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responsibility?
    If a bottom does not safeword and you don’t pick up on what’s going on, and this will happen if you play long enough and well enough, there is no blame. However, it is still your responsibility to monitor for physical safety as best you can. As ethical tops we make a commitment to never knowingly harm our bottoms. To this end we check in regularly to make sure that things are going the way we think they are, and we constantly monitor the physical and emotional safety of our bottoms. If a bottom is beyond safewording, and you as the top feel unsure about how far you should go, it is your responsibility to slow down or stop the scene and get into communication with the bottom to make sure you have informed consent. If you have to bring the bottom back into reality to do this, please remember that you helped get them into that altered state in the first place, so presumably you can help get them back there again as soon as you are sure of what’s going on.
    And just because someone safeworded doesn’t mean that the scene has to be over. There may be times when the problem that brought either of you to safeword is so overwhelming that carrying on doesn’t feel like the right thing right now – but most often we find that after we’ve dealt with whatever the difficulty is, we’re still terrifically turned on, with the added bonus of a shared intimacy.
    W HEN Y OU I TCH TO G O F URTHER . Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between “enough” and “too much,” between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we’re craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.
    We will assume that you who are reading this book are not about to do any such thing: if you feel that you are in danger of actually harming someone, please seek help from a therapist or counselor right away. But when you’re feeling frustrated by partners who want to stop before you’re ready to, or who don’t want to play the way you want to, it’s easy to let the fantasies grow so strong that they begin to seem like realities. The good news is that, with patience, skill, mutual knowledge and trust, and sometimes a bit of compromise, there are usually ways to indulge those desires without harming, alienating or losing your partner.
    We suggest that you spend a little time thinking objectively, if you can, about the fantasies that are driving your desire to push limits. In your fantasy, what is the turn-on? How can you tell, for example, that the bottom has been driven past limits? Is she begging, crying, screaming? Is there physical evidence – blood, urine, tears?
    When you have a pretty clear picture of what that turn-on looks like to you, you get to the embarrassing part: describing it to your partner. You may find, to your surprise, that your bottom has been having similar fantasies, and needs only your permission to go into the headspace you’ve both been craving. (Begging for mercy, for example, is difficult for many bottoms, who may be worried that they will beg so effectively that you’ll actually stop. Knowing that you’re willing to keep going unless you hear a safeword can feel very freeing.) Or your bottom may be willing to play-act the fantasy in the way that turns you on – he may find that the role starts to seem very real and very arousing once he gives it a try.
    We sometimes meet tops and bottoms who want to do scenes without safewords, reasoning that it is impossible to “really” push limits when the bottom can stop the scene anytime she wants to. A safeword is simply a code we use to communicate the status of consent. Responsible tops play consensually – the safeword is your safety net, to let you know that’s what you’re doing.
    In our experience, the most common problem is the opposite one: bottoms who earnestly hang in there way beyond their limits and