Hannah

(really quickly: Top-Vers-Bottom and Dominant-Switch-Submissive are separate concepts with their own history but the phrases have become conflated in popular discourse. When specifically talking about this particular phenomenon, the terms do get used interchangeably, and I will be using them as such for this one post.)

There was a tiktok I saw a couple days ago that my partner also saw and we had a nice discussion about. I can't find it again, but fundamentally it boiled down to how a lot of cishet men don't see a relationship as one between a man and a woman, but a man and an object, and much of their homophobia comes from a lens of "How can you have a relationship without an object" and "how can you have a relationship between only objects?"¹ (See the violent fear mlm men will harass them being rooted in "How can they treat men like objects?" and sapphic love is treated as lesser because cishet men see it as "you can't have a real relationship just two objects.")

Trans and nonbinary folk also get hit with this in different ways,² as much of the hatred cishet men show towards us can be rooted in "Is this a man or an object?" because we don't fit neatly into their internal classifications - after all, if someone can change from being a man or an object, that implies that it's not about objects, but about people, and that could risk making them think about how they treat women.

Then, falling asleep last night and thinking over the conversation, I realize queer people often repeat this thought process. We just treat bottoms like objects instead.

I'm sure you've seen the memes. The "Look at you, you're just a bottom" with a dismissive photo attached, or the conflation of bottom with being submissive and therefore weaker, or hell the conflation of submission with weakness.³ These also get conflated with femininity in a negative way, with people assuming the smaller member of a gay couple is the bottom or in a relationship between a butch and a femme assume the femme is submissive and in relationships between enbies people often assume power dynamic based on perception of masculinity/femininity (see also in general "Who wears the pants in the relationship?" type quests that are always gross.)

And just...why?

After trying so hard to reject so much of cishet normative society, why do so many of us turn around and recreate a microcosm of it by talking about bottoms as if they're lesser? Like, of course when the speaker and the listener have both discussed this and the bottom has consented to being treated that way, feel free to degrade the bottom until they're all worked up, but that's the kind of thing that happens with negotiation and discussion. But when it gets put onto other people without consent, it just replicates the same harmful mentalities. Not to mention that we keep forcing it to be a binary, ignoring switches and verses.

Don't believe me?

Stop me if you've heard this one before. "You're not a switch, you're a bottom that will top to make your partner happy."⁴

Yeah. And I know people who that is true for. One of my exes proudly used that phrase to describe its own switch side, and I know a lot of switches who happily lean into that. And that's fine for them. But I'm a switch, by which I mean I will domme happily 95% of the time and am a full on slut who will domme anyone who I find attractive and consents to it...but 5% of the time it's nice to experience the other side of things. It also takes an incredible amount of trust for me to even consider switching, something I'll only do in the context of a committed relationship or incredibly deep friendship and even then it'll take months before I'm comfortable enough to do it.

Do I have a point or call to action with this?

Not really. Just wanted to vent about a trend that's always made me feel a bit icky.

1. I know this is not the sole cause of homophobia/transphobia, but it had enough of a ring of truth to warrant a discussion imo.

2. Of course we do.

3. I'm a sadist. If I ever, ever were to assume my masochistic play partners were weak, I can look at their backside for solid proof they have incredible strength to endure that.

4. You were supposed to stop me.

I keep wanting to share this, but can't quite form my thoughts into something coherent to say. So I'm just gonna smear words on the page and see where it takes me. I think mostly I want to talk about why I dom sometimes, even though I lean very submissive. (In fact I would say that I honestly dom more than I necessarily want to, but not for the reductive reason of "just wanting to please my partner.") Just offering my perspective up, I suppose.

For a while I was under the assumption that I was purely submissive. It took trying out domming a couple of times to admit that, actually, I am capable of both. It's still true that submission is far more intense for me, and gets my heart racing in a way that nothing else really does. So why dom at all? Because, like...
It's fun to be mean. Like, really fun. Teasing a sub and turning them into a mess by just being a massive bitch is fucking great. It doesn't always necessarily get me off, but I'm still having a good time. And on top (heh) of that, it's a power fantasy. For just a little while I get to feel strong and in control, and that's a nice feeling. Again, not as intense for me as having someone else control me, but it's a different experience and one I enjoy having sometimes.

As for why I end up domming more often than I'd really like to... it's really just been circumstantial. Like, a friend offering to let me control their blutooth vibe. I kind of have to be the dom in that scenario. Or agreeing to do a scene with someone who doesn't want or have experience domming. I'll take up the challenge if I really want to fuck them. My ideal sex life is one where I sub maybe 80% of the time, but the reality has been closer to 50% for a while. That's life I guess. (to be fair, it has been shifting more the direction I want lately)

To tie this into the general idea of OP's post, I am very lucky that my first dedicated domme took respect and communication very seriously. Being new to kink, and being overwhelmed by all the intense things I was feeling, I was perhaps vulnerable to exploitation. She instilled in me early on the need to have self respect as a submissive. She herself had bad experiences in her past, and took her role as my kink mentor seriously. Every sub has limits, and they need to be respected, no matter what. If your domme treats you like an object outside of your scenes (and you didn't agree to that happening) then they are no longer being your domme, they're being a bad partner. And in some cases, maybe an abuser. As a sub, you are still a person, and you still get to decide how you are treated.

I could maybe talk more about the conflation of top-bottom with dom-sub, but other people have done that and this post is long enough. For the record, I'm a sub-leaning switch on the dom-sub scale, but also almost purely a bottom. Depending on your definition of bottom. Ok, I'm not getting into it, I promise, please end post.