I’ve had endless debates with my friends over the Suicide Girls. My friends are mostly geeks, and mostly guys, so I’ve had to defend my position of derision about the Suicide Girls ad nauseam to a bunch of drooling geeks who just enamored at the idea of a girl who likes Star Wars and computer games and might think that they’re cool for knowing about those things too. Believe me, I’ve heard every argument in favor of the Suicide Girls, and yet I am not swayed.
It’s not that I have an issue with porn, or with sexuality. I’ve ‘experimented’, to put it mildly. I was a DJ in the goth/industrial scene for many, many years. I love Marquis and other fetish magazines, and fetish art. I used to party at The Vault in NYC, I’ve seen Richard Kern’s films with Lydia Lunch, I have history in the fetish community, I am pierced and tattooed, there’s not a lot in the fetish realm that shocks me, even if I don’t understand the appeal of some things. Because of my history, my friends seem perpetually confused as to why I don’t like the the Suicide Girls. ” But they are about all things you are about,” they say,”they’re changing the standards of beauty and making it sexy to be alternative and non mainstream.”
Actually, they’re not. They are trying so hard to be ‘different’ that they set an entirely new standard of conformity.
When I first started out being “alternative” it was before it was cool and socially acceptable to be different. Women like me in the punk/goth/electro communities made a conscious effort to create looks that were authentic for us, that made us happy, and that said to the rest of the world,”We don’t like you, we don’t like your standards of beauty, and we’ll make our own rules so please fuck off.” So we got tattoos, dyed our hair weird colors, pierced our nipples and noses and other things and wore our contempt for traditional societal standards of beauty the way we wore our heavy black eyeliner and black clothing and Doc Marten boots. We faced society on our terms, and demanded respect and recognition for who we are as people, instead of sexualized Barbie dolls. The men who were attracted to us and fell in love with us loved us for taking a stand, for daring to be different, for being true to our own ideals of beauty and intelligence.
But the Suicide Girls have taken all of that and turned it into a mass marketed hollow imitation of popular culture. The Suicide Girls took elements that made us original, like having Blue hair or tattoos or piercings and made them so common that they’re now ubiquitous. Oh gee another girl with weird hair and tattoos and piercings. How exotic . There’s a saying that “You can put lipstick on a pig but that doesn’t make it a lady”. Well you can put a latex dress, hair extensions, and tattoos on a white trash stripper with ‘issues’ and that doesn’t make her “alternative”. But it will make her a Suicide Girl.
And it’s not just that. The Suicide Girls are generally not original or authentic in any way. They still play solely to men’s fantasies, except that instead of playing to the more common fantasies like cheerleaders or little girls they play to darker fantasies of women who are dominant and experienced, enjoy ‘exotic’ sexual pursuits and wear fetish clothes. But they are still catering to the fantasies of the masses to make money. It’s not original, it’s not empowering, they’re “Alternative Barbie”s who need to have tattoos and piercings instead of blonde hair and implants. They create mainstream porn in a different package. And that is not what the original goth./punk/fetish/alternative women wanted. We were making statements against that kind of trite garbage.
One of my best geek friends insists he only frequents the site because there are witty articles and good new information on there. Uh huh. There are very witty columns and intelligent news pieces on there. There definitely are. Written by men. There are a few women who write columns about things that matter, but mostly the women write trite posts or sometimes trite columns about sex and sexuality, and the most popular discussions are always the hyper-sexualized Penthouse style sex discussions. For a site that is supposed to be so cutting edge and supposed to be about re-defining societal images of women and beauty, it’s pretty light on intelligent women writing about anything about sex. And it would be ok with me even they were writing about sex, but doing it in an intelligent, innovative, female-oriented way. But they don’t. It’s all discussions of sex geared again towards popular male fantasies. It’s boring, it’s all been done a million times before, and it de-values all the principles and innovations that original ‘alternative’ women like me stood for.
The Suicide Girls are the Hot Topic of porn, and they’re about as relevant to real alternative people as Hot Topic is to real goths/punks/rivetheads. That’s why I don’t like the Suicide Girls.
