One of the site’s appeals is that it attracts women who are similarly strong willed and remarkable. Kera — who first learned about the site in 2002 when she was googling “suicide” (“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I was actually writing a paper about depression in young girls”) — really believes that SuicideGirls has solidified a new feminine archetype. “Everyone there is exceptional about something, and they’re all very confident about it,” she explains. “There’s this feminine tradition that you have to undermine the exceptional aspects of your personality because they’ll threaten the guy you want to seduce and marry you — or because it’s just not attractive to be exceptional in any one way . . . The girls who model for the site refuse that.”
Despite that high level of confidence, only one local SG interviewed for this article has told her parents she’s naked on the Internet. It wasn’t Kera. “I was raised in the feminist movement — taught about sexuality and taught to never feel ashamed about who I am,” the poet-in-training says, citing her feminine role models as painter Frida Kahlo and Bettie Page. Still, Kera thinks her mother wouldn’t be pleased with her choice. “My mom’s very liberal and she’s a feminist, but I think she’d be upset because she would think that I’m demeaning myself. She also wants me to go into politics. I have no interest in going into politics, but she thinks I would make a good politician.”
Nor was it Sid. “My mom is an ultraconservative Catholic woman, so I didn’t want her to think that I’m committing some kind of sin,” says Sid. Nonetheless, Sid self-shot her first set during Christmas break in her Rhode Island bedroom while her unsuspecting mother was home. If her mother finds out, Sid figures, “I’ll just look at her and tell her that I’m old enough to make my own decisions. None of the stuff that I’m doing is more pornographic than artistic: I’m not the girl with the spread-eagle vibrator shots.”
It’s Bailey whose mom knows. And she found out by accident. “She asked me if I wasn’t loved enough as a child,” remembers Bailey. “And then she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
The old-school
Bailey Maxwell is SGBoston’s badass doyenne. A Miranda July–type with a tiny shamrock tattooed on her lower neck, the Dorchester resident was one of only 30-some SuicideGirls in 2002 and Boston’s debut nude model. She was also the first local SG with a journal, the first to interact with the site’s members, and the first local girl with enough history to refuse to take “Suicide” as her SG last name.
“I take a lot of pride in being the first Boston girl,” Bailey says one Sunday evening over a beer and nachos at Redbones, the Davis Square barbeque joint listed as a “vice” in her SG profile. “I kinda started it. That makes me sound so pretentious, but I have a lot of pride in being from Boston.” She does have the townie phrase WICKED PISSAH inked across her sternum. “I want people to remember.”
