Topdrop

What is topdrop?

Topdrop is the emotional and physical backlash that can hit the party who ran the scene once it is over. The blow can come within an hour or only days later, and feels like emptiness, listlessness or doubt. Topdrop names that person after the act; domdrop names the same backlash after the authority.

What topdrop looks like

Rarely as sadness. Mostly like an engine that won’t turn over. The common picture: the scene went well, everyone left satisfied, and the next morning you can’t get the day going. No appetite, no drive for work, and a vague feeling that something is off.

Richard Sprott and Anna Randall describe two different things under one word in the Journal of Positive Sexuality. The immediate form, for which the scene uses a biochemical explanation, and a later form that begins hours or days after the end. Of that first one they state flatly that no research exists that has ever tested the physiological story.

On the giving side it is mainly the late form that stands out, and it surprises: it follows scenes that went well.

Why topdrop follows a good scene

Because something stops that you actually wanted to have.

Sprott and Randall propose reading the later backlash as grief: a reaction to loss, and what gets lost is the peak experience itself. For that they go back to Abraham Maslow, who introduced the concept of the peak experience in 1962 with the prompt: “Think of the most wonderful experience of your life: the happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture.” For the one running the scene, that peak is usually the state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow. They describe the loss of it with an image that lands grimly well here: “the view from the mountaintop” is gone.

And then comes something that lifts topdrop out of the BDSM corner. The authors write that this process is not unique to kink and occurs after every intense performance, with actors and directors in the theater as an example and with the “post-Olympic depression” of athletes.

That comparison has been measured. Gregory Diment, Nina Due Stagis and Andreas Küttel gave 49 Danish Olympians questionnaires about wellbeing, depression and anxiety one month after the Tokyo Games. 27 percent scored below average on wellbeing or moderate to severe on depression, and 16 percent on both. They add themselves that a clear definition of post-Olympic blues is still missing. That this is a good measure for what happens to a top is my inference and does not appear in their study.

There is one more reason the giving side is prone to it, and it sits in the work beforehand. Sprott and Randall describe the top’s work as a run-up with hurdles: you have to reach the skill before you can do the scene, and that delay makes the satisfaction greater.

What it gets you to expect topdrop

That you won’t go looking for a mistake that isn’t there.

• For the one who ran the scene it saves a day of brooding. Anyone who knows the dip belongs to a good evening won’t go back over which decision was wrong.
• For the one who went through the scene it saves a wrong conclusion. A quiet or absent top the next day is usually not distance and not regret.
• For two people together it produces one agreement: a message the next day, in both directions.

This is described and not proven. Sprott and Randall present grief and identity change explicitly as a proposal, not as evidence, and no measurement has ever been done on BDSM tops. If the gloom hangs around longer than a few days, then topdrop is the wrong explanation and a doctor belongs in the picture.

What topdrop is not

“Topdrop means you went too far.” Usually the opposite. Sprott and Randall link the later backlash to peak experiences that were good; it is the loss of them that causes the dip, and not a mistake during the scene. Doubt afterwards is no source either: if you want to know how it was, there is exactly one person who can say.

“Topdrop is just being tired.” Fatigue comes right away and passes with sleep. The late form often begins only once you have already slept a night, and sleep does nothing about it. That difference is why Sprott and Randall distinguish two kinds of drop.

“Topdrop is a Dutch word.” No, and in Dutch it means something completely different. The newspaper archive of the Royal Library holds 690 articles with topdrop, and the oldest is a Red Band ad in, among others, the Eindhovensch dagblad of 17 September 1959: “TOPDROP! Grote, donkere droppen met de echte, lekkere dropsmaak waar U met hagelwitte tanden van genieten kunt”, with the pun “TOPDROP op en top drop!” underneath. Those ads run on into 1989. Not one of them is about BDSM.

What I see of it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo and psychotherapist, and I’ve had this more often than I wanted to admit for a long time. With me it doesn’t come as sadness but as slowness, and always on the day after an evening that was good.

The weight doesn’t scale with the intensity of the scene. A long, precise evening with a lot of preparation hits harder than a heavy session with no run-up. That fits what Sprott and Randall write about that run-up, and I only found it out by keeping track.

And this is the practical part: since then I plan nothing for the day after. No second appointment, no admin, nothing that comes with a decision. That sounds like a luxury and it is just scheduling.

What you can do yourself

• Count on a delay. If the evening itself feels fine, that says nothing about the day after tomorrow. Put the dip in your calendar instead of waiting for it.
• Agree on a message the next day, in both directions, and agree it beforehand so nobody has to ask.
• Keep track of one thing after a scene: how much preparation went into it and how you felt two days later. After five times you see your pattern.
• Don’t plan decisions for the day after a scene. Doubt you feel then is about the dip and not about the decision.
• Get help if the gloom lasts longer than a few days. That is no longer topdrop, and it deserves something better than waiting it out.

More reading about topdrop

Within this glossary the same backlash is named after the authority on domdrop, the receiving side on subdrop, and the umbrella with all four forms on drop. What there is to arrange beforehand is on aftercare.

Beyond that, the article by Sprott and Randall is free to read and written for therapists who know little about BDSM; it is the only piece that pulls drop apart into two kinds.

Where this fits on this site

I do this work, so the landing of the giving side is in my planning. What we agree beforehand about how an evening ends and what happens the day after is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Black and Blues: Sub Drop, Top Drop, Event Drop and Scene Drop. Richard A. Sprott & Anna Randall, Journal of Positive Sexuality 2, November 2016 (DOI 10.51681/1.233). Full PDF read. This page uses from it: the spelling Top drop in the title; the footnote that KittyK and Samuel are composite client descriptions and not real people; the distinction between the immediate and the later form; the proposal to read the later form as grief over a lost peak experience; the quote from Abraham Maslow from Toward a Psychology of Being (1962, p. 9) about the peak experience; the description of flow in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as what a top loses, with “the view from the mountaintop” as the image for it; the finding that this same process occurs after every intense performance, with theater and the “post-Olympic depression” of athletes as examples; and the application of C.A. Tripp’s erotic equation to the top, whose preparation and skill form the hurdle that makes the satisfaction greater. Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi and Tripp were read in Sprott and Randall’s account and not in the original.
• What is this thing called “Post-Olympic Blues”? An Exploratory Study Among Danish Olympic Athletes. Gregory Michael Diment, Nina Due Stagis & Andreas Küttel, Scandinavian Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 5, 21-30, 2023 (DOI 10.7146/sjsep.v5i.134527; author names, volume and pagination checked against Crossref). Provides the design with 49 Danish Olympians who filled in the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, the PHQ-9 and the GAD one month after the Tokyo Games; the outcome that 27 percent scored below average on wellbeing or moderate to severe on depression and 16 percent on both; the difference where female athletes scored higher on depression than male ones; and the authors’ own remark that a clear definition of post-Olympic blues still needs to be developed. The study is about top athletes and not about BDSM; it is here because Sprott and Randall make that comparison themselves.
• Red Band TOPDROP advertisement. Eindhovensch dagblad, 17 September 1959, via the newspaper archive of the Royal Library. The oldest of 690 articles with topdrop in that archive. Provides the Dutch meaning of the word: “TOPDROP! Grote, donkere droppen met de echte, lekkere dropsmaak waar U met hagelwitte tanden van genieten kunt”, with the line “TOPDROP op en top drop!” and the mention of the company pharmacist of the Red Band factories. The OCR was checked word for word. The same advertisement ran on 17 and 18 September 1959 in at least eight regional papers and the series runs on into 1989.

Related terms

Topdrop is the backlash for the one who ran the scene, and the name the research literature uses.

• Domdrop. The same phenomenon, named after who held the authority.
• Subdrop. The side of the one who went through it, with the figures on postcoital dysphoria.
• Drop. The umbrella these four forms hang under.
• Aftercare. The care topdrop is the argument for, and that the giving side skips most often.
• Top. The role this dip comes after.
• Topspace. The peak that topdrop follows.