In 2001, Selena Mooney found a stack of Betty Page images at a thrift store in Portland, Oregon. There was something different about them. The classic pin-up model seemed more comfortable than normal, as though she wasn’t deliberately trying to be sexy. The reason, Mooney supposed, was because the photographer was also a woman — fellow pin-up model Bunny Yeager.
This gave Mooney an idea.
“In the early 2000s, there were really only two types of beautiful women that were represented,” she told Racked in 2015. “There was either the stick-thin, waif, blonde Kate Moss-type supermodel, or the silicone-enhanced, buxom Pamela Anderson fantasy of what a woman should be, and there were very few things in between.”
Many of the women Mooney knew at the time were beautiful for wildly different reasons.
“They were pierced and tattooed and had interesting stories and interesting bodies. They had interesting things that they did and interesting ways that they carried themselves,” she said.
[image:5,half]Mooney photographed her friends in the pin-up style and collaborated with Sean Suhl to build a website around the photos. In addition to galleries, it featured message boards and blogs for each of the models, basically functioning as a rudimentary social network. Its name, Suicide Girls, was borrowed from the book “Survivor,” where Chuck Palahnuik uses it to describe “girls who chose to commit social suicide by not fitting in.”
Each of the site’s models, the eponymous Suicide Girls, took on aliases, including Mooney, who became “Missy” Suicide.
The site launched on Sept. 3 of that year, capping a decade of intentional weirdness that had grown over the course of the 1990s into the hip-but-different alt movement. Amorphous and undefined, it should be impossible to ride that cultural wave for any length of time.
And yet Suicide Girls isn’t just sticking around, but thriving — as though insulated from the cultural changes that followed in its wake.
How is this still a thing?Last we checked, there were more than 3,640 Suicide Girls — and that’s not the full number of women depicted on the site.
The original Suicide Girls were photographed by Missy herself, but as the site caught on, the company would purchase sets of photos shot by other photographers. Once accepted, the subjects of those sets would also become SGs. This allowed the brand to spread globally, eventually getting to the point at which there were, at least for a time, Suicide Girls on every continent (a researcher in Antarctica shot a set of herself).
[image:2]Around 2007 or 2008, the site rolled out a two-tiered system in which an aspiring model applies to the site and, after a basic approval process, becomes a “Suicide Girl Hopeful,” said “Rambo,” the site’s current model and photography coordinator and a Suicide Girl since 2006. Hopefuls can then submit sets of 40 to 60 photos in which they go from fully clothed to fully nude on the site, and members — the site is based on a subscription model — can view after a few months. If a set garners a significant amount of positive feedback, the site will then purchase it from the model for $500 and run it as a Set of the Day. Once it becomes an official Suicide Girls set, the model also becomes an official Suicide Girl — a process called “going pink” (based on the color scheme differentiations on the site).
It’s hard to tell how many SGHs there are on the site, but several tens of thousands apply on a yearly basis. There are at least 134 full-fledged SGs in the Southwestern U.S., and quite a lot more hopefuls within the same region.
Why are there so many clamoring to be a part of the site? The short answer is that despite almost two decades of cultural change, the same qualities that made someone “alt” in 2001 still do in 2020.
Suicide Girls doesn’t have any physical requirements — the drive to become an SG is more about the attitude, Rambo said. “Obviously, the alternative look tends to go hand in hand with that kind of attitude.”
Far and away, the qualities that tend to set Suicide Girls apart from mainstream pinup models are tattoos, piercings, and brightly colored hair — all things that have gained cultural acceptance over the last 20 years, but which still don’t tend to pop up a ton in the mainstream media or even, say, a Playboy centerfold. Some SGs go a step further with other forms of body modification, including scarring, branding, and other cosmetic surgeries, such as having their tongue split.
[image:4]“Albright,” a Hopeful from Santa Fe, New Mexico, said she was drawn to Suicide Girls because they’re not cookie cutter — they’re all different shapes and sizes, and none of them look standard. Albright has piercings and tattoos and began stretching her ears at age 13.
“I’ve never been what you would call normal in terms of my preferred aesthetic,” she said.
The general aura of nonconformity surrounding Suicide Girls is part of its continuing appeal, she said.
“I feel like it has the longevity that it has because of that kind of nonconforming positivity, especially with this generation. Not conforming to things like the gender binary, beauty standards, and things like that is really prevalent now.”
But how far from the average can one go and still be a Suicide Girl?
Just how alt is alt?According to Rambo, even if the site is about celebrating alternative forms of femininity, it’s still centered around the female body — bare breasts and bums are the minimum requirements of its photos.
That said, one doesn’t necessarily need to identify as a “girl” to be a Suicide Girl, and putting one’s reproductive anatomy on display is completely optional. Hypothetically speaking, a gender-neutral individual could endeavor to become an SG if they want to show off their feminine side.
On the other hand, though, it’s impossible to go pink without appealing to a wide audience. After all, getting positive feedback, which, for example, could be a couple thousand likes on a set, is what sets becoming an SG in motion. As such, a range of factors can slow or halt a model’s rise up the site’s system.
[image:6,half]“Caroline Hellcat” is an SG hopeful and photographer from Albuquerque. She also comes from a multi ethnic background — both Navajo and Filipino. And she has noticed that being different makes it at least a little bit harder to become a Suicide Girl
“The girls that are ethnic and look ethnic, we kind of have to push it a little harder. … The girls see it like, ‘Oh yeah, if you’re curvy and your set — unless it blows others out of the way or you’re really active on your site and everything — we don’t see it get bought a lot.’”
That said, one aspect of the site that everyone seems to pick up on is that there is extremely little to no negativity within Suicide Girls itself — something of a surprise, given the toxicity that can be found on the rest of the infinite hellscape that is the modern internet.
“A global sorority”To some degree, Rambo attributes this to the fact that pretty much everyone on the site identifies as an outsider.
“I think it goes back to that most of us grew up as outcasts, and I think a lot of us were bullied and stuff, so I think most of us would never want to perpetuate that vibe and would never want to make anybody else feel unwelcome,” she said. “I think most people come into the SG community, whether they be model, photographers, or members of the site with a supportive mindset due to probably a lot of things they’ve been through in life.”
[image:3]Then again, Rambo acknowledged, it’s a site for which everyone who isn’t a Suicide Girl pays a membership fee.
“I don’t know why anybody would want to take their hard-earned money to go be a dick somewhere,” she said.
The community of the Suicide Girls and the hopefuls themselves is tight knit, she said, especially because the site offers opportunities for them to collaborate and work together, such as when they all chip in to rent a place to shoot somewhere exotic, like Toulouse, France, or Ibiza, Spain, forming what she calls a global sorority.
“Girls from around the world will fly there for the week and split the cost of the house, and shoot a bunch of photos. And then, next thing you know, you’ve got twenty new friends, and they’re from every corner of the world,” she said.
Even within that larger group, the SGs and SGHs of New Mexico are particularly supportive of one another.
“The girls here are very career minded; they all have their goals kind of set in place. We all talk to each other which is nice that we all have that support from each other. Anytime we feel shitty or we can’t do anything, or if we can’t get a job, we all help each other out,” Hellcat said.
[image:7,half]The regional SG community is less judgmental than other sorts of outsider groups, said “Hybrid,” another Southwest-based hopeful whose modeling intersects with a love of cosplay. While she finds some validation from other women she meets while dressed as, say, Han Solo at a comic convention, she also gets dirty looks and snickers — something she doesn’t see around other SGHs.
“I saw a post the other day about one of the Suicide Girls feeling really down and coming to Suicide Girl whenever she’s feeling down,” she said. “I think that people, especially girls who aren’t involved in Suicide Girls, think it’s just a nude website or it’s just risqué stuff, but it’s really like a community of people caring about each other.”
Evolving with the netBeyond the alternative aesthetic or the tight-knit communities within the SG network, Suicide Girls might just owe its continued success to its symbiotic relationship with social media.
Over the years, the site has branched off, creating movies and annual live burlesque show tours and the like, but most of the women who are now SGs or Hopefuls didn’t find out about the site from those; they found out about the site from other Suicide Girls.
The site predates even social networks like Friendster, but it really started to take off in the age of Myspace (which is where Rambo first saw it as a high schooler). Suicide Girls would create their own pages on social networks to promote their own SG work, which would also, in turn, promote the Suicide Girl concept itself. This continued onto Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and there is probably even a burgeoning SG community on TikTok.
Ultimately, this may have created an effect akin to a snake eating its own tail: Suicide Girls promote themselves on the internet, which inspires like-minded women to embrace the aesthetic and join the site themselves, where they then promote themselves to the next generation. This freezes not only the site into a perpetual state of semi-relevance, but keeps the “alternative” subculture from straying too far from its roots.
Or, just as likely, mainstream culture and its standards of beauty have refused to evolve since for 20 years, and those who would rebel against it have never been forced to adapt.
