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Suicide Girls, the Book

WWW- I don’t remember who turned me on to suicidegirls.com, but I do remember who gave me access. It was Selwyn Harris, aka Mike McPadden, a once-notorious zine publisher who, for reasons long forgotten, never really liked me. I was overseas at the time, living on a four-to-one economy, and couldn’t afford the modest monthly membership. So on my own website I issued a request for a donated password. Within days Selwyn came through. I still can’t explain his charity.

SuicideGirls was revelatory. Here were women with tattoos and piercings and a don’t-give-a-fuck enticement never before put on pornographic display, at least not in a manner that so perfectly married subject and viewer. Here were the women I’d lusted after my entire adult life, but never beheld au naturel because I was either too much of a loser or too monogamous (or both). There was Voltaire, with her dyed dreads and countless tattoos, a slight, spry pixie who smirked shy like the hottest riot grrl you never dared approach at the CBGB matinee. And then there was Rose, with less ink but even more inaccessible in her stance; the look in her eyes betrayed her intelligence and revealed a sweetness at her core.

Or so it seemed. At its best, the viewer is a voyeur who can imagine contact with the subjects. That’s how pornography works. That these women clearly had a lot in common with me made it all the more enticing. I was shocked at the excitement generated by women who in many cases were doing nothing more than posing for the camera. SuicideGirls reintroduced an innocence to my modest world of pornography.

I wasn’t alone. SuicideGirls exploded. Playboy did a spread. Soon, everywhere I turned someone was writing about it. The number of girls increased, as did their diversity, and the journals kept by the SuicideGirls-a marketing masterstroke made possible by the blog phenomenon that exploited the need for further connection between digital stalker and stalkee-remained current and honest and charming. How can a man resist a bunch of cute tattooed girls who all seem to list Requiem for a Dream and Hackers among their favorite movies?

SuicideGirls was founded in 2001 by the pseudonymous Missy Suicide, a budding 20-something photographer whose keen interest in Betty Page-era pin-ups moved her to take snapshots of the girls around her. It makes sense that Portland would birth SuicideGirls. It’s that kind of city, a culturally progressive big town that’s less a backwater than, say, Murray Hill. There’s a long tradition of counterculturism, activism, punk rock and cute chicks.

And now comes SuicideGirls the book, published by Feral House, the indie imprint formerly of Portland responsible for Apocalypse Culture I and II, Lords of Chaos and other vital titles. It’s a lovely volume light on the explanatory copy-just a short and sweet introduction from Missy about herself and the site’s history. The bulk of the 160 pages is dedicated to full-color shots of the girls in varying degrees of nakedness and provocation. Some shots are explicit, others more artful. The last 46 pages offer samples from the girls’ personal pages, including a self-portrait (Missy handles all other photography). Ninety-one girls are represented, with a handy index pointing readers to their favorite.

What’s most striking about SuicideGirls is how the mid-90s riot grrl ethos has been simultaneously absorbed and rejected. Fifteen years ago, that cute chick with tattoos at the Fugazi show subscribed to an intense intersection of feminism and straight-edge, and with it came a certain rejection of men. Even perfectly good, respectful, pro-chick men. The grrls exchanged secret handshakes and swapped copies of the latest Sarah Dyer comics while we watched from across the crowd, imagining the tattoos that were hidden from view. SuicideGirls is just like the good ol’ days of Sharpie-scribbled slogans on white t-shirts at the Bikini Kill show-only with nudity.

The SuicideGirls (the name, we learn in the introduction, is Chuck Palahniuk’s slang for hipster chicks who hang out at Portland’s Pioneer Square) are sexy because they’re flawed. There’s no pressure to be perfect; their bodies are as different in print as they are in reality. There’s no fucking, no cock-sucking-no cocks at all, in fact-and what sexual contact is there seems natural, unforced. (For a girl who pierces her hood, how far away is sexual experimentation?) These are empowered women. Their bodies, their decisions.

Like the Barely Legal cottage industry (spawned, coincidentally, by the work of the aforementioned Mike McPadden), SuicideGirls was the originator of a new kind of porn: amateurs with ink. Countless clones are now popping up on thumbnail sites like The Hun and Richard’s Realm, yet as the second generation proliferates, the genius of SuicideGirls is made clear: The imitators come from some dude with a camera paying a woman with tattoos to show us your tits. Missy Suicide, on the other hand, has a reputation for sharing the wealth. If there are objections lodged by anyone personally involved in the SuicideGirls website-not by an observer who would presume to know what’s best for a woman and her breasts-I’ve yet to come across them.

And yet, it’s still porn. Sexy alt-pornography, sure, but these 160 pages are still nudity meant to arouse. It may be produced as riot grrl FUBU, but it sells as Maxim for hipsters: socially acceptable smut for Lower East Side coffeetables.

 

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