FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT, gosh I’ve been thinking this for years.
Less silly mode: :p but now I realize some people just need more than hrt :3
At the end of the day we still need to love ourselves…
I personally want to get bottom surgery to make certain clothes fit better :3
I still dont know what bottom or top means after hearing them 1000 times😭😭😭
It gets blurred and means different things to different people but the basic idea is the one who ‘receives’ pleasure in sex (for cis straight relationships, the default is the woman, for (also cis) gay men the one being penetrated, and then for (again cis for brevity) lesbians the one doing the ‘work’ such as fingering), commonly paired with submissiveness and often conflated as being the same thing. They were originally terms exclusively used by gay men but eventually found adoption outside of that even though top/bottom roles are so often far less strictly defined, adhered to, or even identifiable in other queer relationships than that. In my personal experience though most people talking about being a bottom online are primarily referring to submissiveness instead.
Nobody memes the power bottoms :(
Once I finally get bottom surgery i’m going to be such a power bottom 🥺
hm, the only thing I think could use some minor clarification is that while I agree bottoms are the “receptive” partner in sex, it’s not necessarily that what they are receiving is primarily pleasure.
Bottoms are maybe stereotypically submissive, passive, receptive, etc. and tops are stereotypically active, dominant, and penetrating. (Obviously the stereotypes can be broken and are not total, e.g. power bottoms as you mentioned are dominant in the dynamic or in control while still maybe being the receptive partner in penetrative sex.)
But I think top and bottom are neutral terms with respect to whose pleasure is centered. The person penetrating who is functioning as the “top” might have their pleasure be the focus when penetrating a bottom. This is more of a “service bottom” kind of dynamic. When the top is mostly focused on the bottom’s pleasure, then we might say they are a “service top”.
I’m just not sure there is a default in terms of whose pleasure matters, maybe as you imply the bottom’s does, but I think the heteronormative default is that the man’s pleasure is centered, so probably with most straight couples having straight sex, the man’s pleasure is centered and the woman’s pleasure is an afterthought. But “top” and “bottom” are typically queer or kink terms that are used precisely because the gender roles are not necessarily being followed (even in a straight couple, a man being the bottom and the woman being the top would be considered subversive).
I only add this clarification about pleasure because I’m a preferred bottom who has suffered from a lot of dysphoria, so it has been much harder for me to receive pleasure during sex, and so I have been a bottom who prefers to focus on the pleasure of my partner (I believe the old term for this was “stone”, hence the original meaning of terms like “stone butch” or “stone femmes”, which has since shifted to imply more about gender than about sexual experiences). Even if I struggled to receive pleasure, I don’t think that altered my seemingly innate preference for being a bottom, so it’s at least not essential that bottoms receive pleasure (even if they are “receptive” in other senses).
Though ironically bottom surgery did help me a lot with actually receiving pleasure, so maybe I’m just coming into my own as a bottom. 😅
it’s a bit related to the sexual roles that traditionally were gendered, with women being receptive partners in sex receiving men’s penetration. The woman is like the bottom and the man is like the top.
The dynamic is generalized by ContraPoints in the Twilight video, where she labels it DHSM: Default Heterosexual Sado-Masochism:
This is also similar to the ideas Julia Serano lays out in Sexed Up about our binary gender conceptions.
I think the reason for thinking in terms of top and bottom is to move away from essentializing “top” as male and “bottom” as female, and these are terms used in queer communities where there might be same-sex lovers or genderqueer lovers who still engage in these sexual dynamics but might not want to use heteronormative and gender essentialist language, or in kink communities where straight people might be going against the grain (e.g. a woman pegging a man, the man is the bottom while the woman is the top) but prefer language that doesn’t imply their sexual practices invalidate their gender.
Generally the bottom is the one being penetrated and the top is the one doing the penetrating. Sometimes people use bottom to mean submissive and top to mean dominant though.
