The New Topping Book by Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy Page A

that you don’t want – an unplanned pregnancy or a nuisance infection or a deadly disease. Opinions change monthly as to how risky various sexual and S/M activities are in terms of disease transmission; we urge conservatism – when in doubt, use a latex or polyurethane barrier. Don’t assume that your partner’s definition of safer sex is the same as yours: discuss beforehand which activities each of you thinks are risk-free enough to do without a barrier, which are risky enough to require a barrier, and which are too risky to do at all. If one of you has more conservative standards than the other, that person sets the standards, regardless of who’s topping and who’s bottoming – it is entirely unacceptable to subject someone to a physical risk to which they haven’t consented. The important thing is not the latest statistics or scientific study; the important thing is that you both feel safe.
    Take care of your own safety, too: don’t play with strangers in private, and the first few times you play with a new partner, tell a trusted friend where you are and who you’re with (and make sure your play partner knows that you’ve taken that precaution).
    Y OU A RE R ESPONSIBLE FOR E MERGENCY P REPAREDNESS . Not everything that can go wrong in an S/M scene has anything to do with S/M. As part of taking care of your bottom’s (and your own) physical safety, you should have the equipment, training and ability to handle real-world emergencies ranging from quakes and fires through heart attacks and seizures.
    If you don’t know what you’d do if the lights went out, if your bottom suddenly became seriously ill, or if you inadvertently started a fire in the playroom, you shouldn’t do the scene until you’ve figured these things out.
    Y OU A RE R ESPONSIBLE FOR C ARING FOR Y OUR E QUIPMENT . If you own your own whips, sex toys, bondage equipment and so on, you are responsible for seeing that these items are carefully selected, well maintained and properly cleaned. Aside from the aesthetics of the situation (dirty or uncared-for toys are a sign of a sloppy top), poor quality or poorly maintained toys are downright dangerous. We know one top who broke a finger trying to grab a whirling handle on a poorly designed winch, and we’ve heard many stories of bottoms pulling inadequately attached eye-bolts out of the wall and sustaining nasty falls.
    While the jury is still out regarding whether or not HIV can be transmitted via uncleaned sex toys, it is certain that various other nasties, including hepatitis C, can be. When you’re not sure if a toy has been exposed to body fluids, assume that it’s contaminated and clean it carefully. Chapter 10, and several of the books in the Resource Guide, give more detailed toy cleaning information.
    Y OU A RE R ESPONSIBLE FOR Y OUR O WN AND Y OUR P ARTNER’S E MOTIONAL S AFETY . This may seem a little counterintuitive – after all, in the real world, we believe that people should be responsible for taking care of their own emotions and for asking for the kinds of emotional support they need. But we believe that the implied contracts of what we do are a little different, and that the usual boundaries get shifted a bit when we play together.
    If Dossie showed up for our co-authoring appointment tomorrow, and Janet said to her, “Dossie, I feel angry because of something you said last week,” we would handle that in certain ways: Janet would accept responsibility for her own anger and would process it herself – with Dossie’s help if Dossie cared to give that help, or without it if Dossie didn’t.
    But when we agree to play together, there is an assumption that those adult boundaries are going to be altered – perhaps even to some degree dropped. This is what we meant in the Introduction when we said that “BDSM is ritualized codependency.” Unlike the real world, where we assume that adults are responsible for processing their own emotions and taking care of their own