The Death of SuicideGirls

Sam, you are the first to say anything useful about this without whining. I remember being irritated by the concept of Suicide Girls from the start. Anyone trading on the “alternative” image is playing a stupid game with elitism and authenticity. You’re right that one ideal was simply replaced by another.

The thing you are more right about is this, though: “The truth is that empowered women have been at the core of the adult industry for years - you just can’t spot them if you think a smiling blonde with big tits can’t run a business.” It really is the crux of the feminist soul searching I’ve been doing the past few weeks. It all comes down to individual agency and calling successful porn actresses cogs in a machine is completely denying their ingelligence and control over their own destinies. It is, in fact, a profoundly patriarchal act by feminists that want to rescue women by infantilizing them.

What happened to your linking hability on this post Sam? All those “mailto:” …

To tell you the truth I was intimidated by suicide girls on day one, so to know it was just deceit and lies makes the world a little better to breath in.

You say “$300 for all rights to a photoset!” is exploitation, do you know where I could find ressources on ethical price and guidelines in the adult/glamour/modelling industry? I think that what this industry lacks the most is education (that I mean to provide on my site/project) : a bit like that[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0932102123/qid=1128 348586/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-8429794-2071264?v=glance&s=books&n=5078 46] - no it hasn’t got my seller id in it (I never really got into that)

Well count me as one of the morons who got snowed and thought the story behind the site was ‘real’. I’d recently joined in July after kicking the idea around for several months.

I ended my account this morning, I’d been thinking about it since this flap started to hit the blogosphere but your concise breakdown really pushed me toward ending things. I’m annoyed that they got a single dollar of mine.

I knew about the grumblings and the issues but my friends who bought the SG spiel just ignored me. I think some folks don’t care about a lie if they like the lie.

Thanks Sam for this post. A really good concise and clear version of the situation without whining, like Ellie said.

By the way, I just remembered that we met in Montreal when you came up for a business trip a few years back.

SG is so full of misguided idiots (the staff & owner, the supplicated members & models too). I find it unbearable. The sets are up, more and more quantity, but the quality is down. Things get dumber and more infantile, as it goes…

I tend to hate the people most like me in the world, or at least give them the worst scrutiny. I gave SG a chance, but it only got more unenjoyable over the life of my membership.

It’s ironic such supposedly free-thinkers, progressives, liberals or whatevers flocked to this site and were duped so thouroughly (mostly out of their own devices).

The thing always felt greasy and now I know why.
Good article.
cheers.

Metatron? As in the Voice of God? lol! Sam…

P.S. : have you ever read “Good Omens” [Neil Gaiman - Terry pratchett]?

Indeed, it is good for the soul to see SG humbled a bit.

Do we really care? where is the meat?

Somehow I’ve never been attracted to SG (except maybe for the photos “Lithium Picnic” took some while back.) For me the pics where pretty dull and nothing more the a 100$ digitalcamera and 15 minutes in some random location in the house. Nothing Special IMHO.

Also the notion that a girl (nubile) put the wheels of SG in motion seemed fairly unrealisted and smelled like snake-oil from day one. I won’t miss it.

Re: Sadly, while SuicideGirls sold a myth.
All porn is a myth and SG has never been anything other then a porn. Everything else has always been marketing I saw that from the very begining with that site. Even if people wear all black and get tats and crap it doesn’t mean they aren’t effected by stupid marketing.

Sam,
Almost three years ago I wrote a story for a Canadian publication called This Magazine about the Suicide Girls. I’d like to share it with you (yes, with a measure of gloating):

For about two weeks I have been driven mad by the website http://www.suicidegirls.com Here is the pathetic reason why: I’m made wildly resentful by a bunch of hot punk and goth chicks (all of whom are just my girlfriend’s cup of tea) who believe that sexual revolution means posting nude photographs online and creating a community of skanky, sultry bratlings as a mutinous option to the siege of stereotypical beauty rampant in mainstream erotica. Here is a legitimate reason why, which I will (without sneering) illustrate using the mission statement posted on the site: “Suicidegirls believes that creativity, personality and intelligence are not incompatible with adult entertainment, and 200,000 visitors a week agree. Suicidegirls is empowered erotica, a place where girls outside of mainstream culture can make the case that rebellion, a unique personal style and nonconformity are far sexier than anything you will see in mainstream pornography. The models who reveal themselves on the site are in charge of their own image and how they are presented, supported by a vocal, thriving community in numbers any site would envy. Suicidegirls mixes the smarts, enthusiasm and DIY attitude of the best music and alternative culture sites with an unapologetic, grassroots approach to sexuality. Suicidegirls is a new form of adult entertainment that appeals equally to women and men.”
A lot of adult entertainment appeals to both women and men. A lot of it is DIY. A lot of women are in charge of their image when they do sex work. And a lot of women make a lot of money at it, too. When, by e-mail, I asked Missy, who’s 23 and one of the founding members of Suicidegirls (the other one is a boy named Spooky), how much girls are paid to be on the site, what she told me was, “When we started the site we were paying them a bit more than the local average for the sessions. Now that the site has gained popularity we pay them 3 times what we were paying when we started.” I also asked her if she thought of herself as a pimp, to which she replied, “I do not consider my job pimping. First of all the girls on the site are in no way for sale. It is just a place for them to express themselves and feel sexy. People do pay membership fees but that money gets distributed back into running the business. I feel that I just provide a forum for the girls to express themselves in an environment where sexuality is thought of as a positive, healthy thing.” As it turn out, girls are paid shit to be on Suicidegirls—one to two hundred dollars to fuel a web site that has a brisk little boutique and has a quarter of a million visitors a week, many of them, presumably, paying members. Somebody, somewhere, is making money off the backs of girls using the “empowerment through sexuality” formula and that, more than anything, irritates the fuck out of me. Don’t even get me started on my theory that Missy is actually a forty-eight year old man, living the life of a very sated Humbert Humbert. .

All of this would have probably escaped my rage if the site actually lived up to its promise. But it doesn’t. It’s not really intelligent, it is in fact at times downright idiotic, and the girls featured are, piercings and tattoos aside, all very conventional in their slender, youthful beauty. This, and because I do truly adore some of the despairing Smiths loving drips on the Suicidegirls who I think are being profited by and who probably don’t care as long as they’re getting attention, has me worked up to such an extent that I am writing Missy frothing emails asking if she actually knows anything about the sexual renegades who came before her. Does she really believe, as I wrote in my column, ” that choleric teens clutching their downy mounds while giving the camera their best fuck you/me is a daring affront to typical beauty standards, that it’s such a leap in taste for even the most mainstream viewers?” Missy replies nicely, “I have no delusions that I am the first one to think that creativity and intelligence were not incompatible with adult entertainment. I am not very familiar with many sex-positive activists. I should do more research on the sex industry and its crusaders.” Part of me is overjoyed that she knows little to nothing about many of her sex positive foresisters, the ones who made the current sexual climate sympathetic to such a website. It means that sexual sensibilities now are such that young women feel confident making erotic, explicit things all on their own. This is success in revolution, isn’t it? The other part is on the phone to all my friends screaming, “Can you believe she doesn’t know who Nina Hartley is?” Never mind that I didn’t know who Nina Hartley was when I started working in the sex trade.

Incidentally, Nina Hartley is a very famous porn star who was a highly articulate advocate/critic of the sex industry long before some of the Suicide Girls were getting their suicide diapers changed. She told me about four years ago, when I interviewed her in a Mississauga hotel room where she was staying on one of the strip club tours that porn stars do to promote their careers, “If we could evolve so that I didn’t have a job anymore, that would be great. If we got to be so sexually healthy that we didn’t need to commodify sex? Hallelujah. The commodification of sex comes out of our sexual repression and our sexual self hate and loathing and ignorance and fear and superstition.” This is one thing among many that I appreciate about Hartley. She is brutally honest. Comes from being a swinger, too.

Throughout human history, women have turned to sex work to find and fund independence. Existing sex workers turn to that history to affirm theirs. They scrounge for positive role models in their profession, and despite overwhelming evidence eclipsing the affirmative, they find them. The good thing about being a social pariah is that if it doesn’t kill you, it forces you to be lucid and informed, although it’s galling to see how useless these skills can be. When the issue of sex work finds its way into the mainstream media, the mainstream media rarely, if ever, manages to find anything good or legitimate or worthy in this work. Stories that are tragic or scandalous always take precedence over stories that are positive and enlightening. Even if a documentarian sets out to be objective, they cannot seem to resist that lingering shot over the high school prom photos, the shelves of teddy bears, the bucktoothed and bewildered parents sitting outside the all-American homestead in lawn chairs—innocence lost. The agenda is a caveat, and this makes it unsettling to speak critically of sex work (thereby, in my mind, giving it the benefit of being a genuine profession with complexities) without the nagging guilt that you’re playing into everyone’s worst suspicions. People need their fears about the sex trade confirmed, because people will apparently never be done feeling guilty about desire. The spoils of lust have always had as captive an audience as the lust itself. The thing is, it’s so easy to underscore the positive aspects of sex work, because the bad ones, to a culture that hates itself for being sexual and yet is trying so hard to love sex, are really bad.

Adult Video News is an American monthly which is basically a vanity publication of the porn industry, generating interest in new stars, latest inductees in to the porn hall of fame, recent hirings (Seymore Butts Signs Avy Scott and Mari Possa As Tushy Girls), industry gossip, and legal issues. March’s issue contained an unusually long article about an episode of ABC’s Primetime Live hosted by Diane Sawyer called Young Women, Porn & Profits: Corporate America’s Secret Affair. The piece was titled Tonight! ABC’s Primetime Fucks the Adult Industry and Doesn’t Even Leave any Money on the Dresser! I never saw the episode in question, but predictably, it came out raging against the porn industry, with one focus being a young starlet’s undoing by it. “Be there as an 18-year old makes a decision she can never take back…Fortune 500 corporations reaping profits and looking the other way as young women go further and further…” Diane Sawyer is quoted in AVN as saying. Sorry, who’s making the porn again? Also predictably, AVN came back blaring in the hoarse, defensive voice of the stereotypical pornographer, making some rather pointless arguments, one being that “Despite all the hype throughout the broadcast about how General Motors and DirecTV were making billions of dollars off of the backs of poor, deluded 18-year-olds who were tricked and coerced into performing more and more graphic sex acts, Sawyer wasn’t able to get any of the major corporations to speak on camera.” Well d-uh, dumbasses, they’re not major corporations because they make a habit of appearing on internationally broadcast news shows that put them in league with pornographers. Sawyer was, however, able to squeeze some tears out of the starlet (who has been claiming now that she was crying because of personal issues and not her job, to which she has returned). Welcome to America, where you can work as a press assistant for Richard Nixon and help him write his memoirs, and then look pityingly down your nose at and fret for the fate of girls who have sex for money, in a business that, despite the genuine plethora of bottom feeders that fasten themselves to any industry that uses sex to generate revenues (fashion, booze, cars to name a few others), has actually been making an admirable effort to be open about its shortcomings, and promote safe sex practices both physically and emotionally, through an amazing organization called AIM Healthcare, spearheaded by former porn star and sex activist Miss Sharon Mitchell.

Undoubtedly being a porn star is hard work and it’s particularly hard if you’re completely unprepared for its intricacies and you’re way, way too young, but even without these disadvantages, it’s pretty easy to make someone cry about being in the sex trade. You’re already all worried about what your mom’s going to think, you know this’ll definitely keep her up at night, you end up constantly explaining your choices to everyone, and without a doubt, there are a lot of opportunistic assholes in the business. You’re going to make some mistakes. If Diane Sawyer had followed me around for two years of my stripping career she would have definitely gotten some tears, some staggering out of taxis drunk beyond repair, some scary moments doing drugs with some very scary people. I also had a ball. I didn’t write my book in time to ride the wave of stripper chic that crested about a year ago— I’m still sorting through the various haiku-like mystery notes that say things like ‘Jean likes to fish, gives me recipe for apple compote and halibut,’ but I sincerely had some great times. Maybe this is Michael Mooresque in its self-serving obviousness, but isn’t a lot of work demoralizing at times? If someone had interviewed me when I was twenty-one and working the six a.m. shift at a croissant restaurant for the most evil bitch from France on the planet, they wouldn’t have been able to stop me from crying. The sex trade, without the benefit of politics and religion keeping it vital, is essentially just part of the service industry. The fact that it is besieged by moral issues that range from empowerment to sin from both sides actually fuels it, which is ironic, to say the least. Like Hartley said, she wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for the stigma.

So here’s a question: is there anything good or legitimate or worthy about the sex trade and all its satellite enterprises? That would depend on your definition of what is good and legitimate and worthy. I can attest personally that stripping did a lot of good for my body image, but it wasn’t necessarily because I was getting applauded left and right for showing my big ass. It was mostly what I saw in the dressing room, which was that even morbidly thin women have stretch marks and cellulite. Undeniably, it’s a very popular career choice among girls these days. Being a teen rebel ain’t easy in this mixed up, crazy world, and the business of sex is made even more appealing by some of its groovy graduates. Once again, the word empowering is used by many sex workers to define their experience in the business. They are not victims of the cruel, innocence robbing, esteem crushing system perspective favoured by the news shows, the Christian right, and the various feminist organizations still clinging to their pre sex positive ideals. They have enjoyed it for the most part, and see themselves as legitimate business people and advocates for pleasure and free choice. It is absolutely true that many women have found independence through sex work at various times in history. Ancient Roman hookers were, unlike the majority of the female population, not considered property and had the same access to higher learning as men. Good time girls in Alaska’s gold rush were some of the first totally self-made women of modern history and, despite the hardships presented by their own choices, escaped the Victorian morality that forced the rest of the world, men and women alike, into lives of prudish misery.
But empowering? Why does it need to be so lofty? One of my personal fears about the current empowerment philosophy informing sex work is something which has already begun. Sexual empowerment and sexual positivity have become trendy (see the thoughtful hedonists at nerve.com) and that trendiness will attract the inevitable backlash that any trend generates, be it cocktail lounges or pashminas or sex work, and that backlash will be, as it has always been when it comes to matters of sex, conservative. But when has this not happened in the history of our love hate relationship with the sex trade, where the pendulum swings back and forth and knocks the wind out of us each time? Empowerment. Of course. Depravity has always required a noble ally. I mean foe.