Members hint at the gossipy, catty side of SuicideGirls in an offhand way, because it doesn’t square with all their talk about support and friendship and community. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise: sisterly mini scandals can erupt among any group of “confident,” “opinionated” women with “strong personalities” — no matter how punk, hot, enlightened, empowered, nude, or tattooed they are. What’s more important to members and SGs is that friendship coexists with occasional conflict. “The community is just amazing, and I’ve gotten to be so close with the people here, I didn’t ever expect it,” says Kera, who’s too busy with her academic life at UMass Boston to be bothered with she-said–she-said hearsay. “So when drama happens either in my real life or online, I just ignore it.”
That’s pretty much how she and the newer SuicideGirls seem to view the mass departure of last fall. “I don’t really know what the allegations were, but they all seemed very far-fetched,” Kera says. “So it didn’t really affect the way I thought about myself as being part of the community.”
Having heard the nasty epithets hurled at the site, many of the younger SGs don’t seem to idealize SG as some sort of feminist utopia. For them, gender empowerment isn’t really a consideration. “The idea of feminism never came into play when I applied, nor does it enter my mind to this day,” Lexie writes in an e-mail about why she applied to become a SuicideGirl. (Her personal profile says she did SG because “my vagina told me to.”) “I never did it for social equality, nor womens interests.” She adds, “In my daily life, the mass-model exodus had no affect on me.”
Yet even some loyal members believe the site is not the strong-willed sisterhood it’s cracked up to be. “I’m sure that 90 percent of what’s out there that’s negative is true,” says Allston resident Dan Wherren, who’s been a willing SG consumer for four years. “But even though I don’t believe in PepsiCo and CocaCola, I still buy their products.”
SuicideGirls do keep disappearing individually (some for personal reasons, like pregnancy). So do members: observers point out that any time a subscriber posts an anti-SG rant in her journal, she gets “zotted” — her profile mysteriously disappears. And an affiliated promotion that has MySpace members voting for a weekly “SuicideGirl Beauty Queen” has ruffled some feathers. (It’s worth noting that one of the site’s biggest defenders from last fall, site programmer and SuicideGirl Olivia, recently disappeared from the site.)
“There’s drama everywhere,” says Bailey, who’s recently watched many of her first-generation peers disappear. “I’m amused by it because I’m like, ‘Are people forgetting that this is a porn site?’ That’s all it comes down to in the end. You’re naked on the Internet.’ ”
Bowie, who became a SuicideGirl after the squabble, couldn’t care less. “I don’t really think that I’m doing SuicideGirls because I want to empower myself. I thought it’d be fun. I just like boobs.”
On the Web
SuicideGirls: http://www.suicidegirls.com
