Music: Bad girl burlesque

Suicide Girls adapts punk pinups to stage

By Newt Briggs

Siren is a 26-year-old nursing student recently transplanted to the Los Angeles area. Her likes include photography, listening to hip hop on her iPod, eating Oreos without the icing and watching her favorite movie, Labyrinth. One day, she aspires to become a pediatrician, but her sincere ambition is "to set things on fire."

Siren is typical--if such a thing is possible--of the contributors to Suicidegirls.com, a goth/punk/hipster website that puts a countercultural spin on erotic photography. Combining tattoos, thongs, pierced nipples and punk attitude, Suicide Girls offers an interactive web community where members both male and female can meet, share posts and ogle nude photos.

But Suicide Girls doesn't feature the hardcore porn that has become the bedrock of Internet erotica. Granted, the site does exhibit a healthy dose of girl-on-girl action, but the photos are far more reminiscent of Bettie Page and Bunny Yeager than Jenna Jameson and Sylvia Saint. And instead of saline or silicone, the Suicide Girls themselves are likely to favor indelible ink and stainless steel. Although it's not a requirement for participation, Siren has 19 body modifications (eight tattoos and 11 piercings), and her worldview seems consistent with that of the other models on the site--kind of riot grrl next door.

"To me, it's not porn," says Siren, who serves as both model and photographer for the site. "It's too tasteful and creative to be porn. It's more like a throwback to classic 1950s pinup photography."

Whatever it is, the website has blossomed into an international phenomenon. From humble beginnings in Portland, Ore., in 2001, Suicide Girls now boasts a clothing line, 500,000 unique users per week and crossover partnerships with Interscope, Capitol and Island Records. In fact, the site has become so popular that it has inspired a traveling show, which sets the 19th century burlesque to a punk rock soundtrack.

"It's basically an updated, Suicide Girls version of the traditional burlesque," says Siren, who performed in a classic burlesque before signing on with the website in 2002. "We start out with the old-school music and the old-school costumes and the whole classic look. I mean, it's not exactly Moulin Rouge, but it's somewhere along those lines."

That, however, is only the beginning. As the evening progresses, clothes come off and the music gets faster--from vintage ragtime piano to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joan Jett and the Ramones.

"We do kind of like a cheerleader-slash-naughty schoolgirl skit," Siren says. "Then we have a traditional number where a man comes into a bar, and two women are propositioning and fighting over him. We also have one that includes chocolate and whipped cream."

In other words, it's like a trip to the strip club without the lap dances and the repeated rounds of Motley Crue's "Girls, Girls, Girls."

"The show is really nothing like what you'd see in a strip club," says Siren. "There's more art to what we're doing. It's kind of like going to a theater with a little bit of a striptease. And there's no full nudity. At the very least, we've always got on little bottoms and pasties."

There are still those, however, who object to Suicide Girls on the basis of its name--as if the site somehow advocates clinical depression and antisocial behavior. Siren, who says she's neither inclined to commit suicide nor currently taking any kind of psychotropic medication, argues that Suicide Girls in fact does the opposite.

"Suicide Girls is about empowerment. It's about re-evaluating the standard of beauty and redefining what it means to be a sex symbol. I think that we're trying to say that we can be pierced and tattooed and angry and sexual and fragile and feminine all at the same time."