Dare to Bare it: The evolution of pin-up

by Erica Shupe

There are more than 1,000 women featured on SuicideGirls.com, and they are all pushing the boundaries between art and pornography closer together.

SuicideGirls.com has a misleading name. The website isn’t dark or twisted at all. In fact, its pink wallpaper background projects a very flirty, feminine image. It may better be described as “alternative,” “soft core” pornography.

The website features “girls” who are pierced and tattooed, representing various lifestyles as well as a variety of ethnic groups and body types.

Their poses appear to be a throw back to the 1940s and 50s pin-up style photography of Bettie Page, but with a modern twist.

The unique aspect is that the website is more than a “here are your tits, now give me some cash” kind of operation. There are nude photos, but the models keep journals that paying members of the website are able to comment on. The website also includes message boards and groups, event postings, podcasts, a shop, and even its own newswire.

So with all the efforts to distance itself from the pornography industry, does Suicide Girls, or “SG,” encroach on the art world?

The photoset concepts are styled and executed, and sometimes even photographed by the girls themselves, and most members and models agree that it is a form of self expression. This begs the question, however: where does one draw the line between art and porn, if such a line can even be drawn at all?

The human body, particularly the female form, has been celebrated in art throughout history, and nudity has been seen as early as Greek and Egyptian times.

In 1907 Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon caused a controversy for its fragmented cubist style and depiction of women. Though it was far from realism, it featured female figures in provocative poses, breasts fully exposed, legs spread.

One can clearly see pin-up roots beginning in Henri Rousseau’s 1910 painting The Dream.The painting features a woman, fully nude, lounging on a chaise lounge in the middle of a tropical rainforest. This pose is now emulated in pin-up photography and fine-art photography everywhere. It was even used in the blockbuster movie, Titanic.

After these paintings came the pin-up. Beautiful, perfectly manicured women posing either nude or semi-nude in photographs, clearly meant to entice the eye. However, the demure poses rarely gave the viewer anything more than a peek.

As the world became super-charged with sex, the pornography industry suddenly exploded beyond “dirty magazines” sold in paper bags at the convenience store. Poses became bolder and more revealing. Society screamed about this negative objectification of women, but at the same
time consumed it.

In 2001, website owner “Missy Suicide” started Suicide Girls in Portland, Oregon, while she was finishing a degree in photography.

“I was connecting with these amazing women who were so comfortable and confident with their bodies,” says Missy. “I wanted to document that confidence and I had always loved pin-ups and it seemed the perfect style, with a modern twist.”

The website has since taken off and now boasts 500,000 visitors a week and 24 million page views a month. It’s name was taken from a Chuck Palahnuik book, Survivor, after a phrase in the novel.

Like the burlesque troops of the war era, Suicide Girls is actively challenging what it means to be a woman, what is artistic, and what is not. Gone is the idea that the only definition of beauty in the adult world can be a tall, blonde, buxom, Barbie-like parody of a woman.

“There is a very narrow depiction of women in media,” says Missy. “The ideal of beauty is so limited. I know so many incredibly beautiful women who would never appear in a magazine or on television.”

The first Suicide Girls posed for free, but they now make over $300 a set. It is not a full-time job for the girls, however. “The Suicide Girls are as diverse a group as you can imagine,” says Missy. “They are lawyers and doctors and mathematicians and housewives and college students and artists and just about anything else you can think of.”

This statement couldn’t be more truthful. These women are more than their pictures, they really are how Missy described them and are far more diverse and intelligent than one might predict. Because the women do have lives and careers beyond Suicide Girls, all of the girls on the website go by a fictitious first name and the last name “Suicide” to protect their identities.

The reasons women pose for the website are almost as varied as the women themselves, but one standing reason is self-expression. “I think pin-up models are a bit more engaged,” Missy says. “In artistic nudes, the body almost acts like a still life.”

“Oryx Suicide” has been a photographer for SG since 2005. She has shot over 80 photo sets with more than 50 different models.

“I’ve always liked taking pictures of people,” she says. “The most interesting pictures I take are of people.”

Armed with a degree in photography from Ryerson University, Oryx never thought she would enter the “porn” world.

“I always love to joke around and say I’m a pornographer,” she says. “I love saying that because I’m not what people would consider: I’m educated, I’m a woman, I’m intelligent. I’m not some creepy guy with a camera that’s like ‘come here little girl,’ and I love challenging that label.”
Being a photographer for SG connects her with other like-minded women, including models “Tekky” and “Lotus,” two of the women who belonged to the website before it became a media darling.

“I think it was something that was in the right place at the right time and it exploded,” says Lotus. “It was something that wasn’t available by anyone else and it got in at the ground floor.”

“My sets are pretty much just self expression,” Oryx says. “I do my sets for me and the people on SG that I know and so, when I do them, I want to be happy with these images, I want to be happy with the story they tell.”

Suicide Girls has difficulty being fully embraced in the art community as a website with artistic merit, mostly because of the subject matter.

“The line is so blurry,” says design student and model Tekky. “You have amazing painters who have done nudity, and people classify that as art. But as soon as somebody gets naked for the camera, (those same people) are like ‘Ah! It’s porn.’ Because that is how a lot of older people are raised to think, that any kind of nudity in that sense is taboo and wrong.”

Oryx agrees that there is stigma, but says she still sees the art. “Working professionals I don’t think would consider my work to be art . . . but I think my work does have artistic merit.”

To be deemed artistic is not the only challenge to face Suicide Girls. There is also the desire to evolve the photography in a way that is artful, tasteful, and not demeaning towards women.

“My mom doesn’t understand that there could be any sort of porn – and I use that term loosely – that doesn’t exploit a woman,” says Oryx.

“I think [SG] makes something you can be aroused by but not be demeaning to the person who is being portrayed,” says Lotus. “I don’t ever feel like I am being objectified in my sets or anything like that, but I encourage people to (masturbate) if they are attracted to me. It doesn’t mean you own me, or I’m going to be your little slut. I am who I am and I am giving you the opportunity to see my body, and if you want to express that by being aroused, then that’s fine.”

The bottom line is that Suicide Girls, like all art, is open to interpretation.

“A magazine ad can arouse somebody just as much as a porno movie, depending on the person,” says Tekky.

Just as the art side is open to interpretation, so is the feminist aspect. “Personally, I believe it is feminist as far as it is female empowering,” says Oryx.

So where is pin-up and the world of female friendly art porn headed now? SuicideGirls.com has thrown that door wide open and only time will tell where this provocative art will venture next.