Switch

What is a switch?

Switch is, in BDSM, someone who takes both the leading and the receiving role, depending on the partner, the evening, or the scene. A switch is therefore not a half dominant and not a wavering submissive, but someone for whom the direction itself is a variable. The word stands next to dominant and submissive as a third option.

How switching works in practice

Almost no one changes in the middle of a scene. The changing sits between scenes.

Katherine Martinez studied that for the Journal of Homosexuality with 202 questionnaires and 25 semi-structured interviews, and she splits it exactly this way: people shift in identity and in play across time, across place, across scene, and across play partner. Those are four different axes, and for many people not all four are open. Someone can choose the same side for years with one partner and the other side with a second, without ever shifting inside a single evening.

A normal course of things looks like this. Someone always plays the receiving side at home with a steady partner, and at a play party with someone else plays the leading side. Nothing about that is indecisive. It is the same person doing two things in two places, and on a profile there is one word for it: switch.

Why the word first meant a whip

Because switch in English is four hundred years older as an object than as a role.

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the noun to the 1590s, in the sense “slender riding whip.” Probably from Flemish or Low German, related to the Middle Dutch swijch, “bough, twig”. The verb follows around 1610 with the sense “strike with a switch, lash.” The meaning the scene uses, “a change from one to another, reversal, an exchange,” dates only from 1920 and began as slang.

The role meaning is much younger. Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists a separate sexual meaning under switch, and the oldest of those is not the role but the taste. In American underworld slang of the 1960s, a switch is someone who likes to be whipped. The 1969 quote leaves little room: “they usually whip them so bad that they can’t work for a couple of months.” The role meaning intended here gets its first instance only in 1992, in Brenda Love’s Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices: “The term switch is used by those in the S/M community for those people who alternate the role of a bottom/submissive and top/dominant.”

In Dutch there is no word for it. The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal knows zero entries for the noun switch, but it does have the verb switchen: “Overgaan, omschakelen (naar iets anders)” (to cross over, to switch to something else). So Dutch has the action and not the person.

Why people switch

Because from one side you learn things you never see from the other.

Whoever has lain tied up once knows afterward what a wrap does that fit fine two minutes ago. Whoever has led once knows how much there is to decide in that leading. That is the payoff switches name most often, and that neither role can deliver alone.

• For the switch, the pressure to choose disappears. No side has to be defended that does not fit in the moment.
• For a partner who has one side, a switch is often the first with whom the conversation about the other side can happen without embarrassment.
• For a couple where both switch, a negotiation arrives that other couples do not have: who leads tonight, and how you say that today you want the other side.

Switching makes no one a better dominant or a smoother submissive. It is not a training and not proof of experience. What does happen is that the role stops being self-evident, and that costs conversations.

What a switch is not

“A switch does not yet know what they want.” In Martinez the opposite shows: it is exactly the group that breaks the pattern. Men in her study mostly called themselves dominant, master, top, or sadist and also always played that side; women mostly called themselves submissive, slave, bottom, or masochist and also always played that side. It was women and queer or pansexual participants who broke that split, and they did it through their switch identity. That is not doubt.

“Every switch does both sides about equally often.” No. Martinez measures role identity, role frequency, and role fluidity as three different things. Someone can call themselves a switch and choose the same side nine times out of ten.

“So anyone who sometimes wants the other side is a switch.” That is an assumption and not a given. The word is a self-label. The roles someone plays and the label someone picks do not always run in step. See sub for the study in which that gap was counted out.

How I see it

I’m Victor, gigolo and psychotherapist, and I work on only one side of the line: I lead. What I do see a lot are women who call themselves a switch and only mention it on the second or third date.

That it comes so late has a reason I now expect. They are afraid it sounds like backing out. That “I’m sometimes the other one too” reads as “I don’t mean it.” That is exactly what it is not. Almost always it turns out to be about one other partner, in one other period, and it is an expansion and not a reservation.

The practical consequence for me is small and concrete. I do not ask “are you dominant or submissive,” but “what do you do with whom.” That second question brings answers that do not fit the first.

More on switching

Within this glossary, the two sides this moves between are on dominant and submissive, and D/s explains how that relationship itself is set up. Bottom carries the broader three-way split of top, bottom, and switch, and the BDSM test is where many people meet the word for the first time.

Off this site, the study by Katherine Martinez is the only one that takes switches as its main subject instead of a leftover category, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang shows with quotes and dates how young the role meaning really is.

Where this fits on this site

I lead, and that means I am a counterpart for one half of what you do and not for the other. If you call yourself a switch and want to know what is left then, that is a good first question. The page about the BDSM date says what does happen and how we talk it through beforehand.

Sources

• BDSM Role Fluidity: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Investigating Switches Within Dominant/Submissive Binaries. Katherine Martinez, Journal of Homosexuality 65(10), 1299–1324, 2018 (DOI 10.1080/00918369.2017.1374062, PMID 28854056; first name, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref, which gives Katherine Martinez where Europe PMC has only “Martinez K”). Only the abstract is freely accessible, and nothing here goes beyond it. Provides the design with 202 online questionnaires and 25 semi-structured interviews; the distinction between role identity, role frequency, and role fluidity; the four axes people shift across, time, place, scene, and play partner; the finding that men mostly call themselves dominant, master, top, or sadist and also always play that role while women mostly call themselves submissive, slave, bottom, or masochist and also always play that role; and the core finding that it is women and queer or pansexual participants who break that split through their switch identity.
• switch, n.¹. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green. Provides, under sense 4, the separate sexual meanings: (a) in American underworld slang, someone who likes to be whipped, with quotes from 1967 and 1969 the second of which is literally about beating someone senseless, and (b) in American gay slang, someone who switches preference, with the oldest quote being 1992, Brenda Love, Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices p. 277: “The term switch is used by those in the S/M community for those people who alternate the role of a bottom/submissive and top/dominant.” At the verb switch, the origin is given plainly: “[SE switch, to whip]”.
• switch. Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper. Provides the noun from the 1590s in the sense “slender riding whip,” probably from a Flemish or Low German variant related to Middle Dutch swijch, “bough, twig”; the verb from 1610 as “strike with a switch, lash”; the sense “thin bough, twig” from around 1600; and the sense “a change from one to another, reversal, an exchange, substitution” only from 1920, originally slang, with switcheroo from 1933.
• SWITCHEN. Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal via the Geïntegreerde Taalbank of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Provides the entry switchen, vb. (intr., weak): “Overgaan, omschakelen (naar iets anders)” (to cross over, to switch to something else), against zero entries for the noun switch. So Dutch has the verb and not the person. In addition, the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek gives 12,669 articles containing switch and 4,132 containing switchen, almost all about electronics, sport, and politics; rolwisselaar returns zero articles.
• Top, bottom, switch. Wikipedia. Provides the placement of switch as a third term next to top and bottom, and the definition that those words refer to the giving and the receiving side. Written by volunteers; used here only for the definition.

Related terms

• Dominant. The one side a switch shifts toward, with the work that comes with it.
• Submissive. The other side, and why it is not a character trait.
• D/s. The relationship the switching happens within.
• Bottom. The three-way split of top, bottom, and switch, and why it is about position and not identity.
• Top. The other side of that split, with the difference between carrying out and deciding.
• Brat. Pushes back, does not change sides.
• Sub. The label for one side, with the study in which label and behavior turned out to diverge.
• BDSM test. The questionnaire where switch comes back as a separate score.