Free The New Bottoming Book by Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy Page A

they are willing to honor and acknowledge their bottoms' fantasies, they get hotter scenes and happier bottoms for their trouble. Most tops welcome constructive suggestions — they generate new ideas for more and better play.

    Your tops cannot read your mind. They can, however, enjoy hearing about what interests you, and can also tell you what interests them. When everyone puts their desires on the table, it becomes easy to figure out how to script a scene that will make everyone feel good. (The Yes/No/Maybe exercise from Chapter 3 can be of particular help here.) And when you feel secure about getting what you want, you can afford to feel generous about what your partners might want.

    We will point out again that its not just okay to want your wildest fantasies, but it's actually necessary — with no desires, there would be no hot scenes at all! Remember, greed makes you generous.

What's In It for You?

    Now that you know a lot more detail about your desires and your limits, you are well along the road to realizing your fantasies. Look at your Yes/No/Maybe list one more time from a different perspective, and see if it answers these questions: What are my goals? What are the rewards I'm looking for? This list contains the items that make up your fantasy; you will construct it step by step, like a puzzle.

    And here we are back to looking at the big picture: your actual fantasy or fantasies. At this point many people, experienced players as well as novices, get really embarrassed and begin to believe that their fantasy is particularly juvenile, selfish, stupid, boring, primitive, trite, or whatever other judgments they have about themselves. The truth is that Iocs of fantasies are rather primitive, and many come from very young parts of ourselves, so they are juvenile. Fantasy is also the material from which we construct our movies, TV shows, books, songs and videos, so fantasies may also seem trite... you've probably seen them before.

    It helps to understand that fantasies have a lot in common with mythology: they are stories that people become attached to for a variety of reasons, they satisfy some sexual or psychological need or want in our (probably only partially conscious) minds, they are rich in symbolism and emotional texture. These are the stories that dreams are made of.

    So here are your dreams, and how are you going to use them as information to set up the scenes that you want? We've already discussed the physical issues... now let's look at the less tangible rewards of play, which, although they can be harder to define, are the clearest description of who you want to be as a bottom.

    If you tell us that all you want is to make your mistress happy, we'll send you back to the blackboard to try again.
    Many tops feel completely lost with bottoms who don't have the faintest idea of what they want, and, as we have said, it's irresponsible for bottoms to expect the tops to do all the work. And there is no way to choose a top or negotiate play with a top until you have some idea of what it is you want to get from your play.

    A good question to start with is: What's in it for me? What is the reward I would like to get out of this scene? Do I want to be punished? Praised? Show off? Become invisible? Who am I as a bottom? How do I want to feel?

    We need to understand that there are lots of different states of consciousness we move through every day - waking and sleeping, for instance. Being turned on is a state of consciousness, and all the parts of the sexual response cycle are too. Pain play in S/M generates states of consciousness that probably relate to how our bodies produce endorphins in response to pain. Submission is, we believe, a trancelike state of consciousness which includes heightened suggestibility and a sense of calm and Tightness. And all of our scenes, physical, emotional, mental, can be looked at as efforts to get into a particular state of consciousness.

    So when you understand what you're