lespapapas

i am so sorry that everyone lied to you. bottom = someone who prefers to be penetrated when having penetrative sex, top = someone who prefers to penetrate others when having penetrative sex, versatile/vers (not switch, oops. that’s a bdsm term) = no strong preference for either (or a preference for changing roles every once in a while)

im gonna be blunt here. the word for that is not “top”, its “dominant”. thats the actual terminology and also the word that you use yourself multiple times. i know that not all sex requires penetration. this is why i specify “penetrative sex” and not just “sex”. these words describe penetrative sex, so you wouldnt use them to describe non-penetrative sex 

I’m not speaking to the content of the first post here, more the discussion of what top and bottom ‘actually’ mean.  I really sympathise with the desire to not have crossover between the meanings of submissive/dominant and top/bottom (if that’s what the op is in part expressing); I think the general cultural conflation of e.g. ‘being penetrated’ and ‘being submissive’ (and indeed the broader association between sexual acts and personality traits) has harmed me by making it harder for me to figure out what I want, I’m guessing that means it’s bad for a non-negligible number of other people, the conflation of these terms probably sometimes actively perpetuates this harm, and presumably sometimes it’s just harder for people to communicate clearly about their desires when the meanings of words are ambiguous. But I think there’s a lot of value and importance in acknowledging how people actually use words to describe themselves, and my experience is that in (gestures vaguely) queer online spaces I hang out in, when top and bottom are used to mean something other than (or additional to) preferences re penetration I don’t think it’s a ‘common misunderstanding,’ it seems to me like the emotionally meaningful reality of how people think and talk about their identities and desires. I think identity often feels precious and meaningful to people, it goes deeper than ‘oh I’ll just use a different word, cool,’ and so it seems important to me that the way people use these words is acknowledged (I think using top and bottom to indicate preferences unrelated to penetration also has quite a long history in the bdsm community that I know almost nothing about so I’m really just expressing my uninformed emotional reaction here). For example an Autostraddle survey on tops and bottoms of several thousand people reflects top and bottom being very commonly used to mean more than ‘who prefers to be penetrated’.  “The most consistent descriptor in the open-form answer descriptions was that of the top being “in control” or “in charge” of the sexual encounter, or otherwise “leading the way” or being the “more active” or “dominant” partner. “You primarily enact, direct, or conduct the activities,” said one butch top. “Someone who is the team captain for the activity,” wrote one bisexual top, adding: “Someone who often initiates or lovingly takes control. Someone who is taking on the responsibility of giving the other party or parties a very good time.”

Hermione Granger: *comes from muggle world and discovers magic*

anyways hermione is a cutthroat bitch and her demonizing divination is due to the fact that she literally #cannot with emotional forms of magic. quidditch? which requires an emotional partnership of trust with the broom? nope. divination? which requires an emotional openness and willingness to forego logical conclusion at the whims of fate? are u fuckin kidding me. patronuses? which require not just technical skill but also a deep connection with your own emotional core? uhhhhh we’ll just let harry handle that one.

Pronouns: heesh/himmer/hizzer

Me: waiting for any form of public transport

You, an intellectual: 9+7=16

Also though like speaking as a Math, noticing that 9+7 is (8+1) + (8-1) also totally works for this and is also extremely useful for other things?

To put this in personal terms, my six-year-old might do something appallingly horrible and selfish and age appropriate to one of my three-year-old’s toys. As a parent you swoop in and say, “This is not acceptable and you cannot do that.” But just as I (or my wife who is a clinical nurse-psychologist, and so, pathetically, we actually speak like this at home) am saying this, the other will say, “He can’t help it; he doesn’t have a frontal cortex yet,” to which the first inevitably responds, “But how else is he going to get one?"