We met ten years ago, as some of our faithful readers will remember, when Janet volunteered to be my demo bottom for a seminar on receiving the cane. We got together before the seminar to establish limits, communication and so forth, and again afterward for lunch, to debrief. Janet said, “I think you should write a book – I’ve got a great title, call it The Bottoming Book.” I said, “I’m too neurotic to write a book by myself, I get anxious and panicky, you’d have to write it with me,” and Janet said “Sure.” That’s how we started. It’s ten years, five books and two revisions later, and more scenes than I can recall.
During these ten years we have become best friends, lovers, collaborators, co-authors and SM explorers together. Much of this book is about our explorations. And we are not primary partners. During most of the time we have worked together, one or both of us was partnered to somebody else.
For me, one of the most remarkable things about our relationship is the way our writing and thinking flows along with our play. For instance, we might be stuck trying to describe something that seems undescribable, and then we’ll play a scene. The scene will go wherever it goes, and next morning one of us might wake up with a good answer: the story of the scene becomes the teaching parable.
We fit together. We fit together very well. We like to cook together, hike, go to movies, hang out with our kids and all those other good things. We both sew and knit, we are both crafty — Janet wrote her delightful book Kinkycrafts, and I was a cottage industry leather crafter throughout most of the ‘80s. We like to make things.
We also fit together in our differences. Janet is an older sister, I’m a younger sister – even though I’m eleven years older than Janet, you can see the dynamic. Janet describes herself as a reformed caretaker, I as a reformed clinging vine – if we hadn’t reformed before we met each other, we’d be impossible. But somehow we avoid codependence and keep on doing what we’re doing.
We both write and think and edit. Janet tends to do the big editing, has a vision for the overall structure of a book, while I’m the detail freak, doing tons of copy-editing and smoothing and clarifying the language. Nobody is anybody’s ghost writer here – we both write and think. And edit. Each other.
We have never had a quarrel about our writing. We are, actually, both conflict-avoidant to a fault, but since it’s both of us, we’re on equal ground here, so it pretty much works. The few times there have been conflicts that we needed to talk about, we were pitifully polite about it. When one of us says “I hate to bring this up, “ it’s always true. Our disagreements are usually resolved easily, possibly because we both give in too easily, but then neither one of us is very pushy, so we’re not in danger of overwhelming each other.
We love each other. This is not romance: violins don’t often play (although there are moments when we hear a note or two).
Janet mostly tops, I mostly bottom, although we do switch from time to time, and our play involves many different roles for both of us. She’s bisexual and gender-bent and I’m a femme dyke. I’m a therapist and she’s a publisher. I’m a pagan who has been exploring spiritual practice for forty-two years, she is stubbornly secular and puts a lot more faith in science than I do. And sometimes our differences make friction, but mostly they make wisdom and fun.
We are both really, really smart. And serious about our work.
In the movies, the lyricist stands by the piano and says a few words, and the composer plinks out a phrase on the keyboard, and they look at each other with a dawning recognition, and suddenly burst into song: and a song is born.
They hardly ever retire into the bedroom to torture and fuck each other as preparation.
Dossie and I have been friends, play partners, collaborators, lovers, co-conspirators and confidantes for more than a decade now. We’ve seen each other into and out of one primary relationship and several hot flings each; we’ve written five books, moved each other into seven houses, had several miserable weeping arguments over money, and collectively gained and lost easily a couple of hundred pounds.
We are not romantically in love with each other, probably never will be — that’s a role that just doesn’t fit, although in some ways I think we’d both like it to. I usually fall in love with men. She falls in love with women, but the women she falls in love with are a particular flavor of crazy that doesn’t match up with mine. Yet our sex is blazing hot, and we know more of each other’s secrets than anybody else, and we sleep peacefully and blissfully in the same bed, and we cook fabulous meals in the same kitchen without tripping over each other.
She lived communally with drag queens while I commuted through suburbia in a station wagon; she was taught violence by men, I benevolence; she floats easily in realms of spirit and ritual that cause me profound discomfort. Yet when we sit eye to eye and join our breath, we fly together; and later, when we talk about what we felt, it is the same – only the words are different.
We’ve role-played everything from Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf to kids at a birthday party to inner-city pimp and whore, then gone out to the kitchen in our robes and slippers for fruit and cheese and chocolate and arguments over philosophy, and then back to the bedroom to get out the vibrator and finish the evening properly.
So what we have is this odd, puzzle-piece of a relationship that’s defined by what it’s not: we’re not spouses in the way most people are spouses, not best friends in the way most people are best friends, not lovers in the way most people are lovers, not fuck buddies in the way most people are fuck buddies, not co-authors in the way most people are co-authors. No word for it at all, I guess. Just us.
This book is radically different from our previous work. Until now, we have always written “how-to” books, with lots of explication and direction spiced up and illustrated with teaching stories derived from our play. This book is lots of stories with bits of explication tossed in to give you some of our ideas about why and how things happened the way they did, and a few suggestions about how to follow your own pathway.
When we first decided to write this book, we started out, as we often do, by leading some workshops at conferences on the subject of transcendent SM, to test out our ideas and to hear from people all around the country what was important to them. A sweet man in one workshop raised his hand and told us that he had a vision of this book as a journey, kind of like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We liked that idea a lot (once we got over being intimidated by comparison with Robert Pirsig).
So for two years we sought out ecstatic experience, together and individually, and wrote about what we did, how it felt and the thoughts we found in our brains the morning after. Then we drove ourselves nuts for six months patching all the pieces together into what you are holding in your hands.
This process has been amazing for us: terrifically intimate, personal and vulnerable. We have kept a lot of our individual writings intact in the voice of each of us, and written the explication parts in the more familiar authorial “we.” We created some visual distinctions so you can easily tell who’s speaking:
Dossie loves you.
Janet loves you.
And we, your faithful authors, love you.
We already wrote The New Bottoming Book and The New Topping Book, which cover the emotional basics of SM – and several other authors have written excellent books that cover basic techniques, negotiation, safety information and so on. We didn’t write this book as a how-to ; it’s a description of our own journeys into transcendent sex and SM, with some thoughts about why it’s worked for us and some ideas about how to make it work for you.
If this is your first book about BDSM, we’d like to request quite firmly that you read at least a couple of those other books, or attend some good workshops, or learn from some experienced players, before you actually try any of the activities we describe here. In other words, please play sensibly, with the most complete knowledge you can get – ecstasy carries responsibility. If SM is completely unfamiliar territory, you might be quite startled at what we include in our normal sexual practice. If you would like to learn more about SM, we’d like to recommend our book Malien Someone You Love Is Kinky.
Dossie remembers:
When I was 19 years old, and trying to figure out how to have orgasms with a partner, I read a book called Sexual Surrender in Women by Dr. Benjamin Morse. Here are some of the chapter headings:
The Terrified Virgin
The Insecure Mistress
The Nymphomaniac
The Dominant Female
The Masturbator
The Latent Lesbian
The Guilt-Ridden Girl
The text was based on case histories of women with each of these so-called pathologies, and, not surprisingly for 1962, they all got better by getting married. It took me a few years to come to terms with the reality that marriage was not my path, and a few more to figure out how I wanted my relationships and my sexuality to be. And there was a time when I agonized over the ideas that were presented in books like these, basically that who I wanted to be and how I wanted my sexuality to be was sick, sick, sick, and that I would only be happy when I gave up being myself in order to become somebody’s wife.
A few years beyond that and a lot more experienced, I was sitting in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse with some friends who were professional writers, from science fiction to hack, when one of them started telling a story about how he had written this book called Sexual Surrender in Women under a doctor pseudonym, and even got invited to speak at some universities, har, har, har. I was very good, I didn’t throw my coffee cup at him, even though I was tempted. I did shriek: “I know you. You don’t live anything like what you wrote in that book.”
He was obviously astonished that I was so upset. “You got to tell them what they want to hear.”
We include this story here as an object lesson in evaluating the voice of “authority” – including what you’re reading in this book – by matching it against your own experience, and deciding for yourself if this fits for you.
A legion of individuals and institutions claim authority, in most cases exclusive authority, in matters spiritual. Religion teaches us to defer to the wisdom of a higher authority – Jehovah, the priest, the guru, the ten commandments, the twelve steps. Academia teaches footnotes: what we say must always be based on somebody else’s authority.
It is with a considerable sense of risk that we decided to write this book on our own authority. We decided to report to you our experiences on a journey we made while we wrote it, to share with you our thoughts, our play, our sex, our arguments, our discussions, our journeying, our journaling about what we did and how we felt and what we thought about it. All of this book comes directly from our own experience: what we felt and saw and heard and tasted and struggled to find words for. We have chosen ourselves as the authors of our experience.
Sometimes we found it hard to stay with our own authority. Surely we should be spending hours in the library, reading what everyone else has said. Or looking to scientific authority, as if spiritual or sexual experience could be condensed into a multiple-choice questionnaire and turned into numbers, where only the average counts as truth.
We have felt a little giddy, unanchored, a trifle terrified, maybe a little miraculous – could it possibly be that our own insights and experiences could be enough? Fifty years between us of SM play, sixty-five years of sluttery, could that be enough? Enough to write a book, enough to be useful to you?
We decided, for better or for worse, to write this book on our own authority. We hope it encourages you to discover and rely upon your own.