BDSM and Aftercare: How to Support the Tops and Doms in Your Life
Aftercare isn't just for bottoms and submissives — tops and dominants need love and care, too.
(Original article from https://www.them.us/story/bdsm-aftercare-tops-doms)
Dahlia wears a white dress shirt and a wormy eyeliner-moustache traced over her upper lip as she reads aloud from John Waters’ memoir, Shock Value. Between sentences, she pierces my skin, meticulously arranging each needle to create a starburst design on my right shoulder. When she removes the needles, she wipes my blood with pages torn from the book. As I continue to bleed, she smiles mischievously and licks me clean.
As nervous as I am to be in front of a camera, performing this scene for a friend’s indie film, Dahlia and I have a good time, laughing and sipping whiskey between takes. But even though our play feels good in the moment, a few hours later, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of shame. How could I have enjoyed something so sick? My partner makes me dinner, but I don’t want to eat. I feel like an insect sinking into resin, helpless against the weight of my sadness.
As someone who’s been playing since my early 20s, I’m not unaccustomed to the mental and emotional repercussions of BDSM. Experienced kinksters know the scene doesn't end when the dust settles and the blood dries. Even when I play with someone like Dahlia — a dear friend and an experienced top who I’d trust with my life — more often than not, I can depend on what’s known as subdrop to temporarily take me down harder than any sadist could.
Within BDSM, there are many terms that communicate desire, style of play, and a given player’s relationship to power and to other players: Tops are the doers (e.g., the ones who tie the rope) and bottoms are the people things are done to (e.g., the ones who get tied up). In the context of queer sex, tops can also be the active parties and/or the penetrators, as bottoms are the passive parties and/or the penetrated. Dominants and tops have control, while submissives and bottoms relinquish it. A switch can be either a top or bottom, dominant or submissive — as a term, “switch” applies both to sexuality and to BDSM, activities that often, but don’t always, converge.
There are emotional and psychological repercussions to the power exchange and taboo-breaking inherent to submission (which may include masochism and/or bottoming). As I’ve learned over the years, subs pay for the transformative experience of subspace — the ever-subjective mental and emotional state of floating, calm, or even euphoria brought on by the adrenaline and endorphins triggered by BDSM — with subdrop, the emotional low that comes when the adrenaline wears off and those endorphins inevitably crash.
It seems obvious that a person might want hugs, gentle words, and a hot meal after being whipped until they bleed, but submissives, bottoms, and masochists aren’t the only ones who experience a post-scene or post-sex “drop.” Often forgotten is the other half of the equation: the person who did the whipping, despite the fact that it’s almost certain that whipping isn’t all they did. Dominants, tops, and sadists are vulnerable to topdrop, and need support just as much as their playmates do.
As someone who primarily plays as a submissive, bottom, and masochist, I wanted to learn more about topdrop from those who experience it. I talked with a small group of kinky queers who identify as tops, dominants, and/or switches about what topdrop feels like to them, and how they suggest submissives, bottoms, and masochists can support the tops in their lives.
Within the realm of kink, acts of topping and domination — whether they involve physical accoutrement like paddles or the affective skill-sets of dirty talk, psychological control, or role play — are rarely spontaneous, and often highly disciplined. These are techniques that players develop over time, often as intentional practices. Topping and domination can be no more serious than personal preference, but for many, they are crafts, and even artforms.
A good dom/top would have planned that whipping scene in advance; practiced to make sure that they could use a whip with accuracy, mitigating risk where necessary and deploying it to the desired level of impact; carefully assessed the emotional readiness and ability of the bottom before and during the scene; respected to the safe word if one was used, and kept an eye on the body language of the sub/bottom, checking in when they felt it wasn’t being used when needed; made snap decisions about safety if the bottom wasn’t able to for themself or became otherwise indisposed; and, last but not least, provided aftercare if desired.
“Being a top is like being an actor,” says Ripley, a switch. “You're fulfilling someone else’s desire. You’re running the scene, planning it, and executing it for someone else. As a top, to some extent I'm giving you something that needs to be worked at. Topping is fucking tiring!”
Any person who has been topped or dominated well will attest to the fact that good dom/tops are strong, creative, and emotionally intelligent. From anticipating their sub/bottom’s needs, to reading nonverbal cues indicating their mental state, to bearing the stigma of the perverse desire to consensually cause pain or deprive agency, dom/tops provide their partners with something that they cannot provide for themself. Dom/tops may be “in control” or serviced within a scene, but they also provide a service to the person who ultimately has veto power over how far they’re willing to go. In BDSM (as opposed to an act of abuse), even “consensual non-consent” is negotiated.
For even the most experienced of dom/tops, this affective effort can take its toll. Pro-domme Domina Lex describes her topdrop as “kinky compassion fatigue.” Her relationship with post-scene depression encompasses both recreational and professional play.
“I experience topdrop somewhat often, and I can trace it back to my upbringing,” says Domina Lex. “I was raised in a nondenominational, born-again Christian household. We were always taught to care for others. My parents always put heavy emphasis on it — do for others more than you do for yourself — so I've basically always put [other] people and their needs over mine.”
This sense of responsibility for submissives and bottoms can often be a source of pride and fulfillment for tops and dominants. But among the tops and doms I spoke to, this responsibility can also feel burdensome when they feel that their own needs for aftercare are ignored or rejected.
“Tops are the ones who are supposed to be administering everything, including aftercare,” says Ripley. “There’s an emotional fallout from that kind of intimacy for everyone involved, but tops have that added responsibility.”
Dahlia, who is a pro-domme as well as a lifestyle dominant sadist, points out that under patriarchy, we’re socialized to expect incommensurate and uncompensated emotional labor from women, and kinky and queer communities aren’t immune to this problem. For those who feel entitled to it, the expectation of doms/tops to cater to their sub’s/bottom’s needs is shaped by identity, including race, class, ability, and trans status.
As well as thinking about our own desire to be topped, better communication on both sides of the whip can help manage expectations and avoid disappointment and confusion around consent and capacity. “No matter what role you’re in, ask for what you want from the people you play with so they don’t have to guess,” says Ripley.
Gendered expectations for tops and doms dovetail with the gendered taboos on those who are perceived as the “active” or even responsible parties in a display of deviant behavior or sexuality. Domina Lex also attributes topdrop, in part, to “living in a society where women have to be subservient to men always, and in which we are shamed for owning our sexuality and sexual ‘deviance.’”
Even when she knows that a scene is consensual and safely executed, Domina Lex says, “I sometimes still tend to feel like I'm doing something wrong, like I should be ashamed or horrified. But then I apply logic and reason to these thoughts and know that it's just the bullshit I was instilled with as a kid.”
Dahlia finds her queer femme identity is another factor in the emotional after-effects of play, particularly in her personal life as a polyamorous person who pursues romantic and kinky relationships with other femmes.
“I think femme tops are rare, or people think they’re rare, so when people come across [us], they’re so excited that nothing else matters — sometimes including [our] own needs. It’s like being a unicorn in a situation where you shouldn’t have to be,” Dahlia says.
In her private life, she feels the drain of being a femme-identified queer woman whose identity is marginalized and whose emotional labor is taken for granted, even within her own communities.
“A lot of people want a femme but they don’t want a femme,” Dahlia says. “This includes femmes, too. There’s a lot of internalized femme hate that comes out in queer dating, where people want me to top them or play with them without having to connect back with me or have accountability for their behavior.”
For someone who provides affective labor for a living as a sex worker, recreational play partners and lovers who treat Dahlia as their own personal attention dispenser “can start feeling like clients.”
Of course, an exchange of cash, goods, or other resources does not a fair transaction make, especially in a country where the criminalization of sex work is getting more draconian by the day, further devaluing the labor and humanity of sex workers like Domina Lex and Dahlia. As people paying for BDSM experiences for their own pleasure, there isn’t much incentive for submissive clients to provide aftercare (though this isn’t to say that clients never seek to provide it, especially if they have good working relationships with providers). But as is the case with literally every other gendered job, the affective expense inherent to all sex work is conveniently disappeared by capitalism. For transactional scenes, providing aftercare for the dom/top is an expense many clients are unwilling or unable to pay.
“You come across a lot of people who expect curated sexy fun time, and who never stop to think that that takes time and energy,” says Dahlia. “That’s just something you come across when you’re a top — people feeling that they don’t need to have accountability or connection in order to play with you.”
While Domina Lex acknowledges the responsibility of tops to provide aftercare to their subs, she also points out that, as a professional, she’s encountered submissives who use the smokescreen of aftercare to extract more unpaid labor from the dommes they hire.
“We spend so much time learning about boundaries and safe words, but not enough time on how activities can and do affect us after the scene,” says Domina Lex. “We are people, too, and have emotional and physical needs as well. It's manipulative to try and force someone to give you all their energy for the sake of aftercare.”
For players triggered during scenes, or who have intense emotions afterward, all of the people I spoke with expressed the simple desire for more communication.
“Simply ask if your top/dom needs aftercare, and if they have anything specific they need to feel better,” says Domina Lex. “Even just asking after the scene is over can make such a difference in showing that someone gives a fuck about your mental health, too.”
I’m not proud to admit that providing aftercare for tops isn’t something I’ve always done. It took years of play, building relationships with other players, and educating myself about BDSM to recognize and treat my own subdrop, and it took even longer to understand what wasn’t intuitive for me at the beginning of my forays into kink: That the person or people I play with need TLC after a scene just like I do — especially if the scene is physically or psychologically intense.
Aftercare looks different for everyone, but it starts when we put aside assumptions about others’ needs and ask, with sincerity, “How are you feeling? How can I help?” Because (outside of professional BDSM) play isn’t about transactions — it’s about taking care of each other.
