I’m part of the kink community, and it drives me up the wall when people use these terms interchangeably. Makes it so much harder than it needs to be to communicate
Well, since I’m pretty Ace, that doesn’t come up usually. But it goes something like this in our relationships: A top is the person doing something and the bottom is the person having something done to them, but it doesn’t exactly equate to a submissive or a dominant because those are slightly different concepts. So a submissive could still be a top at least temporarily, because the dominant wanted it, or the submissive felt like they could fit that role, even though they are not inherently a dominant.
Also there’s middles who top another person because a dominant told them to.
Edit: It gets messy when you throw switches and versatiles into the mix too because often they can’t have any fixed roles.
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In the kink community, top and bottom are used kind of synonymously with dominant and submissive respectively, but yes. Thanks for pointing that out.
I’m part of the kink community, and it drives me up the wall when people use these terms interchangeably. Makes it so much harder than it needs to be to communicate
Eh, so are we and it doesn’t bother us, it has a slightly different meaning in my relationships with others. But you do you.
How do you communicate about the concepts that bottom and top actually refer to, out of curiosity?
Well, since I’m pretty Ace, that doesn’t come up usually. But it goes something like this in our relationships: A top is the person doing something and the bottom is the person having something done to them, but it doesn’t exactly equate to a submissive or a dominant because those are slightly different concepts. So a submissive could still be a top at least temporarily, because the dominant wanted it, or the submissive felt like they could fit that role, even though they are not inherently a dominant.
Also there’s middles who top another person because a dominant told them to.
Edit: It gets messy when you throw switches and versatiles into the mix too because often they can’t have any fixed roles.
That does sound messy, indeed
Yeah, so I was incorrect with saying they are synonymous.