Content note: This essay discusses me sexualizing myself, in a totally consensual but sometimes vaguely “yikes” way, when I was a teenager.
I was 15 when I discovered the website SuicideGirls. I was also 15 when I came out as bisexual. That’s probably not a coincidence.
If you’re not familiar, SuicideGirls – which has nothing in particular to do with suicide, despite its name – was a highly popular alt-porn site founded in 2001, mainly known for publishing pinup-style photo sets of beautiful women with tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, and other trappings of the punk/goth/alt scenes. The women, as per the style guide of the site, always began each photo set fully clothed and ended it totally naked; the striptease in the middle was done in various creative ways, with some sets more straightforwardly sexy and some having silly “themes,” like “Alice in Wonderland” or “Lord of the Rings."
I’m using past-tense language here even though SuicideGirls still exists, because it’s been many years since I’ve been a member and, in my mind, it just doesn’t hold the same magic now as it did back then – especially ever since the site founders’ mistreatment of their models became public knowledge.
For most of my preteen and teen years, I longed to embody punk, goth, and frankly queer aesthetics, but never felt I could pull them off. I think I felt trapped in the good-girl image I’d built for myself as a teacher’s pet and (in retrospect) had had drilled into me by my dad’s high expectations for me and the traumatic punishments he used to make those expectations clear. Every time I smudged black kohl liner around my eyes, or applied a fake tattoo to my skin, or slid a studded belt through the loops of my Old Navy jeans, I felt like I was stepping into the role of someone else – someone I desperately wanted to be, but simply wasn’t, and could never become.
However, that sense of failure to blossom into my true self didn’t discourage me from devouring the SuicideGirls oeuvre. I stayed up late poring over the site, even though I didn’t have a credit card and thus couldn’t actually buy a membership. I had favorite girls – ask me about Quinne, Reagan, Apnea or Voltaire over drinks sometime if you’re prepared to endure an incandescent bisexual rant – and would often take their jpegs to local photo shops on USB sticks to furtively make prints with which to festoon my bedroom and locker. There was a SuicideGirls radio show on which hot-sounding women would purr into the mic and play indie bands they treasured like stolen jewels; I remember staying up late one night listening to sweet-voiced Missy Suicide introduce a Death Cab for Cutie song, the first one I’d ever heard, thereby ushering me into an entirely new world of music and art.
I had episodes of that radio show on my little iPod, and I also had plenty of SG photos pulled from various less-than-legal online sources, which I would occasionally peruse while touching myself at night. I will never forget the humiliation of the time a friend borrowed my iPod to listen to music in science class one day and suddenly announced, “Hey, there’s PORN on here!!” I made some excuse about the iPod actually being my brother’s, which is hilarious because 1) it was not and 2) he was literally a child and probably had little-to-no interest at that time in seeing naked women with half-sleeves and labret piercings.
As is common with bisexual crushes, I had a hard time deciphering whether I wanted to be these girls or be with them, sexually or otherwise. There was one particular photo set called “Revelry” that I managed to acquire a pirated copy of somehow (for which I deeply apologize, although I later became a paying SG member at last when I finally got my own credit card), in which Quinne and Reagan Suicide kissed each other, cavorted in a hotel bed, and pawed at one another’s panties on the edge of a bathtub. It’s been years since I’ve seen those photos and I can still remember the black lace of Quinne’s underwear pinched playfully between Reagan’s sharp teeth. I looked at these pictures over and over, Quinne with her luscious curves and long jet-black mane, and Reagan with her foxy grin and hot-pink hair, and felt things I could not yet define.
So it makes sense to me that I wanted to be a SuicideGirl, even though I was underage and it would be a few more years before I was even allowed to join as a member, let alone as a model. I’d gotten my first digital camera as a gift from my parents sometime around this period, and began dolling myself up in my room late at night and taking selfies, before the word “selfie” was even being used. None of the photos I took then were nudes, not only because I’d done my research and knew that could land me on a sex-offenders’ registry for creating child pornography of myself, but also because the nudity wasn’t even really the point to me. It was about self-expression and finding ways to view myself as desirable.
I pushed this principle even further by starting to photoshop the SuicideGirls logo onto some of these photos, staying up late in front of the family computer. That logo was visible on every single SG shot, an iconic and ubiquitous aspect of the genre, and so it gave me an odd rush to see it next to my own meager curves and shy smile. One time my mom stumbled across some of these photos on our shared computer and said to me, simply, “Be careful” – and though I rolled my eyes and blushed in embarrassment and assured her I was being careful, i.e. not sending the photos to anyone, in retrospect I think her reaction was remarkably kind and non-stigmatizing.
At one point I actually even applied to be an SG model, a process which (if I recall correctly) entailed filling out a bit of information about yourself and sending in some SFW photos. You had to get approved before you could send in your first photo set, and then that had to be approved before you officially became a SuicideGirl – and since the site’s photographic standards were high, hardly anyone passed both of those tests. I received my initial approval, the one that said I could submit a photo set for consideration, but I stopped there, both because it would have been illegal to continue (and they would have required a scan of my ID to verify my age) and because that approval alone had scratched an itch for me, had answered the question that had made me want to apply in the first place. The site admins thought I was pretty enough and interesting enough to be a SuicideGirl if I wanted to, and that was all I really needed to know.
On the inside, I felt like I was this punk-rock blue-haired bisexual Baby Spice who wore garters and hot pink lipstick and smoked weed in back alleys and drank whiskey with leather-clad men in smoky bars. But on the outside, I was still this meek and mild-mannered mousy-haired tenth-grader who aced her English quizzes and sang solos in the school choir.
As I’d suspected at that age when I was longing to turn 18 so I could model for the site, my life did indeed open up much wider when I “came of age” and got to make my own decisions about how I presented myself and who I wanted to be in the world. I never became a SuicideGirl, but I got tattoos, dyed my hair almost Bettie Page-dark, wore winged liquid eyeliner and red lipstick, kissed boys and girls and enbies, posed for nude photos, frequented gin-soaked dance halls, and had a filthy mouth. In many ways I stepped into being the woman I’d always dreamed of becoming.
But the reality of it was more complex than it had been in my fantasies, mostly because fundamentally I was still me. I was still shy, and socially anxious, and traumatized. I still stumbled in heels and sometimes hated how I looked in photos. I still saw beauty – especially goth or punk beauty – as something I was imitating, not embodying. I still longed for external approval, and longed to be someone different, more interesting, better.
But despite all that – and despite the site’s many issues – I think discovering SuicideGirls at age 15 was an overall positive development in my life story. The site taught me that there was beauty to be found in aesthetics not often spotted in mainstream fashion magazines, and that cute people could thirst over me even if I didn’t look like Paris Hilton. It taught me that liking art my friends had never heard of, like Death Cab and old Bettie Page prints, didn’t have to be a weird secret and could actually be a cool cultural currency. And above all, it taught me that if I dreamed deeply about who I wanted to be, I could one day become her – not a fantasy version of her, not a version that glowed exclusively on the screens of computers and iPods, but a version that was wholly and unmistakably me.