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.