Suicide Girls

This one's been a long time coming. Ever since I was 19, sitting in the Deja Vu in Port Huron, and I heard a familiar song come on. It was "The Crablouse" from Lords of Acid. I look up, and I see a pale brunette onstage, and I realize that I know her. I was going to the community college in Port Huron at that point in time. I had a creative writing class where each desk in the class holds two people. Guess who I shared a desk with? Yes, that was uncomfortable. I insisted on leaving. My friend, Buddy, didn't get it. We just got there, and he didn't want to leave. I was so afraid that she was going to see me. I didn't know what to do. Finally, I talked him into leaving. I really didn't want to deal with going to class and sitting next to her next week. Plus, at the time I was hanging out a lot with this girl's ex-girlfriend, and my best friend (female) had a crush on the girl onstage. I barely knew this girl, and I had three odd connections to her. The last thing I needed was to see her dancing naked for money. It was just too weird. But, time moved on, and I went to more strip clubs, mostly in Sarnia (Canada). I was 19, I lived at home, I was very single, made decent money, I could afford it, and I thought, hey, why not? I always went with the same friend, Buddy. Every time we went out, he would meet a dancer and then insist he was in love with her. It was so fucking cliched. He just didn't get it. I actually talked to a lot of the girls, and most of them were from Montreal, Vancouver, or Toronto. College students. It would be really easy to say it's just like the French prostitutes in Montmartre in the summer-time. They're just paying for their education. Through most of my adult life, I've had close friends who were feminists. Progressive feminists, thankfully, so they weren't all man-haters. I usually agree with their opinions and ideals. Yet, I had no problem going to the strip clubs. I guess my issue was that yes, it is objectification, and by being there, I'm supporting it, but I'm not objectifying. I probably was, and I don't go to strip clubs anymore, it just seems boring. It was a teenaged phase for me. So, this brings me to the current issue at hand: the popularity of the website Suicide Girls.

If you're not already familiar, Suicide Girls has become a huge online community. It started as somewhat of a softcore porn site featuring women who prefer body modification and the punk rock lifestyle. Now, you can subscribe to access pictures, journals, and all kinds of other crap. They also have a forum, personals, and classifieds. The success of the site seems obvious. It would be so easy to say it's successful because there are a million middle-aged men out there who love looking at pierced, tattooed, naked women because they're supposedly 'bad-girls'. Right. The site is successful because of the million 16-30-something men and women who are tired of the boring airbrushed pictures you see in Playboy. They want to see real people - people like them. I was talking to a female friend today, and she was saying that she thinks when women obectify themselves, it's appropriation. I think I have to agree with her. Then, my roommate said today that "women need to be objectified because women are things of beauty, and things of beauty are objectified by nature." Some women may say the same of men, and that could be true, but men are coarse, and women are soft. Softness is usually more attractive than being coarse (well, it is to men like me, anyway, and that's the only perspective I've got, deal with it). End-point is that some women may have a problem with sites like the Suicide Girls, but they're doing it for themselves. How is that objectifying? Go see the Suicide Girls at the Magic Stick this Friday (Feb 13th).