Riot Grrrrl and SuicideGirls

You should have paid attention in class; I'm sure your professor or TA or whatever told you about this.

COMMERCIAL SUICIDE

The Suicide Girls are a pretty unavoidable phenomenon in so-called “alternative” pop culture these days. The website that started it all, www.suicidegirls.com, wasn’t much more than a showcase for cheesecake photos of pierced ‘n’ tattooed Portland, Oregon-area babes for the first few months of its existence. But it soon found an audience (no surprise there), and a bunch of girls from other parts of America and the world willing to flash their flesh online started submitting images, and now it’s the centerpiece of a mini-empire of post-Goth softcore. Many of the Girls appeared in the band Probot’s “Shake Your Blood” video, dancing, eating fire, spanking each other and whatnot. Feral House published a coffee-table book collecting many of the girls’ photos, plus excerpts from their diaries (which are posted on the site). And now, there’s a Suicide Girls DVD.

The DVD, One Day You Will Be Nostalgic For Now, is being released through Epitaph Records, home to mall-friendly punk acts from the Offspring and Pennywise to Rancid and Bad Religion. It documents the Girls’ first U.S. tour, which found them shaking their tattooed asses on the stages of rock barns from coast to coast. The performance footage reveals as much compromise as carnality – the Girls always keep their thongs on, and cover their nipples with electrical-tape Xs, when performing before the hooting indie-rock masses. By contrast, the studio footage of the Girls posing down while Missy Suicide (the site’s founder) takes pictures reveals much more flesh. Some even give up the gash.

The DVD is long. Each of about a dozen featured Girls gets a vignette all to herself, and those are bracketed by the aforementioned performance footage and some sub-Jackass scenes of on-the-road Girls gone wild. There are interviews, too; the Girls get to talk about their childhoods and how empowered they feel when they take their clothes off for strangers. Some of the performances, like purple-haired Asian cutie Pearl’s hula hoop striptease routine, are genuinely unique and entertaining. Others, though, seem to think that old-style burlesque routines done by girls with lots of tattoos is something new and shocking, as though inky strippers hadn’t been a fixture of touring carnivals for decades in the “red states.” There’s a fair amount of Girl-on-Girl spanking and teasing, in addition to the solo performances. When “Reagan” leads two other schoolgirl-costumed Girls, “Stormy” and “Shera,” onstage with leashes for a nicely choreographed three-way dance routine, most viewers will find they’re getting what they paid for, and then some.

Some of the Suicide Girls are genuinely hot. “Nixon,” whose tattoos mostly feature skull motifs and whose large, luminous breasts are tipped with gleaming nipple rings, has the wide eyes and bright smile of a lobotomized cheerleader – an intriguing contrast to her sexually menacing Goth-slut look. “Tegan” has a boyish face, and brown hair with a blond streak, combed back in neo-rockabilly style; she poses in a garage, crawling naked atop a muscle car, the hood yawning open like a hungry hungry hippo’s mouth. “Reagan” looks a little white-trashy, like a cross between Chloe Webb and Juliette Lewis with a horseshoe-shaped nose ring and large, black plugs in her earlobes. She strips down in a Laundromat, losing everything but her vintage-style roller skates as bubbles blow past.

One Day You Will Be Nostalgic For Now is fun, but it raises many more questions than it answers. For example, it’s frequently hard to tell whether Missy Suicide is playing innocent for ironic reasons, or if she’s just a vacuous art-school chick who genuinely stumbled onto a gold mine. When she says of her girls, who despite their individual choices of tattoo design and piercing location certainly have a unified look, “Their uniqueness is what makes them beautiful,” it’s hard not to chuckle indulgently. And her claim that the success of the site shocked her is even funnier – after all, it’s pretty damn hard to lose money producing porn.

And make no mistake – suicidegirls.com is a soft-core porn site. The girls might not be penetrating each other with dildos the size of loaves of French bread, but their faux-lesbo smoochfests and their retro-garbed spread shots are providing spank-fodder for thousands, if not millions, of horny dudes and chicks across the globe. And this DVD, which will likely reach people who’ve never seen the website, exactly the way the coffee-table book probably did, is just the next step in the Suicide Girls’ campaign to conquer the world of post-punk masturbation. All the rhetoric about celebrating alternative body types and different visions of beauty is just self-justification; after all, the regular ol’ porn industry’s been marketing niche tapes for years. If you want to see 300-pound girls, or girls with shaved heads, getting poked in the pooper, you can. Porn stars like Belladonna and Rachel Rotten, each one slathered in elaborate ink, have been appearing on VHS and DVD box covers for years now. The Suicide Girls aren’t a revolution – they’re just one more option on the menu.

Some of 'em arent beanpoles. More than a few of 'em got some meat on the bone, but indie stick chicks do take up the majority.

The thing started in Portland, amongst some of the crusty punker types who hang out downtown in Pioneer Square. At least, this was the explanation given to me when i moved here a year ago.

note that the phenomenon would never have taken off like it did locally had it not been for the hipster adoption(rediscovery?) of burlesque, along with the fact that Portland has the highest stripper/strip-club per capita ratio in North America.

And I would bet money that most of the models would stare blankly at you if you asked them if they liked Bikini Kill or Bratmobile.

My personal opinion as a queer boy heavily influenced by riot grrrl is closely aligned with that of Marianna Ritchey, ie "It is totally lame and totally wrong and I feel very gross about it"

few and far betweeen seem interesting or attractive but i think i'm biased as far as this sort of stuff goes. they should do a kathleen hanna spread where they recreate the whole 'slut' across bared midriff, hot riot grrrl. or have another girl dress as michelle mae [also a former stripper], matching mod and the whole bit or maybe a fucked up little cat power lookalike. see that might be interesting.

No. Unless by "riot grrrl" you mean punk rock and all its associated subcultures. Basically, the site has always looked to me like somebody finally stood on the corner of Lyndale and 24th in Minneapolis, or outside the Dragon's Den in New Orleans, or at any similar intersection across the country, and noticed all the women passing by, and said, "Why couldn't there be a pin-up site of THESE women?"

The appeal is so basic, I'm sorry your girlfriend is wasting her tuition getting to the bottom of it.

Some of the Suicide Girls are genuinely hot.

Groan.

hahaha

http://www.bitchmagazine.com/archives/12_02sg/sg.shtml

I don't find any reference to riotgrrl in Suicide Girls, personally.

The editor is a friend and former co-worker.

-- Chris H. (chrisherber...), August 21st, 2005 4:55 PM. (later)

there is none better. the standard by which all others should be judged.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v175/Reilly311/cum.gif

ie-there's nothing individual about looking alike and talking alike.

from all i can see, it's just another Tatoo mag, but on the net, and w/ more nudity and grrls that say they like the Misfits yet don't know one song...or they just like Davey Havoc!

overall-i give a giant bag of dicks and a hearty 'meh'.

Ha - more true than some can even imagine. They copy eye colors, even.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v175/Reilly311/cum.gif