Search engines

[Curtis]

There's a BDSM symbol? I've been reading about this stuff for thirty years, and I've never heard of it. Is it a Canadian thing? What does it look like?

[Minx]

Curtis

This may help answer your question..

http://members.aol.com/quagmyr/meaning.htm

Minx

[Curtis]

Very good, thank you. So, it was a conscious attempt, like AIDS and breast cancer ribbons, to create a symbol, not something that happened spontaneously. (Before anyone jumps on me, lack of spontaneity is NOT a bad thing.)

[Finding_Fantasy]

Pretty much, yes. It's something that the BDSM community would recognise and something that others would either mistake for a Ying Yang symbol or just a neat decoration.

I think ~d~ 's avatar is actually a variation of the BDSM symbol as well....using flowers for the circle. I could be mistaken though

[Curtis]

Now that you mention it, it seems that she said something like that at the time she changed to her current avatar.

I've seen variants on triskeles around for decades. I always associate them with Klingons, who aren't safe, sane or consentual, but who make pretty good fantasy sadists. One of the old Star Trek novels, whose title I can't remember, was about a human female biologist or doctor who was kidnapped by a Klingon captain and tortured for weeks until (of course) she fell in love with him. Ah, good times...

[j]

I think the use of the triskelion as a BDSM symbol can be traced back to the Story of O, where O has to wear one such ring as an advertisement of her status.

'They were strange iron rings, banded with gold inside, and the signet was wide and as massive as that of an actual signet ring, but it was convex, and for design bore a three-spoked wheel inlaid in gold, with each spoke spiraling back upon itself like the solar wheel of the Celts.'

Pauline Reage never bothered to explain why she chose this emblem, which is still widely used in Breton (Western France) jewelry.