Many men push back against the very idea that top or a bottom is a fixed state. Preferences change - encounter to encounter, mood to mood, and even meal to meal. Worse, they say, is the belief that someone is a top or bottom, based solely on certain physical traits, or race. A gay man who is tall, muscular, or black, for example, might be labeled as a top, regardless of their sexual preferences, whereas people often assume someone is a bottom if they're short, scrawny, or Asian.
'A lot of people meet me, they see that I look Asian, and assume that I'm a bottom,' Mark, of DC, said. 'It is really unfortunate that we're boxing ourselves in.' These labels, while often offensive, can also carry negative judgment, Guggenheim said. There's a hierarchy, or at least there was in the past, in which tops are, well, on top and bottoms have lower stature, he said. This is not only based on a false binary - sexual preferences are fluid, he said. But it's also rooted in the false idea that power or dominance is dependent on someone's sexual role, he said.