I do not know much about the struggle the gay com­munity had o go through to finally get accep­ted by most of the soci­et­ies and coun­tries on this planet. I have gay friends, but it is not a topic which is brought up very often. There is an ele­ment of pride in the homo­sexual move­ment which strikes me as appeal­ing though. As our soci­ety changes we need to be less afraid of the influ­ence such change as on our lives. It seems that this gay pride has helped in mak­ing homo­sexu­al­ity more vis­ible, has helped soci­ety to need to accept it as some­thing nor­mal.

Our Pride

Whenever I ven­ture into the realms of BDSM I meet people who are smart, have a bal­anced opin­ion and lead an inter­est­ing life. There are many dif­fer­ent per­son­al­it­ies and facets to those involved in this life­style and very sel­dom have I met someone that I could not be proud of. Why do we choose to hide our choice of life­style?
Some might argue that less open minded soci­et­ies, such as in the United States, would never accept the open sexual prac­tices tied into most BDSM rela­tion­ships. Which seems to be rather odd. The gay move­ment is extremely sexual and the thought of sexual inter­ac­tion between two people of the same sex was very hard to com­pre­hend and it took a long time to be absorbed by soci­ety. I feel that it is time to stand up and instead of start­ing a full blown revolu­tion we should simply aim to be seen. Respect­fully demand­ing that soci­ety acknow­ledges that people like us exist.

Soci­ety…

Everything which does not con­form to tra­di­tions an norms set forth over gen­er­a­tions by a cul­ture and the soci­ety which is a des­cend­ant thereof will cause dis­com­fort. For some soci­et­ies the concept of BDSM is more alien than to oth­ers. The Japan­ese soci­ety has a very long his­tory of ser­vant cul­ture, most born out of the cul­ture of Shibari, the art of Japan­ese rope bond­age.
Without know­ing much on the topic I would care­fully want to assert that the his­tory of cul­ture in North­ern Ire­land would not be as sus­cept­ible to the idea of a Master/slave rela­tion­ship as the one in Japan might be.

It is up to us to change this!

Stand­ing up

Intro­du­cing change is hard enough, people just do not get up in the morn­ing and decide to change the way they per­ceive the world. They do not go and make changes to what is valu­able to them just because we thing it would be a smart thing to do. Before I want to change, I need to know why I want to change and what change I should be will­ing to accept. If I am not aware of the one thing that could instig­ate such a need for change, then I will never allow myself to exper­i­ence some­thing new. I doubt that many are aware, out­side of spe­cial­ised com­munit­ies, what BDSm as a life­style means. While there might be main­stream porno com­pan­ies try­ing to cash in on a gen­eral trend for more hard­core movies, they are barely scratch­ing on the sur­face of what BDSM and being in such a rela­tion­ship means.

I have vowed to myself that I want to make people aware, gently so, of what I believe in and what I like to call my way of life. For that very reason I will be seek­ing out graphic design agen­cies look­ing for work. Graphic design­ers are artist by heart and should be fairly open minded. I want to cre­ate a Logo, a Logo we all can share, some­thing we can identify with and some­thing that can eas­ily be used to spot oth­ers believ­ing in this life­style. I am aware that there is a BDSM Logo already, but I believe that it is not quite up to par. In terms of it being some­thing that can be pushed around eas­ily and in terms of what I would expect from it as a mar­ket­ing tool.
You are more than wel­come to drop me an email at Master@her.… if you know someone that has the pro­fes­sional skills to help me with the cre­ation pro­cess. Obvi­ously I will be pay­ing for this and obvi­ously I am also inter­ested in your opin­ions and Input, just leave a com­ment on this entry, tell your friends as well.

The Goal

What I want from this is an easy way of identi­fy­ing those people which are in the life­style as well. Whether I go to Canada, Aus­tralia, Hong Kong or Aus­tria, I want a uni­ver­sal sym­bol that cre­ates a vir­tual soci­ety for those inter­ested in BDSM. I would like to see the sym­bol on car bumper stick­ers, hats, under­wear, t-shirt, cof­fee mugs and every­where we as BDSM people go. Not to sep­ar­ate us from the soci­ety we live in, but to cre­ate aware­ness that we are not alone. That there are many of us and that we would like to be accep­ted for what we are. Valu­able, intel­li­gent mem­bers of the cul­tures we live in.