Empire Burlesque

By Jessica Hopper
and Julianne Shepherd

"Someday you will be nostalgic for now," goes the tagline for www.suicidegirls.com, a soft-porn website both "now" and old-as-the-hills, progressive and retrogressive--in other words, just what an online community built around paying to see tattooed punk girls naked is destined to be. The contradictions, predictably, haven't slowed the growth of the site (for an earlier look at the phenomenon, see "Cynical, Bitter, Jaded As Hell. Also Naked,"), which has evolved from a grassroots experiment to a counterculture empire and touring attraction. Suicide Girls' merchandise line includes skateboards, books, underwear, playing cards, and a just-issued DVD, Suicide Girls: The First Tour (Epitaph). While the DVD advertises a behind-the-scenes view of the site and the tour, one aspect of the operation remains obscured: that the girls aren't running the show.

As Missy Suicide, the site's main photographer and idea lady, explains in the DVD, the site began as an art project depicting her friends, punk femmes all, in poses copped from old pinups à la Betty Page. She says her drive was to document alternative ideals of beauty, and the women she knew were a far cry from those featured in mainstream porn: women with newscaster-blonde hair, fake tits, and press-on nails. The prospect for a punk-lady peepshow seemed long overdue; with all other porn niche markets reaping the benefits of the internet, why shouldn't women with lavender hair, sleeve tattoos, and flat butts (and the men and women who fetishize them) get in on the racket too? Now supporters tout the site's diversity of women--shapes, sizes, subcultural affiliation--but its public face and 811 models are really rather homogenous. The dominant images are of flat-bellied, white, take-no-prisoners types: pierced, tattooed, dyed hair, all striking standard men's-mag and fetish-porn poses.

One male colleague of ours recently defined feminism as, simply, "women doing what they want to do." This is the kind of feminism that informs the Suicide Girls' marketing and mythology. Here, the pitch goes, is a website where empowered, sex-positive women post their own nude photos and run their own accompanying journals, by which the viewer is led to surmise that the girls are in control. They could be "the girl next door," or the girl next to you at the punk show, rather than a disembodied bit of ass. Suicidegirls.com is a success story of late-stage capitalism: In a world of confused mores and sexual enjoyment stilted by taboo, the site packages sex positivity for a nominal dip in the Paypal jar.

The "realness" aesthetic/rhetoric advances the idea that Suicide Girls is just punk-ethic writ large. The implication of the models' approval and enthusiasm is that suicidegirls.com can be viewed without guilt or shame--an important element for a fan base brought up in an era of p.c. punk and riot grrrl. It presents a stealthy rationale of fair trade; the "community" enjoys the site as much as the girls do. Subscribing to the site also means subscribing to a certain idea: Its viewers get to lust after girls with shared cultural interests ("shaved pussy; loves Fugazi!"), and the models' "feminism"--they are "doing what they want to do"--exonerates the guilt behind the gaze.

Suicide Girls: The First Tour chronicles a burlesque revue featuring the website's most popular girls, as one model explains, "taking off [their] clothes in a synchronized and classy manner." Were it not for the nudity, the Xs of electric tape strapped over the girls' nipples, and the cascades of beer poured over their chests in money-shot simulacra, it could almost be a home video of Gen Y summer camp--or an episode of The Monkees--it's so good-natured. The SGs engage in misadventures and goofy pranks aplenty: skinny-dipping, roller-skating, and covering their tour manager's van with spray cheese and gay-porn photos, effectively translating the site's regular-girls blog style to life.

The tour scenes and model interviews stress the SG prevalence of sisterhood and girl bonding. One model effuses that she's never met anyone like her tour mates; while describing what her life might be like if she had never become a Suicide Girl, her eyes get wet. The models' firm belief in the opportunities the site offers them is earnest and convincing; it's no wonder that on their homepages many of the girls list their gender as "Suicide Girl."

The friendly sheen and "wacky" footage of the girls takes the not-so-jagged edge off their amateur striptease acts, wherein they flip the bird as they flash their tits. The DVD is little more than a pastiche of behind-the-scenes scenes: the girls backstage! The girls in the van! The girls in the shower rinsing off chocolate syrup! All interspliced with footage of the girls in photo shoots for the site, at which points the film strays from road diary to Cinemax after 11:00 p.m. The camera pans up and down the girls' bodies, cross-fading between tits, ass, tattoos, and the girls' eyes, which meet the camera's gaze knowingly. A soundtrack of awful new-school pop-punk, emo, and hip-hop accompanies these scenes.