Brand Me Tender: A BDSM Couple in the Series by Galina Halilova

— Modern Russian society is as sexualized as it can get, but at the same time, any deviation from traditional sexuality is condemned and banned (for example, the ban on ‘propagating homosexuality’). However, repressions always only promote the wish to do something.

People from the ‘Theme’ — a name that BDSM is called in Russian-speaking circles — say that the Russian BDSM community has several hundred thousand people. At the same time, for the people who are far from BDSM, this reality exists only in cinema and literature. I tried to look at the Theme from the inside and capture the interactions in a BDSM-couple with a 10-year relationship — Mistress Anna and her slave Igor.

“I was lucky, I wanted this myself,” Igor says about his slave status. He not only likes to submit — it is important for him that he breaks himself every time, tests his own limits, experiments, and overcomes some internal barriers.

Anna is also reckless, and does not hesitate to do the things that many people in the community think are overboard.

“We are even more extreme than other people in the ‘Theme’,” she says. “People burst out from our performances saying “you are out of your mind, this is too much” — all while it seems to us that we are not doing anything special. I think that we are the craziest in town. And it is not because we want to be better than somebody: you might think that Igor and I are sitting around and thinking, what to do next to screw with everyone. But we aren’t! It is our internal need, our choice, our freedom. The freedom to be ourselves. People like us are called adrenaline junkies. The public walks, for instance, are extremely important for us — it is much better to get high when people are watching.

You can’t tell what people in the crowd are in the ‘Theme’. Igor was raised in a family of a military man with strict discipline, served in the airborne troops, fought in hot spots, where we was wounded. For some time he had a business, was married, and has a child. He is not open about his inclination towards the ‘Theme’ among his friends and family.

Anna is the author of erotic novels, a lecturer and professional psychologist, and has been a mistress for the past several years. She has three grown children, who have flatly rejected their mother’s way of life, so Anna is out of touch with her family. She holds therapy and BDSM sessions, and she also does coaching for beginner dominas.

“At some point, I decided to work with people with deviant behavior,” Anna explains. “I discovered in myself an inclination towards sadism, or algolagnia, rather early. I feel pleasure or physical relief when I inflict pain on other people. It is easy for me to understand other deviants, ‘we are of the same blood’. I love my subs and I know that I bear enormous responsibility for them.

Anna developed her own methodology, based on the elements of Ganzen Tolkachyov system vector psychoanalysis, thanatotherapy (“guiding a person through a death experience or returning to the prenatal state, for instance, by turning submissive partners into ‘cocoons’, when their movements are limited with bondage or wrapping them into polyethylene film”), existential psychoanalysis, and body-oriented psychotherapy. Half of the time of her sessions she spends on BDSM practices.

For some time, Anna and Igor were in a DS relationship — a kind of a permanent relationship between a dominant and a submissive partner; and then they took it to the next level.

“A sub has safewords, taboos,” Igor explains the difference between DS and slavery. “He comes to the session for the sake of certain practices, and when the session ends, he goes back to his usual life. A slave is a state of mind, when the important thing is not certain actions, but the feeling of belonging to someone, when you voluntarily submit the power over yourself to another person.”

A slave in terms of a couple is an inanimate, depersonalized object. ‘A stool’. He never knows what may be done to him in the next moment or what he may be made to do. If a sub can say a safeword and refuse to do something, a slave can’t.

“She made me eat dog shit, and I ate it!” Igor readily admits.

“He ate it unthinkingly,” Anna confirms. “It was not pleasant for him, of course. This was not a punishment, but just a fantasy of mine: I wanted to fulfil it, and so I did. If I want to dress him as a wench, he’ll be walking around dressed as a wench. And if I want my slave to be screwed by another man, that’s what’s going to happen.”

“Can you imagine that”? Igor asks me. I can’t.

“This is what slavery is,” Anna concludes. “At the same time, in regular life, slaves usually have tremendous leadership qualities. You need to be very strong to not to be afraid to submit.”

It is not easy to be a mistress either. You have to comply with the main principles of the Themes, which are that all the actions have to be safe, sane, and consensual (SSC): you can do what you want only to those who want it themselves. You have to take responsibility for the other person. The right of the mistress to tell off and flog, humiliate and order has to be paid for by love and tenderness.

She also needs to be harsh and know what the sub needs. Anna cites an example: “Your sub is depressed. The only way to help him are sessions of complete relaxation, BDSM-themed, of course. How do you relax him? By absolute submission. What if he opposes you and doesn’t want to submit? Then you need to make him do it. For his own sake. But for that you need to know how things works in people’s heads — people in general and your slave in particular.”

You shouldn’t care too much about you submissive either: “If he is a problem for you, why the hell would you need him? You will be thinking about how to entertain him, not about your own pleasure. And you sub will, too, feel that you turned into a pocket mistress, whom he can order: “I want flagellation, I want a strap-on…” Who cares what he wants, he can’t want anything! Kick them, wipe your feet on them, humiliate them — this is what they understand, this is what arouses them.”

Everything that happens in this relationship is based on mutual consent — and yet, looking at how Anna humiliates her slave, tortures him, brands him with a red-hot iron, I could not help feeling indignation and doubt the reality of what I was seeing.