Well, primarily I just like John on the bottom. ^_^ Nothing wrong with how you enjoy your smut. It’s all fair game. And after all, the whole top/bottom thing is a fantasy, really, when you’re talking about it like it’s an orientation. Mostly, human beings navigate their sexual encounters based on what sounds fun and pleasurable to them that day, and furthermore there are lots of sexual activities that render the entire debate irrelevant. Frotting, for example, or mutual handjobs.
(Well, it’s not how real human partners necessarily navigate their sexual encounters. It absolutely is a societal expectation of how male/female sexual roles should work. But I think that societal expectation may be why so many female slash fans, in particular, get hung up on the top/bottom thing. We’re reflecting/dealing with/exploring the collection of perceptions, expectations and assumptions we’ve accumulated from society vs. the ones that we own as personal beliefs and preferences.)
Now, Dom/sub, that’s a different matter—and one that the show brought up for us when they invited a professional Dominatrix on board, so it’s fair game. If you think about it, Dom/sub really has four different basic orientations: Dom, sub, switch, and non-participant. Because there are lots of people who don’t power-kink.
(I’ll put the rest of this under a cut, for those who really don’t want to be bothered with the ‘who’s on top’ debate.)
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Furthermore, I think the show gave us an answer, at least when it comes to Sherlock. If Irene’s a dom, so is Sherlock. ASiB made a point of paralleling Sherlock and Irene at every possible turn. They’re the same, we were told through dialogue, costume design, lighting, blocking, and framing. Irene comes in with a challenge, and Sherlock steps up. The whole episode is a power struggle between the two of them, both of them vying to be in control. (Honestly I have some fairly strong issues with how this episode rolls up some pretty problematic stuff and cheerfully labels it as ‘sexy’ just because it’s being done to or by a hot woman. But that’s…well, the world for you.)
And I’ve written elsewhere about how much Sherlock likes being in control. The ‘powerful people want to yield control’ stereotype doesn’t work here, because 1: it’s a stereotype, and 2: Sherlock chooses his life. He does what he wants and doesn’t do what he doesn’t want—to an almost cartoonish, wish-fulfillment level—and so it’s not like he’s caught in a web of responsibilities or obligations that he wants to escape from. 3: I don’t really see submission calming his mind, either. He wants things to focus and ramp up his concentration and mental activity, not give it up and go diffuse. He’s the wrong kind of sensation junkie for that, I think.
John, meanwhile—well, I addressed a lot of him in that same meta I linked. John’s an interesting one, though. Because I think that if you take him out of his relationships with certain kinds of people, he’s a very different person. We don’t know much about John’s typical relationships, but what little we do know is weird. We know he sucks with women (“getting off” with Sarah, the dog fiasco with Jeanette). We know—assuming you count the blog as source material—that his army mates call him John “Three Continents” Watson (but then he claims, albeit drunkenly, not to have an international reputation, so perhaps that was his pals taking the piss?).
And then there’s that scene at Sarah’s place that I’ve never really managed to make sense of, where the two of them talk about him staying over at her place kind of like he’s a pet dog earning his way into sleeping by her bed. I generally just assume that’s joking around, since otherwise it’s really kind of strange, isn’t it?
So, John’s sex life is pretty mysterious, really. (Although I think in the same way it is for characters on most shows; it’s not like it’s standard practice for them to sit around and discuss bedroom preferences.)
But what we do know is that John does canonically, explicitly specifically need the kind of escape and release that D/s offers. He and Sherlock both made that point in HLV. John does need someone who can give him permission and the means to let go, surrender his normalcy and oppressive self-control. And we got the exchange about John and his commanding officers in TSOT (and just in case you think Sherlock somehow isn’t referring to himself with that ‘previous commander’ line, John gave his gravestone the salute of a subordinate officer to a commanding officer in TRF, which Sherlock furthermore saw, so they both know damn well that “I don’t have a commanding officer” means “hell yes I do, but we don’t talk about our military kinks out loud”).
And the person who can give him that can’t just be anybody. John doesn’t need or want somebody who can manage his daily life for him, and he’s not about to throw himself on the mercy of just anybody. It takes someone who both has what he wants—the danger, the command, maybe the glamour, and maybe even the anti-socialness—and who can also win his trust.
Because for what John wants, he needs a hell of a lot of trust. It has to be someone he feels comfortable handing himself over to, body and soul. A ‘commanding officer.’ He trusts his safety and his entire purpose in life—to what I think most of us can agree is an irrational degree—to Sherlock. Handed it all over to him at the beginning of the series and essentially said, “You’re my reason for living. You’re what gets me through the day. You’re where I want to be.” And when he (thinks he’s) lost that with Sherlock, he (thinks he) finds it again with Mary.
(Not that I’m saying his relationship with Mary is necessarily kinky or anything. We haven’t seen enough of their relationship to really have any idea what’s going on there, or how it emotionally fulfills either of them, although they’ve both been very clear that it does—which is one of the problems of the season, of course. BUT we are given to understand, whether the show is being truthful with us or not, that John finds his purpose with her again, as he did with Sherlock, and maybe with Sholto, and that he subconsciously sensed some of the personality traits he craves in her, and that these two things are directly connected.)
Now, the funny thing is that if John’s got some kink or submissiveness to him, I don’t think his primary expression of it is sexual (although I’m more than happy to read and write those stories!). But I do think that John’s probably being honest about his sexual orientation to the best of his ability, and that he is, so far as he knows, primarily sexually attracted to women.
But after Irene names Sherlock and John as a couple, John never denies that again. Sherlock ‘isn’t his boyfriend’ and John ‘isn’t gay,’ but John never says after that that they aren’t a couple or together.
And after HLV, when Sherlock comes out and names it—“You’re abnormally attracted to dangerous people and situations” and John flat out agrees, “Yes, but why is she like that?”—I think we can say with full confidence that absolutely John is attracted to Sherlock, even if it’s not primarily sexual.
But a thing about sex is that, somewhat counter-intuitively, it’s not always powered by sexual attraction. Or at least, sexual attraction can be jump-started by other things. This is how demisexuality and many fetishes work. There are kinksters who, if you asked them, would say they’re asexual. It’s not sexual attraction to another person they respond to; it’s participating in some other form of relationship, communication or exchange with a person that gets them physically turned on.
So if, then, Sherlock and John were to have sex at some point, it quite possibly would not be primarily sexual attraction that would be driving it. It might most realistically be a physical sublimation of the passionate attraction in their own relationship. And in that relationship, the dynamic is Sherlock in the lead and, when the chips are down, in control, and I figure that the sexual expression of that dynamic would look much the same.
So, if johnlock, in the sexual sense, were to become canon (and to be quite honest, I think I have a better chance of personally setting foot on the moon than ever seeing the two of them engage in sexual activity on screen together), I think it’d be Sherlock in charge.
One must also not underestimate the influence of Moffat’s fannish self-identification with Sherlock, in a manner very similar to a 12 year old boy reading a Batman comic for the first time.