#top bottom discourse

[no-cosmic-energy]

What do you MEAN "sasunaru vs narusasu" we're the same people WHO ARE YOU FIGHTING????

[bambi-kinos]

people’s arguments about why john has to be a bottom and not paul tend to regurgitate the same critique these people have about paul (“you say he’s a bottom just because he’s feminine!”) by bringing up john’s appearance and more femme attitude after ‘68 and then saying how paul is more masc because of his body / facial hair. i also feel like a lot of people still conflate dom/sub with top/bottom when it comes to mclennon. though i haven’t thought about the societal perception of receiving / giving, i had an ohhh moment when i read that in your post. i personally will always be a fan of service top john paired with a power bottom paul, but john being servicy to me doesn’t mean he’s “submissive” in the typical way. i think he can be dominant and aggressive with paul but that’s because paul allows him to be. like what you said about paul enjoying being john’s second and being put in his place by more domineering and strong men. there’s a lot of power play that goes on in their sexual relationship and it deeply fascinates me!

people’s arguments about why john has to be a bottom and not paul tend to regurgitate the same critique these people have about paul (“you say he’s a bottom just because he’s feminine!”) by bringing up john’s appearance and more femme attitude after ‘68 and then saying how paul is more masc because of his body / facial hair.

Yes, it gets very transparent for exactly those reasons. What makes me roll my eyes about the “you say he’s a bottom just because he’s feminine!” thing is that anyone who bitches about this can only imagine switching the roles and having Paul by a hypermasculine stoic (which breaks characterization) and having John be a hyperfeminine bottom (which is also OOC). I don't think that the original complaints are necessarily a bad thing, there is an iteration problem in McLennon fandom where Paul can sometimes be reduced to a weepy princess, though I haven't heard of any fics coming out in the past 5 years that actually made this mistake. But it does annoy me that fandom can only imagine flipping the script and having John be the weepy bottom princess. It never leads to something more creative or interesting being produced where John and Paul's roles, both self assigned and imposed on them, are discussed especially for the effect it had their relationship.

It would be interesting to explore John's femme qualities but I think that fans are hesitant about going there because they would have to admit that John's passivity in 1968 was induced by his heroin addiction which destroyed his life and his relationships. There's never any appreciating John's femininity when he wasn't on heroin even though 1965 is arguably when John was at the most soft spoken and open minded. I find it a little sad that John's feminine qualities are only appreciated when he was at the peak of his hatefulness and addiction.

i also feel like a lot of people still conflate dom/sub with top/bottom when it comes to mclennon.

A lot of that is wish fulfillment IMO. Especially since Paul fans are usually the ones driving it and it's pretty universal that we want to see him get railed, not really the other way around. We like him because he's so poundable. So it's nice that he has a built in boyfriend who's willing to fuck him until he cries, you know. And it's easy to classify that as top/bottom::dom/sub.

McLennon is very subtle in some ways because of the give and take between John and Paul was so weird and it's just really difficult for us as outsiders to grasp. John and Paul themselves are baffled and confused by it. It makes me wonder if part of their dissolution was the fact that they didn't understand how much power they held over the other one which meant that they couldn't understand why their decisions were having such profound effects on the other person. They seem profoundly frustrated and bewildered by the undercurrents of their relationship where they perfectly fulfill each other in all ways except one, and how deeply unsatisfying their other relationships have been in comparison.

I think @amoralto damaged the fandom for this in some ways because she ended up having a popular blog which meant that her interpretations of John in particular were xeroxed over and over. The problem with this being that I don't think amoralto fully appreciated the power dynamic between John and Paul and her bias against John crept into her opinions which means that they screwed up the fandom discourse. If you go purely by her public posts then amoralto appears to be under the impression that John was a hysteric that was perpetually shitting himself about Paul one upping him. There is some truth to that but it's also not the whole story because Paul's ability to pull the rug out from under John was always a source of pride, fascination, love, and eroticism for John. Yesterday rocked John's world but he was also proud of Paul for being such an incredible artist and he was always pleased about being the one who discovered Paul. He was always aware that Paul had a lot of power over him and John both reveled and despaired in that.

This relates to the top/bottom::dom/sub thing because this dynamic would naturally play out in an erotic relationship between John and Paul. There's the surface layer where John is railing Paul but then there's the additional layer where Paul is the one enticing John to do it by showing his ass off (like really, who do you think those tight cut trousers are for?) and inviting John to put his cock inside Paul. And then there's the part where John's butch attitude and even some of his violence was egged on and encouraged by Paul who was most likely turned on by John punching people out. Paul was not the slightest bit put off by John being a violent person or else he would have bailed within a year of knowing him. When Julia died, Paul is the only one who had patience with John who was getting drunk and getting into fights…meanwhile there's a femmeboi in the background making soothing noises and cleaning him up so that he's fit for company. Really makes the your mind run wild with possibilities huh? Who is to say Paul didn't say "c'mon Johnny, just put it in me mouth and I'll fix you up." Or something!

The point is Paul is ultimately in control of the situation. This is supposed to be what dom/sub set ups are supposed to be anyway, subs are the ones who dictate the conditions in the bedroom. But considering how John built Paul up in his mind, it seems clear that Paul had a lot of overt power over John too. They don't fit neatly into the dom/sub set up either.

They switched power positions constantly and they got a lot of pleasure out of dominating but also being dominated. Paul liked being on top and being on bottom and John liked it when he got to be on top of Paul and when Paul crushed him. The pleasure was in the struggle itself, not necessarily the positions in of themselves.

though i haven’t thought about the societal perception of receiving / giving, i had an ohhh moment when i read that in your post.

It's not nearly as prevelent now though it still lingers. But heteronormativity really dictated the nature of a lot of relationships in the past.

i personally will always be a fan of service top john paired with a power bottom paul, but john being servicy to me doesn’t mean he’s “submissive” in the typical way. i think he can be dominant and aggressive with paul but that’s because paul allows him to be.

IMO there's a lot of truth to this! @zilabee has a really nice post about how John and Paul could afford to be gentle with one another and wrote love songs together. I think that a service top john/power bottom paul really fits this dynamic because it allowed John and Paul to express themselves to each other which solidified their mutual trust and their bond.

In a lot of ways Paul was an ideal partner for John in that he was someone John could have sex with that didn't have consequences (such as pregnancy) while Paul also had the feminine beauty that John really loved. (There's a quote from Yoko I think that John claimed if he fell in love with another man then that man would have to be extremely beautiful. Handsome is not enough.) John could probably be a lot rougher with Paul who could stand up to being tossed around a bit if needed but was beautiful enough for John to fuck tenderly too. Paul wasn't afraid of John's rough side and even encouraged it and decided to love it. In some ways John being a service top lets him express that roughness sexually with someone who won't break in half from being treated like a sack of potatoes. And there wouldn't be judgment from Paul either because he is still a man and experienced the same puberty and testosterone that John did including the same struggles with temper, the bodily changes, etc. He knows where John is coming from whereas a 1960s woman would not. (The transwomen, crossdressers, and homosexuals in Hamburg may have been John's first explicit taste of this. People who were familiar with what growing up as a male would be like so they didn't judge John for his proclivities and interests.)

In other words, John could express himself sexually with Paul in a way that he probably couldn't with women. Paul was fine with it judging from that photo of John's nutsack against his back and it fulfilled his needs as well!

like what you said about paul enjoying being john’s second and being put in his place by more domineering and strong men. there’s a lot of power play that goes on in their sexual relationship and it deeply fascinates me!

Yes! John overwhelms and dominates Paul but it's because Paul wants it to happen. He relied on John's intuition and discernment and ultimately his trust in John to carry it through. John has a partner who can't get pregnant when he climaxes inside him and then can take it on the chin when John is rough and/or degrading. All while he's sharply aware of how much Paul likes it which itself feeds into John's eros, and so on and on…

[uchiha-gaeshi]

Time to rev up the top/bottom discourse engine 😈

[scarefox]

Lowkey annoyed at people who are so deep in the top/bottom cliche mindset that they overlook the canon happenings that are the opposite of those cliches 🤨

This is especially about:

Ai Di x Chen Yi (they are switches tho)

Charlie x Babe

Huaien x Xiaobao

But what's weird with Huaien x Xiaobao is that they aren't even that far away from the usual top/bottom cliche constellation, with Huainen being taller and dominant. But I guess it's because he's feminine and gets called "wife" a lot, that some people didn't catch that he's top every time they have sex so far.

[shieldofiron]

I hate top bottom discourse generally but. Remembering when someone said one character would be the top because he was bi, and I ignored it instead of shooting them with super saiyan bisexual energy beams. As was my right.

[amorremanet]

“i found someone whose takes on my ship are top-notch, who’s clearly writing with love for both halves of the ship, who doesn’t treat either side of their complicated relationship unfairly……and i can’t read their fics because alas, we are exclusively committed to diametrically opposed top/bottom preferences”: the most tragic self-help manual you will ever read

[mage8]

"I love a good probe"

"he said butt so i bent over"

Dan and Phil single handedly destroying any notion that top and bottom are distinct categories

intermission updates:

dan as TSA: “why does this man have 13 sex toys and a golden pig in his carry-on?” Phil: “look. You need one for every month and then one bonus one”

Literally no lights on them invisible silhouettes for the first 20 mins

Pumpkins, clothes, bus, vegas

Dan “I love a good probe,” bends over, Phil pretends to probe. Phil begins normal sentence with the word “but…” and Dan bends over again. phil probes again. Dan: “sorry, he said butt so I bent over.” whole thing happens again 15 seconds later (don’t remember this bit from other shows???)

“I gentrified him” instead of “I colonized him”

Phil did a lovely little twirl through the fog after lawyer dan got burnt

Lots of piss talk…. Lots of piss talk

They keep gaslighting us into thinking there was a blizzard here and they sang lizards.mp3 but as blizzards

Also I love them wonderfully and dearly and the mullet absolutely FUCKS

[confessionconsensus]

not sure if it has been confessed yet, but i am one of those that only read fic with tagged/fixed top/bottom dynamics

[alarrytale]

hi marte, maybe i just discovered your secret 🙂‍↕️ i have seen you recommended some larry fics that are BL🤨are you BL or maybe im wrong? lol ok i like those fics too lol but altought i think they really share but all my fics are BL lol i hope i dont bother you with my comment hehe

Hi, anon!

No bother! And my fic preference is no secret. I talked about it more in detail here. In short, i prefer BL or verse, but i do read BH too. If a fic is good, a fic is good!

[bambi-kinos]

Hopefully, this ask is a fun one! I've noticed that a lot of times you mention Paul is a bottom, and honestly, I agree 1000% per cent, but I'm curious how you came to that conclusion

For me, I feel like it was a result of tons of reading up on him, body language + his lyrics, and I think the whole control freak (misleading in a way too) part makes some fans think he's a top. Meanwhile, I sit here and think, nope, he's totally a bottom lmao

A lot of it is just wish fulfillment as a result of Paul's bus-sized ass. We're not the only ones thinking about it:

Like it would be a crime if John didn't fuck Paul in the ass. Right??? So it's easy to think "yeah Paul is a bottom" rofl.

But more seriously, I view Paul as a bottom for a number of reasons.

The first is simply how long John and Paul knew each other and how they naturally shaped each other's interests and desires. Paul may not have been that 'swishy' (i.e. effeminate) if he had never met John in the first place. It's easy to see how John and Paul's understanding of homosexuality would have shaped their presentation and the roles they took with one another. Like, in modern times two gay guys can just be Guys Being Dudes. They can both take shirtless selfies of themselves holding up fish with the 🤙 going "shaka braaahhh." In the mid 20th century this idea was not terribly widespread so even among gay people there was an impression of "well someone has to be the woman and it's not going to be me."

So I think that's a big part of it. It's impossible to know how conscious a decision this was but IMO John and Paul reached a consensus of some sort that Paul would take up the feminine role in response to John's masculine one. It's a natural (for a given value of 'natural') position for the feminine half to be the one who is penetrated. Paul, who has demonstrated a number of times his sharp awareness of homosexual activity and how society perceives it, would know this. And he took up that position anyway and kept with it, voluntarily. (And to be clear I think Paul stimulated John's butch attitude and grew that to make John more overtly masculine as well. This goes both ways.)

It's not hard to see why this happened. John is a lot more naturally traditionally masculine than Paul is, no matter what John said about being "soft velvet" and "le Oscar Wilde!!11!!1!" He's the one who got into bar fights and hammered the shit out of other men. He's the subject of a rumor about kicking Stuart in the head, not Paul. Personally I think Paul is perfectly capable of violence, even extreme violence, but he simply isn't perceived that way due to his feminine appearance. Meanwhile John is overtly aggressive and in your face about it, even when going through his druggie periods, which is simply a more traditionally masculine trait no matter how you slice it.

I guess what I'm saying is, Paul responded to and was shaped by John's personality and preferences. John likes to fuck, Paul leans more towards feminine expression, feminine = 'the one who is fucked' not necessarily 'the one who fucks.'

I don't believe they were thinking about this as teenagers (and I don't think they did anything besides circlejerking before Hamburg.) And Paul likes using his dick! However it seems obvious to me that John woke something up in Paul that would have naturally lain dormant under other circumstances. John had a habit of doing this for people, he woke them up to their higher inclinations that got them out of their boxes and I 100% believe that he nudged Paul's 'swishiness' awake and that Paul quietly used this to get out of the box other people wanted to keep him in. He was able to embrace this more fully while with Linda. For Paul, that swishiness comes packaged with a certain set of implications and to me there's no reason why he wouldn't embrace that.

That's not to say that he was completely gung-ho from the start. People who write Paul going 'wtf I'm not doing that' in response to John wanting to fuck him are writing material that feels 'real' for lack of a better word. But I also don't think it would be that hard of a sell once he got used to the idea. Really look at this gif:

John's interest in Paul's backside is overt. Paul seems surprised and a little overwhelmed in the moment but he also smiles a little in response to John checking him out. It seems to me that there's interest there, albeit tentative. In other words Paul seems okay with being the one who is piped.

It's a lot to surmise from a single gif, I know, but otoh we don't have a lot of these moments where John's feelings are overt and Paul responds to them.

In addition to all this, Paul is a curious hedonist. I think John could prevail on him to at least try it. Then I think Paul would enjoy it greatly. Anal orgasms are somewhere between clitoral and vaginal for me but anal sex is satisfying in a way that PIV isn't, and I think Paul would actively seek it out once he tried it and realized how good it is. Anal sex is extremely intimate and John paid close attention to his lovers, Paul is guaranteed a good time once John takes him to bed. And John would want to make that special for Paul especially once Paul did 'break down' and go 'alright I'll do it' as part of their kinky power game. John did like to make things sweet for Paul.

Paul has this whole thing about wanting to be John's second and not necessarily the leader. He enjoys being lead and dominated by powerful men who are at the top of their industry. Check out this quote from McCartney Legacy Vol. 1 in Chapter 26:

Paul explicitly giving in to a "strong and demanding" male after putting up a perfunctory fight that he had no intention of sticking to? What does this remind us of?

And look, Paul invites this himself very deliberately:

Paul is doing this on purpose. He shows his ass off to entice us, the viewers, into imagining his hole and putting our dicks inside said hole and inside him. Women appreciate a nice ass but lack the equipment to fuck it properly. Men do have the equipment and by 1965 Paul knows his effect on heterosexual men. He's very much dangling the fuckability of his ass as a carrot in front of everyone who wants to look. No other Beatle displays this kind of overt neediness for this specific kind of attention. Paul knows what he is doing.

Paul is a bottom. A needy and bratty bottom who enjoys being put in his place and has a thick kinky streak to be sure, but a bottom nonetheless.

The insistence that Paul is a top has always smacked of contrarianism, to me anyway lmao. It's always packaged with making fun of McLennon fanart where Paul is yassified and John is butch or with complaints that Beatle fandom is making Paul "too feminine" and John "too masculine." There's a lot I could say about it but for now I'll just leave it at this: it's usually paired with bitching that McLennon fans are having too much fun. Many are guilty of it.

John and Paul themselves acknowledged this dynamic between them in oblique ways. John, Paul, and even Yoko always imagined Paul as being a woman as well as acknowledging that Paulina would have been romantically attached to John. Paul acknowledged it with the "if I were a woman maybe I could have...." thing, Yoko said that Paul would be a "great threat" if he was a woman in her audio diary that she recorded in 1968/1969, and John also has a quote floating around about the potential that lay in Paul being a woman though I'll be damned if I can't find the stupid thing. And then there's the insulting "Lennon's Princess" nickname from Apple staff. They perceived the dynamic as well.

John and Paul, consciously or not, actively pursued this dynamic with one another. They enjoyed it and Paul voluntarily stayed in that role even during a time period where he might have been justified in going "okay we've hit the big time, no more of that!"

Just look at Paul's posture here lmao. John is shoving his erection into Paul's shoulder. Yeah he's trying to hide it but Paul is fine with it, shoulders relaxed with no tension in him at all. Paul wasn't just John's princess, John was also Paul's knight, and that comes with certain responsibilities as well as privileges.

John was overtly more stable when he had sex on tap. John and Paul actively lived together for months at a time where few people could get to them. Seems to me that Paul not only did his job but took a lot of pleasure in doing it and John reaped the benefits. Notably John didn't start falling apart until they stopped touring and his sexual access to Paul was bottlenecked. Then 1967 rolls around and John just sorta, moved in with Paul and noticeably got back on an even keel.

Many thunks are to be had my friend! Many thunks indeed and one of them is that Paul is a bottom. Not just that, an enthusiastic one that likes courting powerful and even emotionally unstable males capable of overpowering him.

Much to consider!

[uchiha-gaeshi]

Omg y’all I think the Tumblr hsmd top/bottom discourse briefly migrated to Xitter…

[scarefox]

The secondhand embarrassment by just reading this comment 💀

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[tari-aldarion]

my sheets asking me pretty personal questions

[jjk-confessions]

Not to be that person but the whole top Yuji thing just like, I don't see it at all. He thrives off being bossed around, so I guess I could see sub top actually lol. Wait revelations are being had. Also future adult Yuji obviously not current Yuji.

.

[phlondsbian]

0 days since the last time dan complained about a rumor he started

[furupops]

@3cosmicfrogs why would you hide this in the tags

anyone who thinks that modern tumblr gays are obsessed with top/bottom dynamics clearly doesn't remember what it was like on here in 2014. people considered themselves oppressed minorities for liking the most popular yaoi in any given fandom but reversing who took it up the ass