This whole vegan strip club thing has really gotten me thinking about my old hometown of Portland, Oregon, and I think there might be something seriously wrong with the citizens of that riverside burgh. I say that because Portland has spawned not only the most ideologically screwy idea of the month, the vegan strip club, but also the fucking Suicide Girls, a company/group of renobs that offends my sensibilities on so many levels that I may have a hard time getting to all of them in one post. There is clearly a screw loose in the collective minds of those that make up Portland’s counterculture milieu that both of these phenomena bring to the fore. To wit: the young people of Portland have found a way to be fashion and culinary iconoclasts without actually having to deal with any of the complexity and uncertainty involved in actual iconoclasm.
It’s pretty easy to get all indignant when your boss forces you to take out your stupid piercings when you go to work or to feel a tinge of remorse for eating a fuzzy cow, but it’s not so easy to come to terms with the larger forces at work behind those discomforts, because doing so requires a fair amount of intelligence and usually results either in uncontrollable rage (if you’re into nu metal) or a feeling of weltschmerz and utter hopelessness (if you like Morrissey). What I am referring to, of course, is the patriarchy’s not-so-invisible hand in nearly all of the small oppressions these pseudo-punks find so uncool. Talking about resisting authority is fairly embarrassing at this point in our cultural development, but I think it’s important to realize that there is a difference between resisting authority in superficial ways while still perpetuating the patriarchal status quo and actually seeing oppressive authority for what it is, wherever it may crop up, and resisting in in a meaningful way. I’m not claiming that doing so is easy, or even that I’m doing it (although I’m trying to in at least a small way with this blog), but I’m also not going to congratulate people for a bunch of bullshit posturing that revolves more around dumb tattoos and ugly haircuts than thoughtfulness.
And that’s exactly what the Suicide Girls phenomenon is all about: superficial and cliche rebelliousness masking a tired rehashing of the pornographic exploitation of women. The idea that the women involved are empowering themselves is revolting; the company is owned and operated by a man, the women are paid nearly zilch for the honor of degrading themselves for an audience of perverts who listen to Reverend Horton Heat, and the company locks its “models” (prostitutes) into contracts that forbid them to “model” for any other sites and rob them of any rights to their own images. Where’s the empowerment? Is it in the fact that they don’t adhere to the mainstream blond porn prostitute ideal? Then I guess that means that women who participate in any kind of non-mainstream porn are empowering themselves. If that’s so, then what’s the criterion by which to judge how empowering a particular kind of porn is? The less mainstream, the more empowered the women are? Snuff films must be empowering as fuck, then.
I had a friend who was in a band that I won’t name, who were opening for another band that I won’t name, and when they went on tour the headlining band brought a few Suicide Girls along to go on stage first to, uh, warm up the crowd. I went to see my friend’s band when they came to town and was unfortunately exposed to the absurd and insulting spectacle of the Suicide Girls before I was able to get drunk enough to not notice. It was basically the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen. Two emaciated women with black electrical tape over their nipples and stupid, generic rockabilly tattoos came out and danced around, pretended to molest each other, and flailed their arms around to the tune of Peaches’s “Fuck the Pain Away”. The audience included more women than men, but I still felt like I was one of about four people in the room who thought it a bit odd that I had gone out to see a rock band but had instead ended up in a strip club in which the strippers all looked like Murder City Devils fans. The dudes who were there, despite considering themselves to be some countercultural motherfuckers, acted just like any NFL-loving asshole at Dirty Dan’s and whooped it up whenever the women pretended to make out with each other. Punk as fuck.
Talking about what is and isn’t punk in 2008 is pretty silly, mainly because whatever was going on in the punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s has been supplanted by marketing campaigns that have brought us to the point where Panic at the Disco is called a punk band, but I do know that dressing up everyday sexual exploitation and patriarchal gender roles in flaming cherry tattoos isn’t punk. It’s fucking nonsense. What Suicide Girls are doing is meeting a market demand created by dudes who want porn that matches their “alternative” hairdos and love for the Misfits, not representing an alternative kind of sexuality in which women are seen as sexually autonomous human beings, which is where the real sexual revolution is at. The mere fact that a large proportion of the Suicide Girls are Bettie Paige impersonators should tip even the most brainwashed of “sex-positive” “feminists” off to the fact that the company is selling little more than the idea that women exist to be used by men.
14 Comments
February 26, 2008 at 3:02 am
first of all , i wood like to congratulate you on your findings, a vegan strip club c’mon! i need a ny strip a porterhouse when i look at tail, not sum soy based habachi grill shit. yor right totally bogus
suicide girls seems silly to me, i like country music, when i go to a club all i hear is rap, no country, and
this is where the white fellas hangout. talk about superficial, they dont even know there own kind
i two think that seein skinny girls with the rib cage showin is nasty gimme sum meet i tell you i dont want her to starve more two look at you know what im talking about
personally i like a good girl on girl thing you know two girls goin at it an your there watchin thats hot maybe throw some some hot nude celebrities in there and some strangers hott
February 26, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Brilliant satire.
February 26, 2008 at 9:34 pm
he’s a pig.
February 28, 2008 at 4:17 pm
He’s not a pig. Pigs can’t be held accountable for their behavior and beliefs. His sorry ass can be.
April 27, 2008 at 8:24 am
[...] kind of hip, countercultural statement, especially for women (more on that delusion can be found here). That idea is pretty tired; when I was a teenager (mid-1990s) a lot of the dudes I knew already [...]
April 27, 2008 at 11:47 pm
I think this article should be titled “What the fuck is wrong with Suicide Girls?”
May 1, 2008 at 11:02 pm
I’m experiencing some serious cognitive dissonance hearing that the suicide girls are considered anything more than tattooed retreads on the misogynistic bandwagon. I’d never heard of them so I Googled the name. I have a difficult time believing that people see anything different here. I guess reinforcing one’s schema is way easier than attempting to see the man behind the curtain.
July 12, 2008 at 4:39 pm
“He’s not a pig. Pigs can’t be held accountable for their behavior and beliefs. His sorry ass can be.”
Hahahahahaha!
August 3, 2008 at 9:59 pm
You don’t like the Suicide Girls because:
1. They are skinny.
2. Some look like Betty Paige.
3. They have flaming cherry tattoos.
It sounds to me that your aversion to the Suicide girls has more to do with asthetics than with ideology. You simply don’t like their body type.
Also, you don’t like that the Suicide Girls franchise is owned by a man, which suggests that you’d like it better if it was owned by a woman.
PS. Considering that the band audience contained mostly women, it never occurred to you that the models up on the stage were there for the *women*, and not the men.
August 4, 2008 at 8:19 am
I don’t give a shit about body type. Did you read the post?
August 4, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Yes, I did.
Example:
“It was basically the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen. Two emaciated women with black electrical tape over their nipples and stupid, generic rockabilly tattoos came out and danced around . . .”
And:
“The mere fact that a large proportion of the Suicide Girls are Bettie Paige impersonators . . .”
And:
“The idea that the women involved are empowering themselves is revolting; the company is owned and operated by a man . . .”
If it is your intention they’re ill-paid and exploited, then what these women looked liked (that they were skinny with tattoos and Betty Paige hair) shouldn’t have been an issue. Furthermore, you said that you were *embarrassed* by them! If they are *victims*, as you claim they are, embarrassment is not an emotion that you should have properly felt in that situation. Instead, you should have made an effort to talk to them about their situation, if possible.
And the last quote I posted here strongly suggests that you only have a problem that the Suicide Girls franchise is owned by a man. In other words, you wouldn’t mind if a woman owned the Suicide Girls and exploited the models.
Next time you see something like this, Nine Deuce, why don’t you try going up to the models and actually talk to them like they’re human beings? Especially if you had concerns about their well-being, as you claim. By being embarrassed by them and focusing on their appearance, I would say that you objectified them much more than the male audience members did.
August 4, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I was referring to their being emaciated because it looked unhealthy. Our beauty standards are unhealthy, punk or otherwise. And how would I have talked to them? Gone up on stage? I’m sorry, but dressing stripping up in blue hair doesn’t make it revolutionary.
August 5, 2008 at 12:05 am
Must_not_critique_the_women. They’re ‘victims’.
Where does this idea come from that the women have no responsibility for where they are? I suspect it’s my generation of progressive alternative childraising parents. I apologize for all of them.
I don’t exactly believe in ’spare the rod spoil the child’ but a little cold water in the face once in awhile might be a good idea. These women are surrounded by praise which keeps them there, while the only people who might wake them up are being bullshitted into being political correct.
Geez.
August 7, 2008 at 12:57 am
To both Sis and Nine Deuce,
It is the radical feminist viewpoint that *all* women who use sexuality as a means of making money are victims of slavery and trafficking. Are you saying that this is incorrect?
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