As Adam once said to Eve: Stand back, we don’t know how big this will get.
We’ve just added two amazing women to our Educators Directory. The legendary fetish icon and pioneer Ms. Stephanie Locke threw her stilettoes on the BED — so how could we possibly say no? Also, a transwoman who is swiftly building her own legacy, Lola Houston, is now enshrined along with 25 other stellar educators. Warm welcomes to them both!
The Board couldn’t be happier about the quality of educator applications we’ve been getting. We’re blown away by the scholarship and authority backing up so many of our educators, not to mention the many years of their lives that they have devoted to helping, healing, educating, and mentoring thousands of others. We love them hard.
It’s as true in BDSM as in public education: teaching can be a thankless job. Every hard-working teacher spends days, months, even years, honing their speeches, hand-outs, powerpoint presentations and everything else that goes into sharing their knowledge with groups of people. Very few are ever compensated for the real number of hours that they spent on preparing a class or the expenses involved in taking time away from their day jobs and spending money to travel to group events. No money can compensate for the emotional experience of teaching either — the highs as you imagine your audience reacting to what you are teaching, and the low after the class ends and you wonder if it really went as well in real life as you imagined it would in your head, and how many of your students really understand your most important points, and whether you left a lasting impression or your efforts would soon be forgotten. Teaching is not an easy job.
Yet hundreds of North American BDSMers — and thousands more globally — have made kink and fetish education their life missions. What drives us? We’re obviously not doing it for the money. We are driven from a deeper, more authentic place. We have the audacity to believe that the truth about WIITWD matters. We have the confidence and courage to speak it. We have the need to make a meaningful contribution to the world. And we have a stubborn streak that tells us that in a world filled with lies and prejudices against us, we can make a difference by making our voices heard.
To all my friends who have wondered why this blog has been so quiet, now you know! I’m spending all my free time working on a BDSM education revolution. BED’s directories are growing at controlled pace, as we carefully vet and slowly add some the most gifted BDSM educators in the world.
Meanwhile, in the last two weeks, I created several new subcategories in our Library to start indexing our fast-growing resources. Feel free to cyberpet the dog when you visit. 🙂
Our Reading Library has a new category, BDSM Scholarship, for those seeking academic writing on BDSM.
We launched a Visual Library, featuring royalty-free work both by contemporary artists (well, just one artist so far, but it’s begun!), and a well-stocked selection of vintage BDSM-related photos and photo compilations spanning over 100 years of BDSM history. You can spend hours looking through all our content, and pick and choose anything you want to share with friends, students, event-goers, colleagues or anyone else who is interested in BDSM education.
Or visit our all-new Music Library, filled with clips and links to YouTube music videos you can use at classes, workshops, parties, or to project onto screens as wallpaper at your events.
All of our Library materials are free for your use.
Last but definitely not least, we welcomed a new member to our staff. Attorney Steve Sandler is officially of counsel to BED.
We can’t wait to see how we look by next year and how many more professional resources we can build for the BDSM/Fetish/Leather/Kink communities. But we need YOU to help us get there. Gloria’s accepting BED donations via PayPal and personally guarantees that all your funds will go towards building BED into the professional BDSM educational hub our communities deserve.
Thank you and congratulations to everyone who has supported BED through their work, whether behind-the-scenes (big kisses to our Board and volunteers!) or out front in our Library and Directories. Special thanks to our first advertiser The Kink Shop too!
Please help us grow!
Be part of our Education Revolution!
