Suicide Girls:The Cool Jerk

Pornography has been around since people discovered nudity. I suppose there was a time, shortly after clothes were invented, where a Cro-Magnon caught a glimpse of his wife’s cleavage as she bent over a hot pot of mammoth stew and said, “I’m going to paint these beauties on a cave wall and look at them later.” Recently, while visiting the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, I stumbled across a small clay tablet carved by ancient Assyrian people who lived in what today is Iran. The tablet featured a rendering of an Assyrian couple enjoying a little rear-entry action. On a card next to the pornographic tablet I learned that the Assyrians also invented beer brewing. This region of the Middle East really was the cornerstone of modern civilization. Living in a such porn filled society, it is interesting to see that modern humanity is the result of thousands of years of tradition. The ancient Assyrians had fermented barley wine and clay tablets; we have Schlitz and Suicide Girls.

Suicide Girls is an interesting phenomenon. It's a porn site, run by women, featuring pictures of nude women who see their bodies as expressive canvases for artistic interpretation. The tattooed ladies of Suicide Girls hearken back to the pro-women’s rights era of the 1950s when strippers were ‘burlesque dancers’ and prostitutes were ‘secretaries.’ It is a little funny that burlesque, a somewhat raunchy, mildly immoral vestige of mid-century America, is now seen as a liberating art form for women. Suicide Girls is a well designed porn website and an expansive forum for punk rock nudity. That being said, I see the tattoos and piercings as frosting on the proverbial T and A donut. I suppose the website is empowering, in that the models aren’t teen runaways and the photographers aren’t middle aged coke-heads with rum stained t-shirts. At the end of the day, Suicide Girls is a beautifully conceived vehicle for the male gaze and an erection enticing piece of internet fantasia. I'm sure the women that run Suicide Girls would be happy to know, that when I look at their website, my erection feels as if it might punch right through my American Apparel jogging pants. For Suicide Girls is not porn, in that disgusting Assyrian sense, it is modernist art in the cheap internet sense.

La Petit Mort/ The Internet Has Gone Too Far

I’m a curious guy, and I like to investigate interesting subjects in the arts, culture, music, politics, and history. I am also a heterosexual man, and as such, I investigate nudity. On a recent investigation, I discovered a website entitled Beautiful Agony: La Petit Mort. The innovative site, featuring the faces of various young hip people as they achieve orgasmic climax, was confounding. The site was both interesting conceptually, a bit intriguing, and mundane. It also brought up a few interesting issues about internet porn, and the act of boiling down sex to a demi glace of various faces writhing in awkward ecstasy.

I discovered masturbation in a rather happenstance sort of way. As a preteen, I did not have the benefit of an older brother or sister to tell me about “self love” or the diverse range of potential lubrication substances. I was twelve, in a bathroom, bored on a cold Sunday afternoon, and for one reason or another I had a hand full of hair conditioner. The only familiarity I had with the female anatomy was the triangle of hair that adorned every Playboy centerfold’s nether regions from 1955 through 1990. In my twelve-year-old mind, sex was nothing more than a brief relationship with a hair triangle. I had figured it all happened inside of the triangle. That afternoon, for the first time, I came. My small, pale body dropped to the floor, convulsing in a shower of violent synapses, and my eyes snapped shut with a sudden flop of joy. My first orgasm flopped out of my body like a tired bus driver after a long day, as if to say “what took you so long?”

As I fondled puberty, I became increasingly interested in inspirational material. I scoured Sunday advertising sections in hopes of discovering a nipple in the Sears women’s underwear section. It was the late eighties and photoshopping stray nipples wasn’t yet advertising protocol. To be honest, Sunday supplements were often rather rich in nipples. One of my fantasies was to be locked in an adult bookstore alone, all the shelves free to peruse, without the prying eyes of the middle aged clerk. In the dream, which was reoccurring throughout my teen years, my soul would fill with the infinite possibility of a veritable nipple cornucopia. This teen dream was realized by a group of computer scientists in the 1960s. These brave men gave the world the never ending adult bookstore, the teenage fantasy land filled with an endless supply of nudity - these men gave us: the internet.

The creators of La Petit Mort, in their quest for an artful approach to nipples in the Sears Sunday supplement, have created an interesting, if strangely disconnected take on standard internet pornography. It seems that in this real life teenage boy fantasy of infinitesimal nipples, people are at their wits end trying to figure out what will be the next craze in masturbation material. To be honest, La Petit Mort would have scared the crap out of me as a teenager. Watching a lesbian from Berlin shout out in ecstasy, filmed at close range, would have given me more questions than answers. Is the world ready for sexuality this basic, this repetitiously human? Even in this golden age of digital sexuality, part of me would prefer a hidden nipple buried in the Sunday newspaper.