Finally! After years and years of looking at BMEzine from the outside - I remember freaking out the first time I saw a genital piercing on there years ago - I finally have a membership! After getting my tattoo in December 1999, I tried to submit the pictures (NSFW) to BMEzine. They were rejected as being too small, even though I felt it was a nice sequence of photos from before, during, and after the process. So since then I’ve just looked from the outside, and I’ve occasionally been frustrated by not having access to the mods of friends who have accounts on the IAM community site.

Last night I figured I’d submit that sequence of tattoo pictures again. I knew they were still too small, and I have the original prints somewhere but I’m not sure where so I can’t re-scan them. (By the way, those pictures are the origin of my 2001 essay entitled Don’t develop your dirty pictures at CVS.) So I resubmitted the little pictures, and got the automated warning that they would probably be too small but were being sent to a human for checking. And then I thought…wait a minute. BMEzine considers corseting a form of body modification; maybe I should submit my corset pictures. So I sent in a couple. Tonight I got the rejection for the tattoo pictures…and then shortly after I got the approval for the corset pictures! What’s funny is that they’re not even very good pictures - the reduction is not especially dramatic - but now that I have access to the full corsetry gallery, I see that there are plenty of pictures in there less “intense” than what I’m doing. But I can see the whole gallery now!

I’m working on my IAM page; fortunately the name “etoile” was still available. I don’t think it’s visible to non-members right now, so I’ll have to figure out if I want to change that setting, and if so, how. Also, my name didn’t get attached to the two photos I’ve submitted, so I will have to ask if there’s a way to do that. Now that I’m logged into IAM it looks like any new pictures would have my name attached, but these initial ones don’t yet. Yay, I’m excited to finally have IAM access and a full BME membership!