“What do you like?” is a question that well-meaning clients often ask me, and one I find endlessly irritating. It is nonsensical in the context of my work—I am engaging with the person in front of me sexually because I’m paid to do so. I am in a customer service role, there to cater to their needs. But it is also impossible to answer outside of a work context, in my personal life.
Sex, for me, is not about completing a checklist of acts, but rather, like good conversation, about responding and adjusting to the person you are with. Something I like with one person I may not enjoy with another; something I desire on one day might not appeal the next. Sex is a form of communication between two (or more) people that is spontaneous and unique to that situation.
I’ve been thinking about this recently, because I’ve been topping a lot in my private life, something I haven’t done regularly since my teens. This has made me reflect on the sexual experiences of my twenties, when I identified heavily with being a (power) bottom, meaning someone who is penetrated but is not submissive. I am reconsidering the extent to which this sexual identity reflects something innate in me, or whether it was just a result of my circumstances at the time.
To elaborate: I worked a lot throughout my twenties, seeing sometimes as many as 30 clients in a week between my brothel and parlour work. In a booking, I usually run the action—making sure the client orgasms, making sure he is happy, making sure we finish within the allocated time. This meant all I wanted from sex in my personal life was to tap out and have someone else put the effort in.
The two women I dated in my twenties were both serious tops, whereas I think that I am a true verse (short for “versatile”, someone who is neither strictly a top nor a bottom). If I sense that someone has natural top energy, I’ll cave to that, but if I sense they want to bottom then I’ll step, equally naturally, into my own top energy, because I believe sex is a response to an individual and to the dynamic we create between us.
Now that I work far fewer hours, I’ve found that my sexuality has shifted. I am no longer burnt out or sapped dry. I feel not only eager to top but to interrogate the rigidity of identifying with particular sexual roles, and the reductive and oversimplified associations of certain behaviours with dominance or submission.
In reality, the interplay between those two states is far more complicated and subtle than we often assume. At times, I can give someone a blow job and feel I am submitting to them in that moment; I am brought to my knees, quite literally, by the feeling that they hold the power. And then at other times, I can give someone a blow job and feel that I am the dominant one, that I hold them in my hands just as I hold them in my mouth. That they are pliable and vulnerable to me.
There are so many factors other than penetration that determine the power dynamic, such as who initiates, what noises are made or how a body is gripped in hands. Who seeks eye contact, who coyly looks away, what is said and what is not said.
Pat Califia’s erotic short story “The Spoiler” attempts to answer the question “who tops the top?” by presenting the ultimate top character that others with a similar inclination give way to, submitting for the first time in their lives. The storyline validated my sense that “what do you like?” is a ridiculous question: what we like is often changeable and unknowable until we’re actually doing it.
Looking back, I think that identifying as a particular role limited my sexual experiences, something I am loath to do—and won’t do anymore. Going forward, I won’t define myself by any sexual role. What I am and what I do—and what I like—also depends on you.
