March 2010 Archives

Yesterday I kicked a guy out of my bedroom, out of my house. Shouting, furious. Get the fuck out and stop wasting my time. He's a "dom top" who saw me as a "sub btm", so this was flipping the script. In the script running in his head, him being dominant meant he could inflict discomfort and it was my job to take it. Dominant sex does it for me, but lack of skills really doesn't. Not in another top, anyway. I say "another", because I was top only myself until about this time last year. My own script is more about getting lost in the moment, not following orders or submitting to another bloke. Ineptitude in a top pulls me out of the scene. I find myself thinking "I could do this better" - spectating critically, rather than playing along together. The guy last night used his fingers, roughly, with nails, without lube, and I stopped him and kicked him out. Not just because it felt unpleasant. It became clear he thought "dominant" excused him from having to learn how to be a good top; that's how that script works in his head.

Sexual scripting (Laumann & Gagnon) is conceptual terrain that Trevor has worked with productive results, suggesting that a major script for bottoms is using their bodies to complete circuits of pleasure and power (in plain but possibly reductive language, "giving pleasure to the top"). I agree with him that it would be fascinating to study the scripts that tops enact in their play, but it would be a tricky area to study. Many of the fantasies involved are wildly socially unacceptable. Often a top keeps them to himself while playing along with a different, more socially acceptable script. The interviewer probably needs to be a top himself to ask the questions and understand the psychology, but this could incite bravado (one-upmanship) and produce an interview dynamic of amplification. I would personally face a struggle with my Catholic, feminist, best gay boy upbringing to not downplay that content in my write-up; writing about my own life I still frequently introduce theory and let the intelligent reader figure it out.

Last night's bad sex experience suggests a couple of things about the role sexual skill plays. Someone asked me if he was just a newbie, and oddly enough, I can't imagine a newbie making the same mistakes. They might struggle with insertion (as every new top does) but they'd be more likely to err on the side of checking too much on how I was going. As it happens, I'd played with this guy before and said no thanks to playing again; he asked why not and I told him, in detail. And then he modified exactly nothing when he got back in my bedroom. No doubt partly because his script allows no speaking parts to anyone he casts as "bottom". But I also figure he suffers from some kind of erection-induced learning disorder: the moment he gets hard he can't remember anything you tell him, and talking about sex gets him hard. It's a vicious cycle.

I'd like to add another layer to the analysis via Mihail Cziksentmihalyi's concept of flow, the state in which arousal and control (ie skill) are perfectly matched. In that state, creative work just flows: you look at the clock and eight hours have passed without your noticing. It's diagnostically useful, too. My own writing problems typically occur when I have high arousal (care too much about the topic, or I'm really stressed out) and I lack the writing and conceptual skills to match the complexity of the topic or the intensity of my feelings about it.

I think we can use that concept to explain what makes good sex work. I also think it's relevant in a prevention sense to the practice of intensive sex partying (Prestage & Hurley, Hurley & Prestage) where a premium is placed on choreographing a balance between pleasure and intensity on one hand and bodily, chemical and HIV risk management on the other. It's easy to see how arousal and control interact with sexual scripting. To last night's dud root, the "dominant" script clearly meant he didn't need to be (or learn how to become) a good top. And to be fair, my relative lack of bottom skills meant that my own script was unsustainable, where a more experienced player might have continued and managed his top to completion of his script and his own satisfaction. That's something I'm careful about in my practice as a top -- I find out beforehand what script turns a prospective partner on and how much skills and confidence he's got, and I meet him there. The whole experience has also got me thinking about what skills and sensibility make a good top -- but that might be a topic for another posting.