"Power-over is a behavior pattern in which a person measures personal power by his or her ability to control others - you increase your own power by stealing power from somebody else."
"Power-with enables us to get more power by sharing our power with others. The more I have, the more you have. By supporting one another in our power, we get more for ourselves."
"Good tops learn to support bottoms through the embarrassment of revealing their fantasies - and isn't embarrassment one of those hot forbidden emotions we love to play with?"
"Many of us find that that more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between 'enough' and 'too much,' between consent and non-consent."
"we all need simply to be held, sympathized with, taken out to lunch, or maybe even to get some pain or bondage for ourselves - and a bottom who withdraws from you the minute you take off your fetish gear or put down your whip isn't supporting those very human and essential needs."
"The important thing is not the latest statistics or scientific study; the important thing is that you both feel safe."
"When we blame, we fail to shoulder our part of the burden; we project the responsibility for whatever is wrong onto another, usually to protect ourselves from feeling terribly guilty or anxious."
"If your bottom is a good communicator, with any luck she will offer negative feedback without a lot of blaming, in a supportive and non-judgmental manner."
"The I-message basically means I share something of my internal reality, my feelings, my desires, my thoughts, my beliefs."
"An important thing to remember is that your goal is to 'turn off your bottom's brain' - to enable her to melt into a malleable, will-less state of arousal and hypersensuality. The more control, verbal and physical, that you exert, the easier it will be for your bottom to relinquish control to you."
"Please remember that when old wounds open it means a buried part of ourselves is now available to our consciousness, so there is an opportunity for healing, by knowing ourselves better and reclaiming parts of ourselves we may have had to abandon long ago."
"We believe that the deprivatization of sex is a radical political act. Hush-hush attitudes toward sex have generated a sick history of shame, embarrassment, guilt and self-loathing that have crippled many people - kept them from realizing their wonderful sexual selves and often decimated their entire sense of self-esteem."
"Sex is spiritual. We live in a culture that has historically insisted that sex and spirituality are mutually exclusive, in a country founded by puritans who were convinced that God hated sex."
"Sexuality has been a path for both of us - the road we originally took to question our individual and social programming."
"as you mix your bottom's power and your own, heat them up with the fire of passion, and with that potent precious power turn lead into gold, misery into exaltation, bondage into liberation and sex into revelation."
