I know what top and bottom mean in a sex sense but which one is more "dominant" I'm too embarassed to ask anybody but this blog feels like the right place :,)
OOOHOHOHOHO YOU’VE UNLOCKED AN INTEREST OF MINE: SEXUALITY AND SEX ED
the short answer to your question is simple: neither! dominance and submissiveness are not inherently related to penetrating and being penetrated.
the longer answer to your question will be going under the cut:
ok SO. in our society, we have this funny little thing called heteronormativity. heteronormativity is our (as a society) inherent assumption that all people are heterosexual and conform to certain heterosexual standards (many of which tie in with good old fashioned sexism because patriarchy! less obviously but still very notably, a lot of them also tie in with racism bc systemic white supremacy!)
one of these standards is the nuclear family/“godly” family. the classic household of father/husband, mother/wife, and 2-3 kids. in this family, the father is the head of the house, followed by his wife, with the children at the bottom of the hierarchy. why is the father always in charge of the mother? why, because he’s the one penetrating her, of course!
the idea of penetration as power is ancient. literally! there is ancient artwork of early human warriors removing the clothing of and, um… forcibly claiming the enemies they defeat as a show of power. (this is a great example of why rape is violence before it is sex, by the way.) the ancient greeks believed it was fine to have sex with men (or, more likely, boys), so long as they were young and effeminate and you were the one sticking it in. always looking to emulate the greeks, the romans adopted this belief. this idea continued into christianity, where it later spread across the whole damn world and if your society didn’t believe penetration was power before, it sure as hell did now. it’s even in our linguistics! phrases like “rises to the top,” “bottom of the barrel,” “a level above,” “x is beneath me,” and way more show we associate the top with strength and superiority, and the bottom with weakness and inferiority. i mean, we literally use “fuck you” and “get fucked” as insults.
here’s the thing, though. in consensual sex between two adults of equal power to each other, that’s just not true. there are power bottoms and there are service tops. sometimes someone rides because they’re taking charge, sometimes someone rides because they’re submitting entirely. a woman may peg her boyfriend because he’s been a very good boy who deserves a reward, or a woman may peg her boyfriend because he demands to be served in exactly the way he wants her to. two people may have sex without involving any power dynamics at all.
issue is, we still have this societal idea in our heads that penetration = power. and because we associate power with cishet white men due to our other societal biases, this causes a lot of people to make interesting assumptions about real life people or ships that can be traced back to accidental bigotry. whoops!
when someone asks a gay or lesbian couple “who’s the guy and who’s the chick,” we know they’re not actually asking about gender, right? what they’re asking is “who fucks who? who’s in charge on a day-to-day basis?” This Is Not Good.
when someone tends to headcanon black male characters as the top or black female characters as the bottom in their interracial ships, they probably have some racial biases to work through.
when a young fujoshi just entering fandom space gets confused and thinks dom/top and sub/bottom are synonyms, she accidentally upholds sexist ideas that will affect her in the future.
some trends in fandom spaces are reflective of this bias. twinks and skinnier characters are more likely to be seen as bottoms than their more muscular counterparts, and fat characters are sort of an in-between. black characters are likely to be interpreted as ‘more aggressive’ and therefore tops, whereas asian characters are likely to be interpreted as ‘more fragile’ and therefore bottoms. ever notice how ‘this guy gets pegged’ in m/f ships almost always occurs when the woman is a badass and the man really and truly loves her and isn’t afraid to cheer her on? yeah, that’s toxic masculinity seeping into a headcanon. he doesn’t feel the need to assert himself as better than his wife, which is weak and womanly of him, so clearly he takes the ‘womanly’ role in sex. ooh, yikes!
this bias can affect people in real life too. as just demonstrated, real life men are regularly made fun of or emasculated for enjoying being pegged. bottoms get made fun of all the time, butches are regularly expected to top just because they’re butch, the aforementioned issues with our perceptions of race, etc.
so, all of this to say that i think it’s very important to push people to understand the distinction between top/bottom and dom/sub, because they are two different dynamics to be considered within a sexual relationship with their own options and combinations. also: let that twink top! let your beefy black guy character be the sweetest sub you’ve ever seen. don’t feel forced to break stereotypes, but don’t be afraid to break them either! personally, i tend to hc a lot of characters as switches/verses, partially because i like exploring the potential dynamics and partially because i don’t wanna deal with top/bottom discourse. a lot of people will still want to associate topping with dominance and bottoming with submission. these people are wrong!!!! don’t be mean to anyone about it bc chances are they just have some unconscious biases to unlearn which is the curse of living in any society ever, but know that they’re wrong.
ok, big educational rant over! hope this helped, and i hope you learned something new!
