For the uninitiated, a Suicide Girl is not someone who just slit her wrists and took a warm bath to hell. Although, she could've tried at one time. In this case, a Suicide Girl is the Internet's equivalent of a 21st Century pin-up girl. Betty Page gone really, really bad.



Warning: SGs are definitely not the kind of girls you bring home to mom and dad -- unless mom and dad happen to live in a trailer and run a meth lab. In many cases, they're the kind of vixens who are going to strap you to a chair, strip down to reveal their multiple tattoos, and piercings, and then, if you're lucky, they'll bang your brains out without putting their cigarette out on your wrist.



After which, they might be apt to crack a tall, light up a smoke and tell you how they're just trying to express themselves. And, oh yeah, what a f*cked up, male-dominated world it is. Fair enough. But when the rant goes on to say that SGs give women a sense of female empowerment, we can only say: WTF?

These are probably not the kind of women mother of all feminists Gloria Steinem was thinking about when she spearheaded the movement. In all honesty, and, yes, from a guy's perspective, the SGs seem like just another angle on taking people's money in the Wide, Wide, World of Porn.



The SG concept was born in 2001 in Portland, Oregon, hatched by a woman named Missy Suicide.


"Hint: that's not my real last name."

Missy says she started the enterprise as an art project/experiment: "I always loved pin-up girl photography, and I wanted to photograph girls that I knew with the same sort of control and respect classic pin-ups were given."

The actual term "Suicide Girl" was taken from a Chuck Palahniuk novel called Survivor. Missy Suicide says: "If I had known the site would be so popular then, I might have thought the name out a bit more."

And, yes, they are popular. Currently there are 1,829 Suicide Girls, and a quick Googling brings up over 3,000,000 links. From the success of their website, the SGs have spun their brand into novelty items, a coffee table book, a radio show, and even a national touring production -- which I happened to catch on DVD.

What goes on in the touring production? They call it "burlesque." I call it Amateur Stripper Hour: Lots of pasties, playing with their own nipples, ass cheeks quivering, hula hoop gyrations, dowsing one another in beer, and then, for the big encore, one-finger salutes for their adoring audience -- garnering the approval they obviously crave.

Sounding like grandpa here, but why else would a woman get naked on stage? Other than for the ego-fix, and $$$, that comes along with it? Enough of this crap, calling what they do "art." This isn't classical burlesque like in the old days. And, every moment I saw was far from art, and far from creative. Did I want to spank my monkey? No, certainly not for the art-factor.



It was like Myspace Gone Wild™: young women desperate for the attention their parents never afforded them. Of course, I'm generalizing. I am sure some of the SGs grew up in warm, and loving two-parent homes. Ok, three or four of them.

I'm guessing most have probably been on the fringes of family and society since high school. At which point they realized they were "different" and they needed to find an alternative avenue to hangout on in order to separate themselves from the pack. Nothing wrong with that.

In comes the piercings, tattoos and dyed hair, and along with it, the intended shock-value they have added to their persona: We don't fit in with the cliques, but f*ck you, we don't care, this is who we are, now deal with it, bitches!

And while Missy Suicide says the SGs were outcasts who never belonged to any one faction, they certainly do now. They have committed the same faux-pas they have probably accused mainstream society of, one too many times: they have labeled themselves.

Of course, labels are easy shorthand for us to identify something by. And when I asked my tattoo-plastered Coffee Shop Barista if she knew who the SG were, of course she did.

When I asked her if she thought they represented female empowerment, she said yes. I asked how. She said it was in the way they are comfortable with their bodies, that they aren't succumbing to the pressure of what the usual Barbie/Cosmo Girl is supposed to look like.

And, in that sense, maybe she was onto something: these are girls who have gone against what pop culture has told them they're supposed to look like, and how they are supposed to behave. F*ck Cosmo, right?

But what about furthering female empowerment in terms of a male dominated world? Which was actually, correct me if I'm wrong, the ideal which feminism was founded upon.

I asked Coffee Shop Barista if it furthered a woman's agenda in that case. She said, "No, it's probably just another excuse to justify doing what they're doing."

And, what they're doing, is getting naked and making Missy Suicide and her partner a ton of cash.



Yes, the SG get paid for their photos, and they are allowed to promote their specific projects on their web pages (even if it's phone sex). But the buck stops there, and is handed over to Missy, and co-founder Sean Suhl. Who happens to call himself Spooky Suicide. And that's not only on Halloween.

Speaking of Spooky, a couple years back, the SG had a mutiny on their hands when former SGs got together and claimed Spooky is the driving force behind the whole venture, and that he treats the girls harshly, and traffics in inappropriate management.

The protestors have since branched out to form their own sites, like: GodsGirls and Deviant Nation.

So, lets get this straight:

1) The SG start as a fringe group.

2) Then they become so large that they fracture into splinter groups, with the castoffs claiming the Mother Ship was only in it to exploit their, ahem, assets.

3) Look at both those splinter groups now. Oh! They're not exploiting anyone! Nope, it's all about the art.


"Can't we all just get along?"