The New Topping Book

The New Topping Book By: Dossie Easton & Janet W. Hardy Foreword Revisioning Welcome to The New Topping Book. About ten years ago, we published a small volume called The Bottoming Book, which took the revolutionary stance that bottoming was as high an art as topping and that skilled and ethical bottoms were integral to hot play. No sooner had it come out than we started hearing from tops who wanted to know when we were going to do the same thing for topping. Hence The Topping Book, originally published in 1994. But in the last eight years we've seen huge and important changes in BDSM culture (including the popularization of the very word BDSM!). Our communities have grown tremendously -largely due to the Internet, which was in its toddlerhood at our last writing - and become much more visible. And we, your authors, are proud to have been part of this evolution. So: The New Topping Book. WHAT'S CHANGED? As we wrote in The New Bottoming Book: S/M culture has massively emerged from the closet. There are dozens of books, endless information on the Internet, national and international conferences publicly held in major hotels,. support groups everywhere - we are no longer the ghettoized subculture that we used to be. More people are connecting to S/M, finding others like themselves, and realizing that they are very much not alone with their kinky fantasies. THE INTERNET. The 'Net has become a major player in the BDSM scene. Along with providing lots of information about kink and connection to like-minded people, the Internet is also exerting a major influence on the content of BDSM. Many things can be done in virtual play that would be difficult to manifest in reality: for instance, we know individuals who are engaged in ownership relationships with people they have never met in person. And so new ways of playing are being devised, and participants are engaging in ever deeper explorations of the psychological aspects of S/M, including extensive dialogue about how our fantasies can inform us about ourselves. The challenge of interacting with people allover the world, people that you've never seen face to face, has created a whole universe of possibilities for relationships, interactions and new knowledge. We'll discuss the 'Net and its ramifications at much greater length later in this book D&S. Over the last ten years, we have also seen rapid growth and evolution of the dominance and submission aspect of BDSM, with extensive discussion of how the relationship dynamic between two or more persons can be expanded, intensified and eroticized by a conscious and consensual shift in the workings of power and control. We've included a lot more information about D&S in its various forms in this book. MORE OF US. Meanwhile, as the scene has become more accessible, more and more new people are joining. This growth in population has made its own changes to the scene, and there is increased market for products and services, which offers much more support for the teachers, artists and craftspeople of our community. For us this growth has offered an expanded opportunity in the form of a much wider audience for our writing. When we wrote the initial Bottoming Book, publishing in this area was so economically constrained that we had to keep the book under 120 pages because if it got bigger than that we couldn't afford to , print it. How's that for basic? We are proud to announce that our books are now widely distr