coral & lapis

4 has SO MUCH HAIR! I love it! And I think these are even better than the others!

This is important because if you keep using these terms eventually you are going to run up against someone who knows their actual origins and actual meanings and they will use them correctly and you are going to have to be normal about people using the actual meanings of words and not accuse a middle age trans woman of being anti feminist because she knows what words mean and isn't plugged into internet discourse among people who have never been to an orgy in their life.

Ok, I get why you are saying this, but you are wrong. Specifically because these terms are not historial, they are practical. As in they are terms to describe the sex people are actually having in practical ways.

Lets start with a fact: Topping does not mean penetrating, bottoming does not mean penetrated. I know you have seen this a thousand times, but it is dead wrong. That is not what these words mean. The reason why you have been told wrong is because topping and bottoming are complex ideas that are not easily defined. There are a lot of conditional intricacies to how they are used that are very intuitive when you are actually having and experimenting with sex a lot, but are hard to define in a simple, easy way.

So why is it so often said that top = penetrating and bottom = penetrated? Well, clinical sources rarely want to write a 4 paragraph explanation of what a term means, so they give a technically correct partial definition.

I want you to imagine two men having penetrative anal sex while laying in a bed (in an abstract sense, if that makes you more comfortable). One of them is going to be penetrating, the other is going to be penetrated. The fact of the matter is that your body is not designed to easily bounce your ass on a dick. Your body is just not set up properly to move easily like that. So mechanically speaking it is much easier for the person penetrating to move, and it is much easier for the person penetrating to be physically on top of the other person. This is why "penetrating" is often conflated with "topping". But that is not what topping actually means.

In the above example, you will notice that one of the men, specifically the one physically on top of the other, is going to be the one moving more and therefore controlling the scene in a physical sense. Because the person on top can move easily, while the person on bottom is pinned down and can't move nearly as well.

With that in mind, top vs bottom is a matter of a sexual situation in which there is unequal control. The partner who acts is topping and the partner who is acted upon is bottoming.

This is why bottom and top are used so often in situations where no penetrative sex is happening. Or even in some cases, the top is the one being penetrated. For example, a rope bottom is called that because the person being tied up *can't move*, and therefore is being acted on more than acting, and is therefore the bottom. A woman riding a man cowgirl style is topping because she is the one acting and the man is being acted on regardless of what kind of penetration is happening.

This is why you can say "top" instead of "dominant" - because the dominant is controlling the scene and is therefore topping. The dominant acts on the submissive no matter what physical position they are in due to the power exchange at play. That is basically the literal definition of dominant vs submissive in the most general terms. Dominating is not the same thing as topping, because it is the subset of topping in which power exchange is occurring. Therefore in any situation in which power exchange is implied or assumed, top and dominant are interchangeable. As are bottom and submissive.