Book Review: The New Bottoming Book
Rating:
Who is this book for? New players interested in learning about BDSM and what it means to be a bottom or submissive.
What will you learn? You will learn how to start determining who you are as a bottom, how to begin exploring and communicating your limits, how to negotiate and find the top of your dreams, and how to differentiate between fantasy and reality. This book will help you to learn and create your own bottom headspace.
Warnings: This book discusses cutting and needle play a lot more than would be expected for a 101 book. This could be off putting if you were to believe these areas of play are widely participated in.
My Thoughts:
Who are you really anyway?
Bottoming here is beautifully and simply defined as "consciously and consensually relinquishing control to another in at least one of four areas: movement, behavior, sensation, or emotion."
The purpose of this book is to teach you etiquette around being a bottom, what it means to be one, and how to find and embrace yourself as one. It helps you to determine 'who are you' as a bottom, going as far as to list pages of emotions, feelings, and states of being that bottoming may conjure and that you may be seeking as a bottom. This is a fantastic resource.
The book takes an in-depth look at why anyone would WANT to be a bottom. It covers how bottoming allows you to feel wanted, allows for deeper intimacy, allows for safety and allows a chance for us to succeed and be pleasing. This is what the foundation of all sexual relationships should sound like.
The authors touch on the emotions that BDSM allows us to embrace, those that we normally need to stifle or hide such as our neediness, bossiness, cruelty and clingyness. They encourage the bottom to be powerful and active in negotiations and to be active participates in their scenes. This is such a helpful reminder to new Dominants that feel they should be designing and controlling everything. Leading into the discussion that we should all be having " power with" our bottom versus power over them. This is a simple but profound statement. It is the crux of how dynamics should function but often don't.
Dossie and Janet really focus on helping a new bottom determine what is fantasy vs reality. Understanding the difference and how they play off each other is essential towards building a functioning dynamic. We all have big dreams and nothing is quite like the way we imagine it to be in reality. They caution going so deeply that you confuse the two because, "when you believe enough in the game you are playing, it becomes true: this is the power of manifesting." There is really nothing better than getting truly lost in a scene and your roles and giving outer reality a break for the evening.
The authors discuss particulars of what happens during a scene too - many elements are touched upon including bondage, service, sensation, fighting back, discipline, building contracts, dressing up for scenes and pain. Pain is particularly well explored and the concept of "surfing the pain" is introduced to help a new bottom understand how to get the most of out pain play. They briefly delve into the major role play archetypes that you might see including: age regression, authority, resistance scenes (rape, kidnapping), humiliation, cultural/historical traumas.
If you are curious about bottoming this book is definitely a good place to start.
