The Massachusetts 17
If SuicideGirls.com is like a naked sorority, there are 17 members in the Massachusetts chapter (possibly more, since some girls obfuscate their coordinates by listing their location as “I’m lost”). Those 17 include: Palo; Lexie; Bailey, the oldest, at age 27, and the most universally revered SG forebear in Boston; Bowie, a blond, married florist; Sid, a teeny Berklee student with a baby-doll face, a helium squeak of a voice, and a corset piercing on her back; Kera, a 25-year-old UMass Boston literature major who edits a school-affiliated literary journal, holds office as the Student Senate president, and plans to study at Oxford this summer; Alexsandria, an adorable dreadlocked Floridian who strips down from a Bentmen T-shirt and Dresden Doll–like striped tights in her first photo set; Hellah, a cute Italian tomboy from Lowell; and Granny, a 20-year-old from the North Shore who’s into “loud trashy music,” “being an artfuck,” and “anthropology.”

The local SG community, of course, is much larger: SuicideGirls must endure a multi-tier application process; site members need only submit their credit-card information. Membership buys both male and female subscribers their very own journal; photo-uploading capabilities; and access not only to the SGs, but also to special subgroups that unite users with shared interests (“Weezer fans,” “Cunning Linguists,” “Plus Sized Women”), issues (“bipolar disorder,” “self-mutilation”), or geography (“SG Middle East,” “SG Iowa”).

One such group is SGBoston, which has 220 registered users (both SGs and members), but only about 50 who actively post. Two Fridays ago, Palo invited all of SGBoston to her residence hall to shoot “kitschy ‘family’ portraits,” which is why she was photographing Lexie. By 9:30, eight people had showed up. Plopped on the floor by the fireplace was SGBoston moderator Dan Wherren, a 28-year-old theater-service technician who’s Lexie’s roommate. Over in the corner is Palo’s boyfriend, Jordan, a sketchbook-doodling artist grumbling that he’d rather be sleeping. Finch, a SuicideGirl who moved from Boston to Pennsylvania, was also in town for the night. After the informal photo session ended, everyone headed over to the Sunset Cantina on Comm Ave for the quasi-monthly “Burgers and Beers,” an SGBoston eating-and-drinking ritual often held at Charlie’s Kitchen, in Harvard Square.

SGBoston — whom Wherren describes as predominantly a mix of “antisocial intellectuals and goths” — convenes regularly for things like this: horror-movie sleepovers, PBR-drenched parties, and music-video film shoots. Some SGs have become really close, like Lexie and Palo, who’ll be roommates this summer, or Kera and Alexsandria. Lexie and Dan met through the site and now they’re roommates; Palo first met her boyfriend, Jordan, at an SGBoston-organized dinner at Pizzeria Uno’s. Others are merely acquaintances.

Gaining an automatic community is one of the reasons many of the more recent local SGs applied. “I’ve always been a shy girl,” says Sid, a 21-year-old from Rhode Island with 22 piercings and 12 tattoos. “I probably would still be sitting in a dorm room somewhere going out of my mind if I didn’t have SG.” While Palo admits that she got “jealous” when she saw the SuicideGirls book and decided to apply, the site also rescued her from yah-dude party hell. “My first two years in college, I went to the typical frat parties in a basement with a keg and a leaky roof — that kind of thing. It was just not my thing at all.” SG led her to actual thinking people. “I ended up meeting quite a few of my best friends [in Boston] on the site.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Bowie, a 22-year-old who recently moved to Cambridge from San Francisco, had always fantasized about being a Playboy centerfold. “I’ve always been someone who’s been into pinup girls,” says Bowie, who has a tattoo of a pistol-firing dame in a garter belt stamped on her right deltoid. “I always thought it’d be cool to be what I admire.” But the site has also helped her make friends in her new home. “Without the site, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’d be at home watching TV.”

SuicideGirls earn $300 for every nude photo set posted. But the exposure can lead to more cash flow. Palo, who studies graphic design and is teaching herself photography, has gotten other modeling jobs and camera-work connections through the site, as well as a free place to crash in Portland, Oregon.

One of the site’s appeals is that it attracts women who are similarly strong willed and remarkable. Kera — who first learned about the site in 2002 when she was googling “suicide” (“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I was actually writing a paper about depression in young girls”) — really believes that SuicideGirls has solidified a new feminine archetype. “Everyone there is exceptional about something, and they’re all very confident about it,” she explains. “There’s this feminine tradition that you have to undermine the exceptional aspects of your personality because they’ll threaten the guy you want to seduce and marry you — or because it’s just not attractive to be exceptional in any one way . . . The girls who model for the site refuse that.”