Tops, Bottoms, Switches, What Do You Mean: Take Our Autostraddle Lesbian & Queer Sex Survey
Writing this week’s “Lesbian Sex 101” post, the first in a three-week series about defining commonly used terms like “top,” “bottom,” “switch,” “submissive” and “dominant” (and their small variations wherein) was … challenging. I declared, at various points in my journey, “nothing means anything anymore!” and “everybody thinks everything means something different!” Through research and extensive personal crowdsourcing, I was pretty close to wrapping up the post about bottoms and submissives when it occurred to me that I’d love to be able to include DATA from y’all about it. It seems like these days, most queer women and non-binary people identify as tops, bottoms or switches but within this specific community there is not a consensus on what we mean when we say those words.
Thus, we come to you bearing a sex survey. We’re looking here specifically at the dynamics that occur in sexual activities that involve people who are LGBQ+ women (cis or trans) or else non-binary people or trans men who feel an affiliation with queer women’s communities. We recognize that this is an imperfect description of a community, but this is a very complicated community and it’s very hard to nail things down and get good data. Please note that most of these questions are referring to sex and sexual dynamics between people who are not cis men — not because bisexual women in relationships with men are not queer enough to be here (you are!) but because that’s just not the topic of this particular survey or this series. Anybody who is not a cis man and has slept with people who are not cis men at any point are welcome to take this survey if it feels relevant to your experiences. Okay. Please don’t yell at us today, we’re very understaffed, we can’t make edits to the survey once it’s live without re-routing everybody to the top of it and erasing their answers, the world is on fire and it’s very hot in this laundromat. Sex is fun!