when you mark someone

The idea of marking goes through every BDSM experience. We talk about them directly or indirectly when we focus on our interest in permanent or momentary marks in our experiences. We also talk about it while feeling the texture of ropes on our skin in bondage, or with a paddle or fingers after a spanking session. It is present as subtle marks that the wax leaves behind on body. These are marks that look like a scar falling apart when we take a shower after a session that involved bodywriting, or even in the cold of needles, catheters and other objects that cross, sew and pierce. These marks are a bodily way of talking about another dimension of the marks we left. This dimension is that of the relationships we build with the people who serve us or who we are serving.

In one of the last texts written here, I said that ultimately there are no dominants without their submissives and servants. Whatever aesthetics you think you are performing as dominant one (caretaker, leather, sadist, controller), this position only makes sense in a particular relationship that involves the expectations and possibilities you have with other people. From my point of view, this is because submission per se is subservience as much as domination per se is arrogance. Nobody does it alone.

In my personal experience, the last few days have been marked by events that make me think about this idea of ​​marking someone. It's been times of farewells, of breaking relationships, releasing collars and letting people go elsewhere, accompanying them in the distance. It is the time of making knots that are looser. And this echoed in me as a sort of obligation to think about which marks I give to the people who came to me, and what it eventually means. I'll illustrate this with a little story.

Sepher, 2019

From May to December 2018 I maintained a fixed relationship with a sub. In general, he was described as a cold and distant person. And in fact, in the beginning, gain his confidence was hard! It required patience, conversation and even a lack of interest in making it a goal. In other words, maybe it was a goal, but one goal among many others. We spent some time together, talking, eating, sharing each other's company. This detachment and coldness were described by other dominants with whom he had contact. What these dominants might not have known was how this ice wall was being built in his experience and how it affects other actual experiences.

Being with him was one of the most thought-provoking and constructive experiences of my domineering experience. This is because, in our disinclination to anticipate agreements and contracts, we had time to build a relationship that really made sense within the universe we inhabited. Things were happening in their time, they had the duration and the intensity that, looking from now on, seems to me to be the ones that I demanded to have.

After the electoral period, he decided to return to his home city and live back with his family. I was fortunate to be one of your last visitors here, almost by accident. In January we said goodbye and he went another way.

In telling this I do not want to pretend to be superior to these others dominants. Rather, I wanna illustrate how hurry makes us distance from people we care about. By giving time to know someone else's story, we not only allow ourselves to know this particular person but also create a more fertile environment for our desires and fetishes. It is about intimacy, and each relation requires a certain quality of time to be truly meaningful.

It is not always the heavy hand or tight knot that hurts, or as my mother used to say, indifference is the queen of barbarism. There are many reasons why someone comes into the world of BDSM and explores the limits of desire and body through strength and pain. As regular people, there are in many of us that lived painful experiences. And these experiences activate many layers of meaning when you must remember. These are layers of fear, of passion. Some of us are prepared to remember, and others may no, so we need to construct a way to pass through these memories. I am convinced that the interest in strength for the majority of people I have known is more the possibility of recognizing oneself in an environment where the boundaries are clear than in a toxic and harmful logic of transforming suffering into excitation. However, this has an effect that needs to be better equalized in our relationships. 

Being with someone, for whatever moments, is being responsible for a relationship. When we cross that boundary of the other's world, we also become part of this world. In this common world, the boundaries may even be clear in terms of limits established about strength and violence, freedom and servitude. But pain and pleasure, humiliation and glory, marks and scars continually overlap this idea of controlled limits. We invariably leave marks on the bodies of others just as others leave their own on ours. Anyway, even using force, one must have some delicacy when it comes to walking among the pains of others.

Anyway, that's it. Nobody does it alone.