“She was no demi-mondaine who had taken a pseudonym to wage war upon the masculine sex, but the goddess of Love in person.”

Severin, in Venus in Furs

Twenty percent of my clients are couples and sometimes they come with some unrecognised polarity issues at play in their relationship. One type of couple is where the woman fills what I call the Venus In Furs archetype. The Venus is always with a man, sometimes a husband, or a secret lover at work, or a passionate soul mate. Her fire is the defining element in their relationship, and both partners usually speak about past relationships as grey and dull in comparison. Together, they discover the esoteric and sadomasochistic. They enjoy empowering and challenging each other, and this can sometimes lead to violent fights as they fight fire with fire. The way they speak about each other speaks volumes about their relationship; “She is strong as marble and never backs down”; “Her fire fuels my heart”; “He stands like a rock when my emotions are raging”, etc.

Yet beneath their passion, there is a subtle, underlying power dynamic. The man is usually older and more experienced. He may be in better shape than her, work out more, be slightly more vain, and have a more refined style. He runs his own start-up while she is typically a middle manager in a big company. Don’t get me wrong, from the outside, they both look amazing, successful, entrepreneurial, sexy, and chick. And they praise each other in front of the rest of the world. He has no problem being her shiny personal possession at the company dinners, and she gladly serves beer to the guys watching the football game. But in the end, he is a bit above her in most aspects of life, as he is more attractive, educated, makes more money, and has more social grace. This reflects the patriarchal society, but there is something deeper in the hierarchy between them, something others rarely see. Deep down, he longs to be dominated by her.

I usually first meet this archetypical couple at a retreat, and they claim to be ‘playful switches.’ She enjoys him ravaging her sexually and leading her in tango, and he wants to learn how to tie rope and handle dual floggers. They enjoy playing around with fantasies and stereotypes. A common sign that she is the Venus in Furs is that whenever she is submissive in an exercise, there is a long list of demands regarding how she wants it to play out. They often end up in conflicts when he is dominant because he balances a fine line between her specific taste and the idea that he should be selfish in his desires. If I ask her if maybe she is simply the alpha in their relationship, she often denies it because submissive slave men are weak and pathetic in her imagination. She wants a strong man slightly above her in the social hierarchy, which makes him worthy of dominating. It makes the power trip even more extraordinary because the Venus in Furs deserves the best. And he picked her because she could bring him down and finally dominate him.

The Volcano That Boils the Surface

However, their power dynamic is often entirely subconscious, as my good friend Sigmund used to say. He would surely agree that these couples on the surface, are the fiery passionate ones exploring sadomasochism and esoteric eroticism. However, down in their oceanic depths, the man actually worships her as the goddess, the Venus in Furs. Of course he wants to learn the ropes and the floggers because he adores her pleasure. But she is the one with a higher tolerance for sensations. In my experience, women can surrender to more stimuli, whereas men get stuck in endurance. As a result, they can generate more kundalini energy (or life energy, if you will) and have more orgasms. So it’s not strange that women often end up in the centre of attention, independently of the power dynamic. 

These aspects of the power dynamics are a mixture of nature and nurture. How these characteristics express themselves individually depends mostly on how one relates to themselves. I’ve noticed that when men have a wish to become more sensuous, that it takes expression in developing fetishes and kinks, like sissification, chastity and orgasm control. In our archetypical Venus in Furs couple, he subconsciously worships her and empathetically takes pleasure through her, while she believes in heteronormative gender roles of her as follower (albeit a fiery and passionate one). However, secretly, she is the one controlling him. And both take great pleasure in this.

When I meet this couple, I want to encourage them to bring this power dynamic from boiling underneath the surface into consciousness. To create a ritual for stepping out of the closet and fully into the hierarchy. More specifically, I ask her to make him her slave, only for an evening. Then to put a collar on him, and use a flogger to drive his passionate desire. I don’t think she should be sadistic and punish him, nor even care about disciplining him, but instead allow herself to use him for her pleasure. Often she worries about how to respect him if she makes him her slave. She picked this strong, prosperous, intelligent man for a reason, after all. Yet it is her responsibility to bring him down only to raise him up again after their tour to the underworld, where she is the Venus In Furs.

As a side note, the expression Venus in Furs comes from the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch book, about a man falling deeply into a masochistic romance. It is dream-like and poetic and far from sadistic and hedonistic. I highly recommend reading it.