a hungry bottom could want to suffer.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“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.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“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!”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“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.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“nipple tug-of-war,” in which two people both put on nipple clamps with chains running from one person to the other and lean backwards so that both sets of tits get a nice steady pull, is a good example.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“We think that this thought does a nice job of expressing the tension that often happens in good S/M – the “oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don’t-stop” energy that we all know and love.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book

“In fact, what we do in S/M is that we act as though we were giving up or taking real-world power, while retaining the ability to keep as much power as we need to feel safe, or to take no more than we feel OK about having.”
― Dossie Easton, The New Topping Book