ID: a reply by @small-strong-bookish-butch which reads: I don't think I fully understand what this means, but would like to hear more about it if you'd like to expound !! <3 I love your takes on sex <3 end ID
tysm 💖💖 & no problem! this was a quick vent so i wasn't at my most comprehensible lol (although no promises this will be any easier to parse)
for me D/s, roleplay, certain kink, etc is about co-creating a context in which the players want to be seen & then affirming that (even if what you're "affirming" is something traditionally considered "negative"). certainly not the only difference but a noticeable difference for me is in scenes that have been good or non-traumatic or a positive experience long-term, my play partners are working to see me in the context i want & treat me the way i want to be treated. whereas in scenes that have been abusive or traumatic or something i consider a negative experience after a certain amount of time, play partners were trying to fit me into a preexisting script for subculturally normative sex or their particular fantasies or etc, casting me in a context i didn't consent to.
so that's what i mean by dysphoria in this post – narrower than the emotional descriptor "dysphoria" & broader than "gender dysphoria," but in that tradition pointing to the difference between how i self-identify / want to be seen vs how others see me. as i've spoken about (including with you, & your validation has been incredibly meaningful 💓) in a D/s context this appears in people trying to cast me as a dom top or sub bottom, sometimes because dom bottom isn't something that exists in their worldview and sometimes because my specific behavior classes me as "too dominant to be a bottom" or "too much of a bottom to be dominant."
which brings us to the brat thing. i meant what i said in the original post, i know some dom bottoms who identify as brats as part of their image/persona & i don't take any issue with that, & i've learned a lot about power + playing with power from them! it's the wider defining of bratting & dom bottoming as inherently interchangeable that bothers me, not individuals for whom that's their experience.
something i encounter even more than dom bottom = brat is that when a top takes charge they're acting toppy, whereas a bottom who takes charge or knows what they want is bossy — even if they're trying to negotiate, not demand. obv this is really misogynistically loaded language & a femmephobic (in the academic sense of degrading things culturally associated with femininity; not saying bottom=femme) double standard. i have never seen a dom referred to as a brat by writers/readers/fandom/whatever who was not a woman, a bottom, or both. it references & reinforces the most misogynistic treatments of femdom — rather than a co-generated power played with out of mutual interest, femdom is culturally treated as a "fake" power that only exists to be a source of pleasure for + ultimate undercut by the sub.
a complicated situation where i was not domming but i wrote about that type of feeling in this post (link) from february 2025: "she left me feeling like the idea of me ever holding power was a joke. like my best performance would never be believable enough to do anything for anybody unless it was at my expense."
my personal connotation as somebody raised under christian patriarchy is that a brat is someone who is wrongfully resisting the correct hierarchy of power / respect / honor culture. typically this is resisting patriarchy & child oppression simultaneously — a girl child is most likely to be called a brat during perceived disrespect — but it could be one or the other (boy children & adult women are also at times labeled brats), or another form of oppression.
what is it about the figure of the dom bottom that's bratty? they are usurping the imposed order of things. they are disrespecting the power assigned to penetration under patriarchy. what is the threat in a dom bottom whose power is not undermined as laughable or selfish or an interruption of the top's dominance? the threat that that destabilization will be permanent! dom bottoming asks, if power isn't "actually" located in penetration, then where is it? and the answer is nowhere, is everywhere, is wherever you want — which shatters not only heteropatriarchal-colonial sex roles but also queer subcultural ones.
so folks can fantasize about a power bottom (as opposed to the normal bottoms who are powerless?) or someone topping from the bottom or a bratty bottom who briefly gets the upper hand or a bossy bottom the content of whose commands undermines any authority with which they may have been imbued, or or or, but that concluding degradation has to put the world back to rights. as katherine angel puts it (cw misogynistic language in the excerpt), "I don't want, you want." my power isn't made up; yours is.
