Trouble with Suicide Girls?

[starsorstreet]

I got the following email forward from a good friend:

Please pass this along privately as much as possible and urge them to listen to the truth and pass this same message along in the same fashion

Comments

[dorktastic]

I tried reading the site you linked to but I found it really confusing, and I don't really have the time or the patience to try and figure out what is going on.
I think the idea of suicide girls as an alternative to mainstream porn, as empowering, or revolutionary is laughable. Bitch magazine had an article about the site a while back.

[starsorstreet]

I think the idea of suicide girls as an alternative to mainstream porn, as empowering, or revolutionary is laughable

I have been turning this over in my mind. It's one of the few sources of such that hasn't offended me completely up until now. I'm beginning to wonder if there is such an animal as non mysogynistic porno.

[githzerai]

Suprisingly, I've heard that the contract that you want to sign-as far as it being legal, you getting paid, etc-is Playboy's. I can't vouch for it though, knowing little about porn-photo-release law.

I've read a bit about Suicide Girls-there's actually a community dedicated to this issue, I think it's called Sgirls or something similiar. And the same girls that complain about the treatment at Suicide Girls rave about the way they've been treated on other porn sites, so you can poke around there if you want to buy some T&A photos (and no matter WHERE I go the critique is horribly written and poorly organized-so much of it is just pissy-"the new girls aren't hardcore enough", "I wasn't put right on the front page"-I really don't care, it's not what I'm interested in.).

With porn I basically have two questions: Is it voluntary and were they paid the agreed upon amount. And there doesn't seem to be an easy way to find that out. We need the porn equivilant of the fair-trade sticker.

[jfpbookworm]

With porn I basically have two questions: Is it voluntary and were they paid the agreed upon amount. And there doesn't seem to be an easy way to find that out. We need the porn equivilant of the fair-trade sticker.

I think there's a third question: who controls the work. If someone produces material for one context (e.g., SG) and it gets appropriated for another context (e.g., Playboy), without their permission, that's a big problem no matter how much they were paid.

[clerk]

i've seen this drama before, but i don't know what it's about. i remember i was looking at a suicide girls LJ community one day, and found tons and TONS of drama. girls being mistreated, not getting paid, and people just being general assholes to them. it sounded really awful to me, but i never knew the whole story.

[finemadness]

bitch magazine also has an article on the farce that is suicide girls.

http://bitchmagazine.com/archives/12_02sg/sg.shtml

[starsorstreet]

weird. I just posted asking what issue that was in. thanks.

[keryx]

Some of the coverage from feminist bloggers:
from Feministe - Part 1 & Part 2, and from Feministing. Also, the Wired article that I think reported it first.

I've always thought that the site, just from a consumer's perspective, is really only about a step less anti-woman than, say, Playboy - the only way in which it veers from the norm of soft porn is that the models are countercultureish (but countercultureish with the same buxom yet waifish body type of a Playboy model) and there was a vague sense that they had a bit more control over the way their image was represented on the site than a magazine model could expect. I'm not completely surprised to learn the latter isn't true (and it sure doesn't seem to be if 30 women have quit over it).

I do think alternative porn in general is at least an improvement over the mainstream, though. Just not at the cost of fairly treating workers and preferably when it presents a real, inclusive alternative to mainstream porn - neither of which is something SG can say for itself.

[horosha]

I have a good friend that wants to join Suicide Girls. She really enjoys the site, although I've never been much of a fan. I'm not really sure what the complaints are. Did the company do anything unethical or breach their contracts?