When the Suicide Girls brought their popular burlesque show to the Icon in downtown Buffalo on October 14, the crowd of eager twenty-somethings huddled on the cold pavement outside the doors looked like an elite convention of self-styled rebels.

Hipsters with elegantly disheveled haircuts bumped elbows with septum-pierced metal fans in trench coats and forked beards. Tattooed punks shared cigarettes with sullen emo-boys in black-rimmed glasses. Ravers toked up with granola types in the parking lot.

“It’s a pretty mixed crowd,” I said to Chris, my “plus one” for the evening.

“Yeah,” he said. “A mixed crowd of white suburban subcultures.”

What brought these outsiders together was the phenomenon of the Suicide Girls (SG), a website that many view as the punk culture’s answer to the fake tits, airbrushed skin, and collagen implants of the Internet sex industry. The site, suicidegirls.com, features punk and goth girls flaunting natural breasts and body shapes in artfully taken nude pictorials that display—in most cases—an eclectic array of tattoos, piercings, and other body modifications. The site also features weblogs, news updates, and discussion boards where members can share their opinions on current issues with SG models and the rest of the site’s community.

Many who pay the $4 monthly fee to become members view the site as the digital headquarters for a movement of liberated, progressive women who see the Internet as an opportunity to wrest control out of the hands of a male-dominated porn industry and replace it with an emphasis on art, independence, and sexual expression.

“I love these women who are not afraid of breaking the mold, who freely express their sexuality and creativity in a field where they are supposed to be the victims and the explored,” said Jade Suicide, a University at Buffalo student and SG model. “The intellectual level of debates you find here is much higher than your average website.”

Critics—including former SG models—claim it has become just another corporate marketing ploy aimed at the middle class hipster subset. They also say the brain-trust at SG Services, Inc.—the site’s corporate identity—cares nothing for the ideals of feminine empowerment and free expression it claims to represent.

“Punk is more than a look, it’s a fucking way of life; it’s a whole mindset,” said Siobhan Counihan, the Spectrum’s news editor. “I won’t sit here and say that none of the girls have that mindset, but I can guarantee the site’s owners don’t.” She toyed with the idea of becoming a SG, but changed her mind when she heard ex-SG models accusing the site of being too controlling with their contracts.

Either way, the site’s membership is rising exponentially and the burlesque show is selling out at venues across the nation. There’s no doubt that when the girls take the stage, the energy they bring to the live act electrifies an audience that comes to love, even deify the take-no-prisoners attitude they seem to embody. By that point, admirers are too caught up with the spectacle to contemplate whether the gravitas is real, or just the pretty, pierced face of another corporate franchise.

An Evening with the Suicide Girls

Chris and I sipped PBRs at the Icon’s bar while waiting for the show to start. The tour is in its second year, and this time around the girls have chosen the all-girl surf-punk trio, Tsu Shi Ma Mi Rae, as their musical opener.

The band’s lead singer checked the mike with a series of “yah, yah, yay, yay” noises, punctuated by directions to the sound guy in the back. Her voice was piercing, with a high-pitched, cartoonish flatness that made me nervous for the upcoming set.

When they finally got into it, however, the set blew me away. It was all driving bass riffs combined with bright, poppy drum and guitar hooks reminiscent of Hot Hot Heat. Add to that the charming, possibly adopted stage persona of perky English-phobic foreigners, and you’ve got one distinctive listening experience. It soon became clear, though, that the audience was restless.

“Show me the clitoris!” yelled a young man with frosted tips and pierced labret as the band ended their set. In this crowd of ultra-hipster guys, granola-punk grrls, and stylish Euro-fetish cases, I thought it was an astonishingly brave—if also crass—display of testosterone.

Before too long, the girls gave the crowd what they wanted.

The idea behind the burlesque tour comes from a similar vein as the inspiration for the SG site, which was designed to be a modern day tribute to the glamorous pin-ups of the 1950s. For the live show, the girls went even further back to post-WWI burlesque theater, employing a wide range of scenes and skits that allow the girls to engage their audience with something more than just their body parts.

The girls brought a wealth of musical styles to their performances: Jazz Age classics, tongue-in-cheek hip-hop, tracks from scenester heroes Death From Above 1979, and more. Their acts were varied and colorful, ranging from simple striptease to an homage to the late Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to a skit lampooning coke-addled party girls—complete with a brilliantly choreographed O.D. finale.

Unquestionably, the highlight of the night came from Odette Suicide in her solo performance.

In perhaps the most devastatingly sinful dance I have ever witnessed, Odette managed to make a cigarette and a fake plastic gun look like the tools of Succubus. She wore a dark halter-top over a pink bra with black stars over her breasts and skin-tight short-shorts. Odette writhed across the stage, cigarette dangling from her pierced lips, occasionally pausing to ash her smoke on the crowd, and doing her best to give the impression that she couldn’t care less about the slack-jawed onlookers. Dragging the fake pistol through her legs for the finale and blowing out her last drag across the barrel, she had the crowd—men and women—in the palm of her hand, and she knew it.

After the show, Odette told me the Buffalo crowd was weak. They had had excited, rowdy audiences for the entire tour until they reached New York City, where the crowd was mostly jaded scenesters.

“They were like, ‘Oh. Cool. Tits,’” she said flatly. “I wanted to jump into the crowd and start taking pulses.”

Odette, in some ways, was born for this. She said she was raised in an environment where the human body was valued as beautiful and there was nothing shameful about being naked.

“I went to the [SG] site, I liked it, and I wanted free access,” she said. (Many SG models have the same story; anyone who models for SG gets to waive the monthly fees.) So she applied. “I looked at what they were doing on the site and said, ‘I can do that.’”

Feminist Revolutionaries or Corporate Mascots?

Counihan, the Spectrum editor, first heard about SG when she was still in high school. “It’s kind of like porn, but it’s these pin-ups of all these hot girls with piercings and tattoos,” her friends told her. She said the punk rock image presented by many of the models is what really drew her in.

“It wasn’t just these bimbo blondes with fake tits,” said Counihan, a junior English major. “It was supposed to represent real people.” When she got to UB, low income and modeling aspirations made her toy with the idea of auditioning for the site.

“Also, the women on the site seemed almost mythical in proportion,” she added. “They seemed to be held in such high regard because they’re hot chicks with brains.”

On the advice of a friend, Counihan researched some of the blogs that had been started about SG.

“I wanted to get an educated opinion because I wasn’t even 19 at the time,” she said. In these online communities, she learned of 40 or so Suicide Girls that had left the organization after accusing its leadership of verbally abusing models and strict contract policies.

“I read about people saying that even after they decided to leave the site their pictures were staying up,” Counihan said. “Also, they wouldn’t be able to work at other sites. As someone who was considering modeling for other sites, that kind of puts a damper on your career.”

SG flat-out denies abuse of any kind and numerous models have posted testimonials on the site defending the SG management, saying that there may have been some blunt comments made, but only as constructive criticism during rehearsal for the burlesque tour or on a photo shoot.

As far as the complaints about the exclusive nature of SG contracts, SG administrators generally agree that this is simply good business sense and that the policy is more flexible than the critics’ portrayal. “While our modeling agreement is exclusive,” reads a press release on the website, “we have and will continue to grant exceptions to that exclusivity in cases that we do not feel the company is a competitor…. We ask that Suicide Girls do not work for imitation sites or direct competitors.”

Critics such as Counihan contend that it is precisely this corporate mindset that cancels out any claims that SG is a flagship for the punk or feminist cultures.

“SG is a corporation and that in itself negates whatever ‘punk’ ethic you may think it embodies,” she said. “This website is like so many before it in that it is making money by playing into trends.”

“They did a great job at that: making money,” she added. But as far as advancing punk or feminist ideals? “Eminem is more of a feminist and Good Charlotte are more punk.”

In the end, however, Counihan said the real reason she decided not to audition for SG was her realization that posing for the site could hurt her in the long run, especially if the rumors were true about the site displaying photo sets of former models long after they left the organization.

“Those pictures could affect my career if my employer finds them ten years down the line,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m working at McDonald’s or at a law firm—if you put yourself out there like that you limit yourself in so many different ways. I didn’t want to limit myself to just having naked pictures of my ass online because there’s so much more to me than that.”

SG Invades UB

For her part, Missy Suicide, the site’s founder and one of the principal owners, believes the “SG ethos” has less to do with politics or social philosophy and stems more from the sense of community generated by the atmosphere of free expression the site creates.

“SG was started because the girls I hung out with in Portland [, Oregon] were beautiful, but I did not see that beauty being represented in mainstream media,” she said via email. “So the ethos of SG comes essentially from wanting to have a place to represent the amazing women who weren’t represented anywhere else, where they could express themselves in their pictures and words. The community grew around that concept.”

The communal aspect of the site is what drew in Jade Suicide. (That’s not her real name; all Suicide Girls go by a chosen, usually invented first name followed by “Suicide.”) Jade is a UB student currently studying abroad in France. She lists her major as something that “requires a lot of reading/researching and allows me to pretend I’m an intellectual.”

“I’m studying the effect of French wine on foreign relations,” said Jade. “We may have found a solution for diplomatic issues.”

“But seriously,” she added, “I’m doing research for my honors thesis and learning French in the process.”

Jade said that she got into SG after a friend of hers recommended that she try to become a model, and the rest was history

When I asked her what it meant to be a Suicide Girl, she said, “Oh man, I knew something like this would come up. The answer is going to change every time, no matter how many different girls you ask.”

For her though, it’s about being someone who takes risks and pushes boundaries. Also, it’s “someone who doesn’t believe women are either whores or saints, but human beings with sexual desires and feelings. Someone who doesn’t accept that porn has to be about pleasing others, it can be about expressing your own sexuality openly.”

The Politics of Porn

The Bush Administration announced that it would push for an FBI investigation of Internet pornography—not just child pornography, but consenting adult pornography. Missy called the campaign “troubling.”

“There’s clearly a lot that they’ve got to focus on,” she said. “Between the tragedy in New Orleans, Harriet Miers declining the nomination, Karl Rove—there’s just so much going on right now that it seems silly.”

However, Missy decided too preemptively remove certain photo sets from the site that she believes would be the easiest targets for prosecution—mostly those depicting graphic depictions of S&M or simulated violence.

Not exactly punk rock rebellion, but there’s logic behind the move.

“If the last election taught me anything, it’s that I don’t know” what the social standards of the majority of Americans are, she said. “I just have to adhere to what the government tells me the community standards are.”

With harsh critics on one side and SG sycophants on the other, Missy’s focus on self-preservation illustrates the one fact both lovers and haters of the site seem to consistently ignore: suicidegirls.com is a business.

Whatever you want to think about the SG, you can’t deny that this little website has had an influence well beyond its size. If the Suicide Girls are revolutionary, maybe it’s because they’ve found a way to sell themselves without feeling like they’ve sold out.

At its bare bones, SG still follows the same “here’s your tits, where’s my money” formula of the thousands of porn sites that flood American computer screens every day. You can call it crap, you can call it the corporate co-opting of a genuine subculture, you can call it bullshit—but what you can’t call it is unsuccessful. And if thousands of people continue to flock to a site that happens to display naked pictures of tattooed women with metal hoops laced into the skin of their back, so be it. Love them, leave them, or get the fuck out of the way. That’s the Suicide Girls phenomenon.