On Bad Top and Happy Bottom Barometers
You know when you're with a good top (because you are trying to pant out your phone number between squeals of delight), you know when you've got an unhappy bottom (she's packing her toys and going home), but how do you discern when a top becomes abusive or inept, or a bottom becomes a total lump of orgasmic joy? We gals aren't taught a lot about spotting hot girl-on-girl live abuse coming at us, or expressing satisfaction from within a rollicking sex scene. I came up with some barometers based on my own experience, and discussions with friends.
- Effective and Ineffective Bad Top Barometers
1. Effective barometer: Hostile personal criticism about your or her other lovers' physical attributes (especially if you later see her preening and pointing out her own physical gifts). A good top ultimately is compassionate about a body's frailties.
Ineffective barometer: Dirty talk or use of cuss words / degrading talk in general. Listen for tone: if it's coy, playful, affectionate, targeting your behavior, and suggestive without being really threatening, it's one thing. If it's *hostile,* targeting things you have no control over, and threatening, be sure to check yourself for safety boundaries.
2. Effective barometer: Expressing doubts about whether you are worth her time. This isn't topping, it's adolescent manipulation. She should keep that question in her Inside Head Voice.
Ineffective barometer: Giving you a run-down of her schedule of planned social and sexual activity. Some tops are just really overscheduled and use the iteration of their time management choices to create personal space. It might be a little self-aggrandizing, but it's not a manipulation or a rejection.
3. Effective barometer: Feigned dramatic revulsion when you reveal a wound or vulnerability.
Ineffective barometer: Actual reactions of distaste, usually followed by clarifying questions about what you've just revealed. Hey, everyone has their squick zones.
4. Effective barometer: Real expressions of hostility about something remote to the occasion at hand but directed toward the bottom (like, spanking harder and harder while getting verbally angrier and angier about last month's PG&E bill-- or last month's girlfriend).
Ineffective barometer: Real expressions of sadness about personal loss or misfortune. Don't be a dick to your dick-- tops need to cry too.
5. Effective barometer: Childish ploys for attention about the top's areas of insecurity. I include financial insecurity here. Tops can be so fragile-- especially butch tops who are given the responsibilities of masculinity with only a fraction of the privileges. There are those who are completely broken by their circumstances, and they shouldn't be working on their wounds by creating them on you. They should just get professional help-- from a therapist, a paid domme, whatever. You don't need to try to heal them.
Ineffective barometer: Urgency about knowing your health and/ or relationship status. Don't be suspicious if your top needs to know these safety parameters in order to play. If you don't feel like talking about it, just say so, but try to respect her safety concerns if you want her to respect yours.
6. Effective barometer: Excessive control issues-- good tops actually *have* most of the control they want. They are *in* their power and confident, know their boundaries, and are *not* seeking to prove something, to you or themselves or anyone else, by establishing control over you.
Ineffective barometer: Checking in with you incessantly. She might be recovering from a bad experience with an incommunicative bottom. Tell her if it's turning you off.
7. Effective barometer: Not owning anything resembling a date planner.
Ineffective barometer: Not having e-mail. Also, not sharing all her contact digits and coordinates. Bottoms can be stalkers too. Or so I've heard.
8. Effective barometer: Consciously or unconsciously violating an express boundary established with or by the bottom. Safer sex, disclosure or privacy, pain or intensity preferences, safeword use-- anything.
Ineffective barometer: Expressing concern about a boundary that has been set. Concern doesn't mean the top intends to violate it, so don't take a question about boundaries as a violation of boundaries. Unless you've set boundaries about asking questions about sets of boundaries (ya freak!).
- Effective and Ineffective Happy Bottom Barometers
1. Effective barometer: Reduction to lizard brain activities (grabbing random things to chew on, ripping fabric, falling onto the floor -and maybe not noticing she's fallen, biting, scratching, etc.).
Ineffective barometer: Departures from bed to see if there's anything to eat in the kitchen. She might just be hypoglycemic, you never know.
2. Effective barometer: Very inarticulate loudness.
Ineffective barometer: Very articulate loudness ("holy cow does that vibrator remind me of the last time I was in Prague!"). She might not have good bringins-up about what is good pillow talk. She might just be nervous.
3. Effective barometer: Preternatural silence and stillness while sweating with a racing pulse, especially if uncontrollable twitching is involved (and the person doesn't have a history of epilepsy or high blood pressure, and isn't experimenting with dangerous mind-altering substances).
Ineffective barometer: Actual brain death.
4. Effective barometer: Marriage proposals, or, stalking proposals. (Just don't take her up on anything. ANYTHING. said in flagrante.)
Ineffective barometer: Prior marriage (or commitment) confessions. Really, don't take this as a complement or an insult. She's just got too much on her plate already and this is how she's telling you.
5. Effective barometer: Offers of specific sexual services.
Ineffective barometer: Offers of specific housekeeping services. Even if she is a service bottom, it's not a good sign if she's thinking about *your* hygiene at this point. Then again, with some clarification, it might be some kind of personal kink for her.
6. Effective barometer: Nonsensical profanity (unless of course your safeword is a piece of profanity, which means you have a stupid safeword).
Ineffective barometer: Profane personal criticisms. (See note on number 2. Bad bringins-up is sometimes just all there is to explain it.)
7. Effective barometer: Stopping you to tell you explicit instructions or ask questions about what you like: yes this is a good thing. This means she's enthusiastic and comfortable with you and doesn't fear top-down reprisals for helping you help her get off (or helping you help her get you off)-- if you want, you can quickly reassert yourself by making a thrilling counter-proposal/ counter-inquiry (the Socratic method can be a turn on for those brainy types)-- but absolutely do take competence-promoting feedback as a good happy bottom barometer. Only bad bottoms fail to give any guidelines for their own pleasure (giving or receiving) preferences.
Ineffective barometer: Stopping you to tell you about her abuse history. Abuse survivors getting triggered in sex play is par for the course in this community where one in five is supposed to have survived rape. Stopping doesn't mean she's happy or unhappy with you as a person or as a sex partner, but it does mean you should (without you grumbling- AT ALL) take time to talk. Negotiations about boundaries can start there, from scratch: that's when you'll find out if she's happy or not.
8. Effective barometer: Wetness in combination with any one or more of the above.
Ineffective barometer: Wetness or dryness alone. Sometimes a gal is just plain dehydrated-- from sun, or alcohol consumption, preferring 24 ounces of espresso to water as her daily liquid intake, etc.-- or she's just not genetically descended from the fountain-people as some are. Think of it in terms of normative male anatomy where a guy can ejaculate but not orgasm: while always (always) honoring requests for "more lube!", and monitoring the slickness of the roads, don't *just* go for the juice-- go for the radiant smile and twitchy fingers.
