girls, grrls, gals
at the moment there is lots of feminist debate going on about suicide girls, the porn site. lots of blogging, and interesting pieces in both bitch magazine and herbivore (among lots of other more mainstream places). everything i’ve seen and read so far leads me to believe that the women working on the site and the women who post their photos/stories are empowered, not being exploited by the industry, all that. it seems like a more democratic, dare i say, liberated way of engaging in the sex industry.
but on which planet is the idea of suicide not wrapped up in miserable loneliness, a horrific act of destruction? and why exactly are SG’s promoters saying that we are supposed to think that’s sexy?
i guess personally, i would find it more of a turn-on if the site were’nt about making that particular flavor of desperation hot (again, as identified by the name, since i’ve only seen the front page and what folks say about it, and yeah, on the web you DO judge a book by it’s cover cuz that IS the book). but i’m interested in your take on it. if you do indeed find that hot (and i’m not talking about the pictures, i’m talking about the idea of suicide), i’m not here to judge. just want to continue the dialogue. if this is a can ‘o worms, oh well. get out the compost!
December 3rd, 2003 at 9:29 pm
Thank you for writing on this. I wandered around the SG site a year ago when it was free (or seemed to be) and was really put off the name. As a former glam goth girl I can relate to the name in the theatrical Sisters-of-Mercy sort of way, but now as an adult I’m concerned about the trivialization of the word. In the same way that it really ticks me off when people throw around the words “Nazis” and “slave” without seeming to have a sense of history and the enormity of those terms, I’m not comfortable with suicide being a groovy and cool word. I understand that it can be fun to step over the boundary of what’s offensive, but I think these words have lost their meaning with catty overuse (I remember one of my coworkers describing another as “the Espresso Machine Gestapo”. I was suddenly hit with the contrast between the Germans I’d lived with who couldn’t say the words Nazi or Gestapo, who couldn’t say Hitler’s name for the shame and agony of history, and this nice paralegal who was just trying to be sharp and funny.)
You know my best friend hung himself twelve and half years ago. Everyone who loved him just peeled apart in the wake of his death. We were all changed forever. I remember the wierd siren call of suicide as a teenager, and after J. died. It was big, but it was not sexy, it was just grief and despair and self-hate. Not too erotic really.