Internet darlings a far cry from the meek bunnies of Playboy fame

With every step in technology, the pornography industry has been among the first in line to cash in and prove that sex will sell no matter what the medium. And alongside the growing brigade of books, photos, videos and Web sites featuring a model measuring 36”-24”-36” minus her clothes, is an argument refusing to climax: Does depicting nudity and sex empower women or does it lead to their degradation and objectification?

But while the academics and the socially conscious are busily exchanging pointed fingers, the Suicide Girls, an army of over 300 pierced and tattooed women, pose evocatively on the sidelines. Scoffing and holding up their middle fingers in high contrast, edgy photographs posted on the Web, they proclaim that not only is being sexy fun, but the industry has chosen to ignore girls like them, so screw it.

Fighting disillusionment with her Web site-building career after the dot-com crash, Missy Suicide founded Suicide Girls with partner Sean Suicide in the summer of 2001 as a way to keep her passion for the Internet alive.

Originally based in their hometown of Portland, Oregon, they worked to form an online space where nude photos of girls who embrace an alternative aesthetic was only icing on the cake. The site, www.suicidegirls.com, also offers a place for the models and other subscribing members to do web journals, create message boards, and foster a community dedicated to giving the fringe of society its own place for congregation. Missy’s two years in photography school (she photographs all of the models in the vicinity), and her eye for what’s sexy in an area not yet consumed by the market, didn’t hurt.

“I always loved pinup-girl photography, and I wanted to shoot the girls that I knew – the fierce, tattooed, alternative girls – with the same sort of respect and control that the classic pinups were given,” Missy said, seated on the back porch of the Suicide Girls Headquarters, now located in the hills of Los Angeles. “Everybody that I know is pierced or tattooed, but you don’t really see it anywhere in the media, and so I wanted to show that these girls are just as beautiful as the girls you find on the cover of many magazines.”

What may have started as a genuine response to the lack of representation of girls refusing to partake in the cookie-cutter mold of the ideal female, quickly resounded in counterculture communities across the world. Members like Digdug, who prefers to use his screen name in order to protect his career as a freelance graphic designer, instantly related to the pinup-style photos that exchanged the plastic look cultivated from tanning booths, peroxide and silicone for permanent ink and body piercings.

“I was, at the time, looking for something that was more alternative, something that represented the kind of girls that I was interested in or dated or knew, (as) opposed to the pictures you see in Playboy or mainstream porn,” said Digdug, who earned his masters of fine arts in sculpture at UCLA and now does graphic design for the Suicide site.

Advertised mainly by word-of-mouth, as well as a few online links, the community quickly spread internationally, and 23-year-old Missy found her business mentioned in a wealth of publications like Spin, Rolling Stone and the New York Times as Generation Y’s hottest prospect.

Now, with around 750,000 non-members roaming the site a week (and an undisclosed number of paying members), 100-250 girls applying every day for coveted Suicide Girl status, and promotional tie-ins with record labels, tours and bands, it’s hard to say whether Suicide Girls really promotes an underrepresented minority or has merely revised pornography to better suit – and better profit off of – today’s generation. Often an image of exclusiveness and secrecy can give a product the exact allure it needs to become explosively popular.

“It is mainstream,” said Shera Suicide, a 23-year-old model from Pennsylvania who took her Suicide Girls name (the models all take on Suicide as a last name, which is a reference from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Survivor”) from her childhood hero and will be performing in the Suicide Girls Burlesque Tour, which will make a stop at The Knitting Factory tonight and Friday night. “I worked at the E3 (an electronic entertainment exposition) convention, and it was surprising. There were some very mainstream-looking people that said ‘Oh, Suicide Girls, you guys are great. I’m a member.’ And we’re like ‘Oh really?’ Some of the members of the site get mad, but if something’s good, it’s going to become mainstream.”

And that’s the double-edged sword of the Internet. What has allowed for communication among otherwise alienated or isolated groups of people, has also thrust open the guarded and sacred treasure chests of varying subcultures to the visions of the businessman.

“That happens with any kind of underground subculture – it eventually gets copied by the mainstream so that it no longer is underground,” Digdug said. “There were lots of discussions a year or so ago about whether the site had lost its edge. It’s not really underground anymore; the kind of things that it is now associated with are things that are very popular.”

But unlike the stereotypical successful businessman, Missy has not been sitting back and lazily filling up on profit. Although girls are currently paid only a flat fee of $300 for a set of 20 to 40 photos, their payment continues to increase with the expansion of the company, and much of the profit generated by the site is poured back into creating new products and features. Message boards, discussion groups, merchandise, a national tour, a print magazine in the works, a book to be released at the beginning of June, and a heavy presence in the L.A. entertainment scene has turned Suicide Girls into the Nike symbol of the now-grown-up Nirvana generation. Having claim to the name Suicide and the opportunities it opens for them far outweighs the monetary exchange the girls are given for their work.

“I’m not being exploited, and I don’t think any of the other girls feel they’re being exploited,” Shera said, who worked a waitressing job before joining the Burlesque Tour. “All the girls love doing this site. I don’t like many people, and I’ve met so many cool people through this site. It changes your life. It’s a big community of cool chicks; that’s why I do it, because obviously it’s not for the money.”

Both Missy and Shera are in agreement that Suicide Girls is more than just a hip site, but a place that promotes the diversity of women by showing they can validate their sexuality without fulfilling the “stereotypical predesigned accepted fantasy of what is sexy.”

But are they creating their own stereotype? When Digdug first joined the site around two years ago, there were only 20 or 30 models. He would not only look at their photos, but also read their journals and become interested in their personalities. Now, with such a large number of girls, their individuality is easily lost among the pages and pages of what could be construed as the cookie-cutter punk or goth look, and Digdug uses the site now mainly for its other features. He said that even his girlfriend noted that the models seemed “interchangeable.”

“From a visual standpoint, it does look like a lot of girls are similar,” Digdug said. “But when it comes down to it, representations of women in media are pretty similar across the board in body types. This site is just as guilty as any fashion magazine, but that’s also what people want to look at.”

Still, Suicide Girls does represent a certain “alternative” alternative within a largely homogenized industry, even if it is only skin deep. But even with their assertive poses and bold stares into the camera, Suicide Girls can’t escape the debate concerning whether this difference makes it any more empowering for the females involved.

“I’m conflicted about whether it’s truly empowering or not,” Digdug said. “It’s not a black or white issue for me. If it’s empowering to them when they shoot and present the pictures, it’s hard to think of it being empowering when some guy in Omaha is looking at the pictures and jacking off.”

In the end, for Missy, it comes down to choice. In selecting her models out of the piles of applications, she makes sure the girls are involved in everything from the scene, the style, and the poses as well as ensuring that a girl knows that once she becomes a Suicide Girl, the nature of the Web and the popularity of the site will leave little room for secrecy or reversal. And, just as she grants her models a choice, she is entitled to her own.

“I wouldn’t let anyone else photograph me,” Missy said. “It’s like getting self-portraits. I’m never happy, and I’m not as comfortable in front of the camera so it’s – I don’t know – I just don’t think they would come out very sexy. I’d be too nervous.”