In a big way, this nude online character was a chance to actualize her id. “Bailey is clearly my alter ego. It’s kind of who I wanted to be a few years ago, and I’m becoming that person more and more.” Thus, Bailey is a creation, one that she finds herself having to live up to when she hangs out with the younger SuicideGirls. “Now there’s this role I’m expected to play. There’s this person I’m supposed to be, these things I’m expected to say when I’m out with everybody. I’m expected to be wild and crazy.” And so for the past couple years, she’s been somewhat elusive, which has helped inflate her persona into an even bigger legend. “I’ve definitely been at the mall and had people be like, ‘Look! It’s a SuicideGirl!’ And I’m like, ‘Ahhhhh,’ and I’d run into a store.”

Bailey stayed with the site last fall when many of the old-school girls decided to leave. “My reasons [for being an SG] had nothing to do with whether or not the site was run by a man or a woman or whether they gave money to Democrats or the Republicans. It had nothing to do with that. It was for me,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to make a huge political feminist statement. I wasn’t trying to liberate women everywhere. [I wasn’t] like, ‘Women of Boston, take off your clothes!’ My reasons were personal.”

The hopefuls
For all the women who left the site, countless others are longing to join. There’s even a specific group for aspiring nude models called SG Hopefuls, in which applicants ponder aesthetic dilemmas such as “To Shave or Not To Shave” and scrutinize staff responses as though they were college-admissions letters. “After getting this letter how many have went on to become SG’s and [how many were] shot down in the end?” asks Baybepurple, an 18-year-old from Detroit, posting a wait-and-see form letter she received after submitting her photos. “Just wondering what my chances are and if I should get my hopes up or not.”

The site’s FAQ section claims it gets 1500 applications a week, but it doesn’t reveal its acceptance rate. “It’s not like a mathematical formula — we just accept girls,” says Missy of the Oz-like inscrutability of the admissions process. “It is kind of subjective. It’s the girls that stand out, that say something a little bit different, that have something to share with the community.”

Although SuicideGirls asserts that its models are “unique,” the hopefuls seek to differentiate themselves even further. Baybepurple wants to be the first plus-size African-American SuicideGirl. Kaijou, a Cleopatra-type figure who wielded a sword in her black-and-white-photo submissions (an explicit no-no from Stephanie, the SG model coordinator), wanted to be the first from South Africa. Gwenyfver, a 22-year-old mathematics major in Saratoga Springs, New York, wants to be the first SG with a cleft lip — not unthinkable, given that Amina, one of the site’s best-known models, has a prosthetic leg.

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They all want to “go pink.” When the invisible SG overlords accept an applicant’s set, the background color of her journal entries turns from a default gray to powder-puff pink. Applicants have been known to buy pink phones and to drink pink beverages while their submissions are under review, in hopes that it will bring them good luck. Like 32-year-old Sunshine, from Ohio, who recently went pink and gushed in her journal, “i feel like i just won an Oscar.”

Kristin Waller wants to be the first SG with a Harvard degree — the Oklahoma native even has ver-it-as inked on her left forearm. The site has accepted girls — like Fatality, a thin blonde from Brown University — from Ivy League schools, but none who have publicly staked a claim to Harvard. Waller, a 23-year-old class-of-2005 graduate who works as a “counter bitch” at Chameleon Tattoo Shop in Harvard Square, first posed nude for Harvard’s undergraduate sex magazine, H-Bomb. In the 2004 debut issue, she’s in the centerfold spread wielding a whip; on another page, she’s PhotoShopped into a nude pirate.

“[SuicideGirls] appealed to my competitiveness, which is a stupid thing to say about showing your tits on the Internet,” says Waller over a grilled ham-and-cheese and beer at Charlie’s Kitchen. “The same urge that got me through Harvard admissions processes makes me want to be a model. It’s so exclusive.”