Top

What is a top?

A top is the person who carries out the action in a BDSM scene: the one who ties, strikes, touches, or gives an order. Top says what someone does, not who decides. The decision sits with the dominant, and those two roles often coincide without being the same thing. Opposite the top stands the bottom.

What a top does during a scene

A top carries out and reads, and that second part is the work. Take an evening with a flogger. Beforehand it’s settled where the blows land and where they don’t, and which word stops everything. During the scene the top strikes, watches what happens to skin, breath, and posture, and adjusts the pace to match. The action is the visible part and the smallest one.

A top doesn’t have to be the one who decides. The clearest form is the service top: someone who applies the stimulus according to the bottom’s instructions. She says how hard and when it stops, he does it. The action runs one way and the say-so runs the other, and that’s why two separate words exist.

Where the word top comes from

From Germanic, and the meaning you know is by far the oldest. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces top back to Old English top, toppa, “summit; crest, tuft, bunch of hair”. The Dutch top is that same Germanic word and not a loanword: the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands gives as its earliest attestations top meaning “crown of the head” as a byname of jan top [1248-71] and “highest point” in broedet up bomen inden tsoppe [1287].

The role sense came much later, and only in English. Etymonline notes it plainly: “The sense of ‘dominant sexual partner’ is by 1961.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives under top, n. sense 7 “in a sado-masochistic relationship, the dominant partner”, with its oldest citation from around 1972: “It wasn’t inconceivable that Bran might condescend to play bottom man to Bart’s top”. The verb follows in 1975.

And then that same dictionary gives the verb an origin that the scene itself denies: “[i.e. one places oneself ‘on top’ of the other person]”. The word comes from the spatial meaning, while every present-day description of the role says it is not about who lies on top. That the two have drifted apart is my own conclusion from reading both entries side by side.

Dutch did take top from English, but only as a garment: topless in 1964, top in 1969, topje in 1970. Say “top” in Dutch and you mean a mountain, a treetop, or a blouse. The role never came along.

Why people top

Because the performing role gives you something to do with all the attention you have. What people say about it is rarely about power and mostly about focus: for an hour your whole head revolves around one body. That’s a different high than the one the bottom goes through.

• For the person topping, the payoff is that you make something instead of receiving something: a build to choose, a response to read.
• For the person bottoming, the payoff is that nothing has to be worked out anymore, because someone else already knows the order and dares to change it too.
• For two people together, it produces a conversation that otherwise never happens: what do you want to feel, how hard, and how will I see that it’s becoming too much.

Topping is no proof of experience. What counts is whether you dare to stop while it’s still going well.

How people top in practice

The most common form is the smallest: one agreed evening in which one person carries out the actions and the other receives them, with nothing changing outside of it. Alongside that are forms that differ at the core rather than in intensity. The rope top works with rope and takes on a second trade: load and nerve pathways. The service top carries out what the bottom orders. The sadist chooses the stimulus because the response to it is the whole point. Someone who does both sides is called a switch.

What a top is not

“A top is a dominant.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang describes top literally as “the dominant partner”, and that’s how the word was used in the seventies. Usage in the scene splits the two: the top carries out, the dominant decides. With a service top the two run against each other.

“Top means you lie on top.” That’s what the word says, not what the role is. In practice a top just as often sits beside, behind, or three meters away.

“Top means the same as in the gay scene.” There it’s a different axis. For Archives of Sexual Behavior, David Moskowitz and Trevor Hart asked 429 men what they call themselves, and there top stands for “exclusively insertive”: one sexual act and its direction. Tops and bottoms lined up closely there between what they said they were and what they did; for those who called themselves versatile that held for only half. Same word, a different distinction.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, gigolo and psychotherapist, and I’m the performing party in nearly every booking I have. I almost never use the word top, and neither do the women who book me. They say “you do it”.

The performing party is the least informed person in the room. You feel nothing of what you do. You have your hands, your eyes, and what she says, and that last one is the only source that can be precise.

So the mistake I made longest is the question “are you okay?”. Almost everyone says yes to that, even when they’re not, because it’s a yes-or-no question in the middle of something she doesn’t want to interrupt. These days I ask for a number.

What you can do yourself

• Agree on which actions you’ll carry out and which you won’t, before you reach for a role name. “The buttocks yes, the face no” settles more than “I’m a top”.
• Ask for a number from one to ten instead of “are you okay”, even when it’s clearly going well, so the scale is calibrated before you need it.
• With anything that’s bound, look at hands and feet. Color, temperature, and tingling tell you something sooner than a face does.
• Arrange your own landing as carefully as hers. The comedown afterward hits the performing party too, usually a day later than you expect.

Further reading on topping

Within this glossary, the other half of the word pair sits at bottom, and dominant explains what actually is about say-so. Beyond it, Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the most rewarding to browse yourself: it gives the oldest citation with a year for each sense, so you can see how young the role sense is.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to know what it’s like to be on the receiving end with someone who does this often, that’s what I offer. The page about the BDSM date covers what we go through beforehand.

Sources

• top, n.. Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green. Gives under sense 7 “in a sado-masochistic relationship, the dominant partner”, with its oldest citation from around 1972, ‘D. Baxer’, His Big Brother p. 57: “It wasn’t inconceivable that Bran might condescend to play bottom man to Bart’s top”. Sense 6, the “masculine” partner in a lesbian relationship, is one year older (1971). At the matching verb top, v.¹ sits sense 5, “to take the role of the dominant or sadistic partner”, with its oldest citation from 1975, Gershon Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke II p. 150: “dreaming of ‘topping’ them virilely”, and the origin note “[i.e. one places oneself ‘on top’ of the other person]”.
• top (n.1), top (v.). Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper. Gives the derivation from Old English top, toppa (“summit; crest, tuft, bunch of hair”) from Proto-Germanic *toppa-, with Old Norse toppr, Old Frisian top, Old Dutch topp, and German Zopf as cognates; the finding that there are no certain cognates outside Germanic; and the dating “The sense of ‘dominant sexual partner’ is by 1961”.
• The influence of physical body traits and masculinity on anal sex roles in gay and bisexual men. David A. Moskowitz & Trevor A. Hart, Archives of Sexual Behavior 40(4), 835–841, 2011 (DOI 10.1007/s10508-011-9754-0; PMID 21465269; first names, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref and against the PubMed record itself, because the first PMID the search returned belonged to an article about zeolites). Questionnaire study of 429 men. Gives the description of top as “exclusively insertive” against bottom as “exclusively receptive” and versatile as both, and the finding that tops and bottoms showed a high match between identity and behavior while only half of the versatiles did. Only the abstract was read; nothing is used here that isn’t in it. The study is about sexual positions among men who have sex with men and not about BDSM roles, and that difference is exactly what it is cited for here.
• top (garment). Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim, and N. van der Sijs, 2003–2009) via Etymologiebank. Gives the Middle Dutch attestations top “crown of the head” as a byname of jan top [1248-71; VMNW] and “treetop, highest point” in broedet up bomen inden tsoppe [1287; VMNW]; the Germanic cognates and the reconstruction Proto-Germanic *toppa-; and the finding that Dutch borrowed top from English in the second half of the twentieth century in the sense of “an upper garment”, with topless [1964; Leeuwarder Courant], top [1969; Nieuwe Leidsche Courant], and topje [1970].

Related terms

Top is the word for the one who carries out the action, and it sits alongside bottom and switch in the three-way split most profiles begin with.

• Bottom. The opposite role, and the word top is always named in the same breath with.
• Dominant. The one who decides rather than carries out, and why the two don’t coincide.
• Rope top. The same role within rope work, with a second trade attached.
• Service. The direction a service top works in, and why he’s still called a top.
• Switch. The one who takes this role only part of the time.
• Sadist. The other axis: who chooses the stimulus, apart from who applies it.
• Topdrop. The comedown this role can hit afterward.
• Topspace. The state a top ends up in during the scene.
• Topping from the bottom. The accusation voiced from within this role.
• Topping. The verb form of this role, and why Dutch has no word for it.