I am not a top or a bottom

Observing how patriarchal thinking can infiltrate queer spaces :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED July 28th 2023

I came out at the very end of 2018 to my family and friends and I came out mid 2019 “publicly”. I chronicled a lot of that process in my memoir can you turn the lights off?

As someone who was heavily influenced by growing up in a patriarchal home and also in a patriarchal family and schooling system at large, my quest for love, as bell hooks would put it, was really a quest for patriarchal approval.

Finding love, especially love from a male partner, occupied most of my personal landscape as a way to prove my worthiness. If I was chosen by a (male) partner to be loved, then I was worthy.

Women under patriarchy thinking and sexist norms are stripped from the opportunity to claim our value ourselves (hence why I created a course called Claim Your Value in 2020), and we have to wait to have our value and our worth confirmed through that act of being chosen (usually) by a partner. I find this only intensifies in proportion to how much our parents did not affirm our worth and value from a developmental trauma lens.

We had loopholes to some extent, the generation of women I am peers with, where we could simply choose power over love. I remember clearly the comfort in feeling like I did not have to render myself vulnerable by deciding to be a career woman.

Yet, no outward facing achievements or work success made up for a lack of self-esteem that lived in my psyche because I could not claim my own value, my own worth or even my own self-acceptance until a partner had deemed me worthy of theirs first.

I think we have to be careful around blaming ourselves for this, this is not something we wanted, it is something that was handed to us as the norm.

When I realized that I did not want a husband or kids, and that I was running a marathon that I didn’t actually sign up for consciously, or from somewhere inside of me that was a core desire place, I felt so lost.

I was lost for many reasons, but at the very top of the list was the fact that if I stopped desiring this and stopped working hard to make it happen, then I was left with no hope for my value to be validated, because under patriarchy, this was not something I could offer myself.

My coming out carried more depth than simply being about affirming my sexual preferences, interests and identities, a huge feat on its own of course, it was also about this profound choice to affirm my value.

I say that my coming out was the best thing I could have ever done for myself in terms of challenging my own patriarchal thinking and ways of believing, acting, being, etc. Like I share in my memoir, some of the ways I saw the world were highly problematic re: gender roles, and also shocked me when I uncovered them.

But then…

What broke my heart the most, was how much the queer spaces I found myself in were reflecting the same patriarchal ways of thinking. Namely the discussion around: are you a top or a bottom?

I remember the stress I felt trying to define this for myself.

To me, the discussion around being a top or a bottom is very much one of who is dominating and who is submissive.

My first girlfriend when I came out and I concluded we were perfect for each other – because I was a bottom in bed, and she was a top, and in life, I was a top and she was a bottom.

So basically, this meant, in life I dominated her. And in bed, she dominated me.

In a lot of ways, this just meant, whoever was being dominated was no longer having to have control – which is nice.

I think a healthier way of framing this is that I would like to be held. I would like to be taken care of. I would like for someone else to design the experience and I would like to show up and enjoy it. I would like to be profoundly loved by you and be treated in gentle ways.

These latter ways of describing what could be seen as dominance aren’t really dominance though because dominance, by definition, implies one person is superior to the other.

What this is…is care. It’s commitment, it’s knowledge, it’s trust.

And the latter ways of explaining this are also incredibly vulnerable. It is so vulnerable to say to a lover, hey I really want to let go, can you hold me while I do? It is way more vulnerable to tell my lover, can you take care of me? Phew.

Last fall, I revealed to my dates, to my mother and to my therapist, that I was not sure I was into domination anymore. Like in life, as a whole.  

I found myself having this intense metamorphosis around the fact that I was no longer attracted to people who wanted to be superior to me, in bed, in life, etc. And I was no longer into feeling like I wanted to dominate others either.

In short, I wanted to pick love over power. I think I had yearned for this for my entire life – I mean, I named a book “Love before Fear” for god sake. And simultaneously to that, I think wanting a no hierarchy kind of love personally the way I did made me feel weak. Made me feel vulnerable. Made me feel too different. And so, last fall, I reclaimed my desire for this kind of love. Even if I never got it in the flesh. I was willing to reclaim it and risk the possibility of the void.

It took me about 4 years to arrive here, even after coming out – to start thinking about what sex and love would look like without the influence of the patriarchy informing my moves, my roles, my scripts. What life as a whole looks like on the other side of no longer waiting to affirm my worth or value until a partner does it for me first.

A life of love is fundamentally only possible from a place of self-love – if we do not treat ourselves with care and commitment and responsibility and respect and trust, and we don’t give that to ourselves, it is hard to receive it from anyone else. The love other people have for us never quite reaches us, does it?

My ex that I am writing about in this piece, the life bottom, but the sex top, her and I had a really overall lovely relationship. It was one of the healthiest ones I have been a part of actually – and still, I am sad for us looking back. I am sad that I found excitement in being the life top, like, yeah I am gonna call the shots biotch, the itinerary? You have no control over it. I am going to assert my will and you will go along with it.

I didn’t say that, but the energy was there, you know?

I wonder quietly why I didn’t naturally gravitate to making something like dinner a mutual decision, why I feared collaboration in such intimate ways. Why that felt threatening to me. Why I dodged intimacy like this.

It’s brave to admit that – I am sure it’s not a popular thing to realize that our want for domination can be subtle, and inherently not too harmful, but it can still exist, alongside our hatred for it when we witness it cross a line into violence, something that is evidently harmful.

bell hooks also said that there is no love when there is domination. And to be honest, as much as I would like to fight against this and explore other points of views because I am aware there are many, and as much as I have fought against it as someone who “believed in the importance of polarity to create sexual chemistry”, I agree with hooks now. I see how wrong I was in so many ways to resist it and even to say but it’s hot. I also understand how of course we want to be held, and of course we want reliable authority to make good calls on behalf of us and our wellbeing, and I think we can still want all of those things and offer them and receive them, and do so without positioning ourselves as less or more than others as we do so. I can now see how patriarchal thinking kept me limited and most importantly, how it kept me from knowing true love. How could there be any love when there is domination?

Love, as bell hooks also teaches us, is also about deep mutuality. If we look to love to only meet our own needs, we have not been taught how to love well yet.

To really be able to sit with our helplessness (and transform it) is the key to be able to liberate ourselves from our want to dominate in any way. Today I am talking about it from a lens of sexuality and largely romantic relationships, but an equally interesting place where our covert want for domination shows up is in our society’s relationship to children when we are adults.

Our penchant for domination seems to, at least my own, comes from this place of I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel in control, I don’t feel like I have agency and I don’t expect anyone to respect me, therefore I must assert my will to make sure I maintain control.

But where is the possibility for intimacy within this?

True respect comes from a place of deeply caring about the other as though they are a part of ourselves.

So, when I say I am not a top or a bottom, I also don’t necessarily mean I am a switch either – sometimes into dominating and other times into submitting.

Maybe I am just a person who is capable of love looking for mutual love.