Topping

What is topping?

Topping is carrying out the action in a BDSM scene: tying, striking, touching, giving an order. It’s the verb form of top and so describes an activity, not an identity. Whoever tops tonight can take the other side next week. A Dutch verb for it doesn’t exist.

Topping, being a top, and being a dominant

Three words, three different things. Topping is the action, top is the role in which you take that action on, and dominant is the say-so over what happens. They often coincide and they don’t have to: with a service top one person does the work while the other decides how hard and how long.

The dictionary doesn’t make that distinction. Wiktionary describes the verb to top as “to be the dominant partner in a BDSM relationship or roleplay”, putting the action and the power in one sentence. Read only that, and you miss exactly the difference three pages on this site are about.

Where the word topping comes from

The oldest citation Wiktionary gives for this sense comes from an interview on August 15, 1981 in Gay Community News. Nancy Wechsler spoke there with Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia about sadomasochism, and Califia describes her own shift like this: “As I went on doing s/m more and more, I found the idea of topping real attractive and so I started to do that. At this point in my life I’m playing top almost all the time.”

In the same answer sits what topping asks, in her view: “I feel that it is really important for me as a top to know what the bottom is experiencing.” So the verb already existed in 1981, and it was used right away by someone who had crossed from one side to the other.

Why people top

Because the doing itself is the draw. You choose a build, you read what comes back, and you adjust before anything is asked. That focus has a name of its own, and it sits at topspace. What topping doesn’t do is reassure the other person on its own: without asking how it’s going, it stays just carrying something out.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to try what happens when someone else takes those actions on, you don’t have to work anything out yourself. What we agree beforehand and in what order, you’ll read on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• top. Wiktionary, wikitext retrieved via action=raw on August 10, 2026. Gives under the verb top the sense “To be the dominant partner in a BDSM relationship or roleplay”, with the example sentences “I used to be a slave, but I ended up topping” and the note that giving advice to the dominant party is called “topping from the bottom”; the oldest citation, from Gay Community News of August 15, 1981; and the fact that the translation table for this sense lists Esperanto, Finnish, French, Portuguese, Sicilian, and Spanish but no Dutch.
• Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia Talk About Sadomasochism: Fears, Facts, Fantasies. Interview by Nancy Wechsler, Gay Community News volume 9, issue 5, August 15, 1981. Scanned volume at the Internet Archive; the quoted sentences were traced back word for word in the OCR of the issue. Gives the oldest known use of topping in this sense, spoken by Pat Califia, whose Sensuous Magic this site also carries; plus her sentence about what the performing side needs to know, in her view. The OCR contains reading errors in the surrounding lines, and only what comes clean out of the scan is quoted here.
• topping. Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, consulted August 10, 2026. Gives that Dutch has a noun topping, a de-word, plural toppings, derived from the verb toppen with the suffix -ing, and that the entry explicitly has “(nog) geen betekenisprofiel”, no sense profile yet. So there is no dictionary sense in Dutch in which topping is about a BDSM action.
• topping. Wiktionary, wikitext retrieved via action=raw on August 10, 2026. Gives that the noun topping in English primarily means “any food item added on top of another”, and that the Dutch topping is recorded as a borrowing under that sense.

Related terms

Topping is the verb form of top; that page has the role itself, with the origin of the word and the research alongside it.

• Top. The role topping is the activity of, and why it says nothing about power.
• Bottoming. The same scene from the other side, with what happens in a body meanwhile.
• Dominant. The say-so, which often but not always sits with the same person.
• Service. The form in which topping and deciding run against each other.
• Topspace. The state the performing side ends up in during a scene.
• Topping from the bottom. The accusation that the receiving side is steering the scene, and why that’s a judgment and not an action.
• Switch. The one who does both sides, and along which axes that shifts.