Life After the Suicide
The internet has always been two things: information and porn. Usually they stay in their separate lanes—you scratch one itch, then the other, and pretend the tabs don’t overlap. For a while there was a site that dissolved the boundary into something genuinely interesting: SuicideGirls, the community that made tattooed alternative women, indie photography, and left-field music into a single strange ecosystem. I loved it without reservation.
Founded in 2001 by Missy among others, SuicideGirls became a cult site fast—for bad girls, rockers, and people who thought mainstream pin-up culture was brain-dead. The models had opinions. The photographers shot bodies like art rather than inventory. The whole thing orbited indie music and alternative subculture and felt, briefly, like the internet had produced something that shouldn’t exist: nude women who read books and gave a shit about ideas. That couldn’t survive contact with success.
The problems started when SuicideGirls got big. Radio programs, TV appearances, books. The underground credibility began to curdle. And then the lawsuits started, and the whole thing revealed what it actually was underneath the tattoos.
Philip Warner, who shot for the site under the name Lithium Picnic, became the first public casualty of SuicideGirls’ territorial instincts. When his reputation grew and he started working for a competitor, GodSGirls, the site moved against him. After he photographed SG model Apnea for her own personal site, they sued him—wrongly, by most accounts—and hit him with a $100,000 judgment. He had to shut his site down, sell his equipment, and live on donations from sympathizers who thought the whole thing was obscene. The community that had preached doing whatever you wanted with your own image had just destroyed a photographer for doing exactly that.
Once the Warner case was public, other stories surfaced. A former SG photographer went on record about the coercive contracts models had been made to sign. Photos were reportedly sold on to hardcore sites without the models’ consent. A 2003 account described a model being pressured repeatedly to strip for the site’s management. The platform that had built its entire identity around bodies as self-expression, around women owning their image, was apparently running a fairly standard exploitation operation in the background.
Missy’s response was to threaten to sue anyone who said so. Which is, in its way, the final proof that whatever made SuicideGirls worth caring about had left the building—because the site had always sold itself on refusing to defer to power, on standing against the mainstream. Now SuicideGirls was the mainstream, and it was coming after the bloggers and photographers and models who’d built the thing from nothing.
Boycotts were called. Communities organized. Alternatives like RazorDolls appeared. None of this is the fault of the actual models—the vast majority of whom are, by all accounts, genuinely interesting people who had nothing to do with how management was operating. The community was real even if the values weren’t.
I’ll still look at the site differently now. What I’m hoping for is something rising from this that’s angrier and more honest—something that takes what SuicideGirls claimed to be and actually means it. Life after the suicide.