On Bottoming
[This post contains a lot of graphic descriptions of my sex life, which is why it’s a paid post. If you would prefer not to read that, this is not the post for you! This one’s also a little more personal and exploratory than it is a step-by-step argument, which is new and scary for me, like all things I’m not sure I’m terribly good at yet.]
Some months back, I was trying to describe what I find most appealing about getting fucked to a friend who confines himself strictly to doing the fucking. “There’s a look in a lot of guys’ eyes where I can see he wants something from me, and he’ll get it, somehow, in my body. That stare, where I can see he feels most himself reflected in my eyes—it’s the most erotic thing to me. I wish I could see whatever it is in myself they see when they’re fucking me.” The top friend, meanwhile, expressed the complementary view: he informed me that that’s exactly the most erotic thing he imagines a bottom to feel when he’s being penetrated.
When I was first coming out and sex became slightly less theoretical, I thought it was the most absurd social illusion that people sorted gays into “tops” and “bottoms” and, even more ridiculously, assigned universal unchanging traits to these roles, like some pop-psychology personality test. The vast majority of us, after all, are physically capable of doing either one. But that conversation with my friend reveals, I think, how hard it is to get away from the sort of thinking that assigns some deeper cultural meanings to a preference for inflicting or receiving penetration. Those cultural associations go back, well, basically to the dawn of history in Western cultures. Almost everyone who’s done serious historical study of sex agrees that “sexual orientation”—the idea that the objects of your sexual desire indicate something fundamental and lasting about you as a person—is a fairly modern Western concept whose emergence can be placed somewhere in the later nineteenth century. Before that, if you take the Foucault paradigm seriously, Western cultures focused on categories of sexual acts; after the emergence of Christianity, for example, there were the acceptable sex acts and the ones that fell under the sin of sodomy. But a sodomite was not a kind of person the way we now think of a gay or bisexual or straight person as a kind of person; sodomites were people who’d chosen to do something sinful or criminal, like a thief. Insofar as pre-modern Western cultures did associate categories of sex acts with kinds of people, however, penetrator and penetrated have been prominent categories as far back as “history” goes. Greek pederasty assigned the “proper” roles of penetrator and penetrated according to age. Classical Latin’s sexual vocabulary orients itself largely around penetrator and penetratee: there are separate verbs for “to ass fuck” and “to get ass fucked,” as well as “to face fuck” and “to get face fucked.” These verbs corresponded with a hierarchical system assigning cultural power to the penetrators and lower social status to the penetratees: free property-owning men, at the top, are the ones who are supposed to be doing the penetrating, while women, slave men, adolescent boys are the ones getting penetrated. In a way, these categories even sort of preceded what we’d now call gender categories, in that men were not necessarily always penetrators but could very much be the penetrated if they were of lower social status. While gender and sex categories were no doubt inextricable, the first century CE poet Catullus’s notorious threat in Carmen 16, for example, to “fuck” some guys, Aurelius and Furius, who didn’t like his more tender love poems “in the ass and the face” seems to be less specifically about feminizing them and more about violently putting them into their place in lower social roles as categories of men who get penetrated. But the poem is also, at the same time, a defense against Aurelius and Furius’s accusation that Catullus’s poems about giving his lover “thousands of kisses” are too “tender.” In other words, Catullus’s defense against these guys’ criticism that his poetic descriptions of kissing women are too effeminate is to write a poem threatening to fuck them at both ends. What I’m getting at, here, is that our cultural-psychological associations with top/bottom roles and gender, power, and social status have been a confused tangle for at least a couple thousand years. Whatever I said when I was seventeen about the silly social constructedness of those categories sure wasn’t gonna make them go away.