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BDSM, Abuse, and Spin - 2/8/2011 12:22:00 PM

strangedesire

Posts: 360
Joined: 12/23/2008
Status: offline

So there's this girl.

She's 20 and her Master is 37. They're engaged. She wears a collar that she can't remove. They have a 24/7 relationship - no safewords, pretty much no limits. She lives with him in a house that they "rent" from a relative of hers. The relative only charges them taxes and utilities, and he pays all of it. He pays for her car insurance and her cell phone as well. Her mother was apparently abusive enough that moving back home isn't an option for her.

Their relationship is rocky, and my impression is that it's always been somewhat rocky. They have an open relationship, but he often seems displeased with her male partners. Me and my Kitten have played with her as well, and I believe he knows this, but doesn't seem bothered by it. I've never met him.

She was involved with an open-minded vanilla friend of mine for quite a while, and still speaks to him often. The stories he heard from her were clearly tripping into outright abuse. Her Master would lock her in a closet for days at a time. After a fight, he marked her so badly that she didn't go to school the next day. He broke things of hers when angry. He threatened suicide when she told him she was thinking about leaving him.

Kitten, much later, heard a slightly different story from her. She talked to Kitten about the way he'd hold her after play, and the way he seemed to be able to see her breaking point and stop right before she hit it. He'd locked her in a closet once, overnight, with a bucket and a blanket to sleep with. She skips classes often, and any mark bad enough to keep her home would have been visible a few days later.

We shrugged it off. She likes to tell people what they want to hear, and this male friend had thought her Master was trouble from the start. (And he was in love with her for quite a while - he had plenty of reasons to want her single.) He's very open-minded about kink, but something like "I hated it but I didn't tell him to stop because deep down I wanted it" sound very different to practicing sadomasochists. We assumed that she was twisting the truth a bit, perhaps unconsciously, and he was reinforcing it by responding with lots of sympathy and emotional support.

Fast forward a few months. The relationship is still rocky. She's recently become involved with another male friend of mine, and her Master is so upset to see her spending her time with another man that he leaves her. (Within a day, he's back, with gifts.) I'm in fairly regular contact with her, and hear about a few nasty things that he said to her. I provide sympathy.

At roughly the same time, she talks to her new lover. He hears about a nasty beating, and her staying home from school to hide the marks. (I saw her less than a week later. She had mild-to-moderate bruises on her back, but nothing visible under clothes. She wouldn't talk about the bruises, though.) She took him to her house and showed him the place that her Master locks her into these days. It's a small space between the basement proper and the bulkhead leading down to it. He sees snowdrifts inside it. I've never seen her house, although she's spent time at mine.

They talk, and she admits that her primary relationship is unhealthy.

Kitten and I are invited to crash in their hotel room one night at an upcoming fetish event. On facebook, she posts that she's just booked their wedding venue.

I don't know what to think. She's a masochist who likes serious humiliation, and wants a relationship where she doesn't have to take responsibility for herself. She doesn't have a safeword, so even if she really, truly, for serious didn't want something, she would have no way to stop it, and she's completely financially dependent on him. The things she does with him could be horribly abusive - or they could be completely consensual.

The difference is in the way she tells her story. It's spin.

I recognize that even if she is being abused, there isn't much I can do about it. I'm at a loss, though. Do I support her in staying with him even though they fight? Do I encourage her to leave him? Do I criticize her for playing things up to get sympathy from the men in her life, or do I give her the emotional support that she wants and them some?

The relationship is broken, and I don't doubt that. But I can't tell if it's the kind of broken that she can work through, or the kind of broken where I ought to be terrified that she lives alone with a temperamental sadist into edge play in a house that has no neighbors within screaming distance.

I'm not looking for solutions, because I don't think there are any. I do intend to talk to her directly about this fairly soon, so I can at least know where she thinks she stands.

Any thoughts? Advice? General feelings?

_____________________________

On that other site as Exegesis.