PicoBlog

I’m telling Anthony about what I’ve spent the last six hours on, clicking through fragments of archived LiveJournals on the Wayback Machine in an attempt to piece together the countless indignities women I have never met suffered at the hands of a pornographic enterprise I hadn’t thought about for a solid decade prior. 

He raises an eye and says something along the lines of, “Wow, so the pornographers treated the women poorly? Who would have thought?” And I say “No, exactly, that’s the point. They acted as though they weren’t like other pornographers.” 

Their mission statement, circa 2002, read as follows:

“SuicideGirls is a website dedicated to creating a new kind of adult entertainment, where the models who reveal themselves on the site are in charge of their own image and how they are presented. A collective co-op of adult entertainment with a thriving community, SuicideGirls is empowered erotica, a place where girls outside of mainstream culture can make the case that rebellion, a unique personal style and nonconformity is far sexier than anything you will see in mainstream pornography.”

The press ate this narrative up without question, heaping praise on SuicideGirls as a progressive, women-centric site where the models controlled the means of production. Bitch Magazine wrote, “In contrast to the often-degrading images of traditional pornography, the Suicide Girls call their own shots—literally. They choose the themes of their own photo shoots and control everything from the poses right down to the color of their thongs—making the site a genuine and refreshing example of women actively in touch with their sexuality without the trappings of shame or exploitation.” Punk Planet wrote, “Punk porn sites are fucking great. They’re co-ed run, female-friendly, [and] non-exploitative.”

But that was the early aughts. But I’m also getting ahead of myself.

When someone puts an ad up on the Craigslist free section that they want something gone, and the something appears to be at all sellable, I don’t care how bad the accompanying image is, or if there is one at all. The listing read “Suicide Girls merch.” The photo was of a blurry stack of DVDs. This was enough to get me in the car.

I was unaware he left everything.

The address I was given led me to a Spanish-style Los Feliz mansion. I found two harried real estate agents hovering around its garage, which did not just hold a stack of DVDs. It held bins and bins of them. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of magazines. Troughs of branded hot pants. Crates of costumes. Cases of used DV tapes. Reels of developed 35mm film. I soon learned the agents had no idea what SuicideGirls were, they only knew they had to clean out the house in order to sell it, and that the house was full. When they got there, “the beds were unmade,” the redheaded one told me. “There’s food in the kitchen. He left everything.”

I told them I remembered SuicideGirls. When I first moved to Los Angeles, they occupied a pale green office on the sketchy part of Santa Monica Boulevard, near the strip mall that still had a sign outside of it advertising “Disco Duck Boogiein [sic] Cocktails.” If you do not know what SuicideGirls are, I envy you. Their aesthetic, that of pale, malnourished girls in band tees, was instrumental to my eating disorder.

The owner of the house, the man who left everything, was the de facto proprietor of SuicideGirls; photos of his mansion, its interior desecrated in that horrible pseudo-goth color scheme popular in the early aughts, populated many of the site’s videos and photo sets.

What would inspire a man to leave everything? Everyone I told about the filled house assumed his cancellation was imminent and that he was going the way of Polanski, fleeing overseas before the shit stuck. But I soon learned he was already, for all intents and purposes, cancelled–said cancellation, however, had occurred in the decade prior to the existence of cancellation, kinda like how no one talks about the fact David Bowie fucked thirteen-year-olds because he died before #MeToo. SuicideGirls was, is, still an operational website, posting new content on a daily basis.

It started, as have many things white and insufferable, in Portland, Oregon. Three days after 9/11, Sean “Spooky” Suhl and Selena “Missy Suicide” Mooney launched SuicideGirls; Selena was, by design, the face of the brand, doing press as the site’s “founder” and thus making it impervious to any accusations of exploitation (of course it’s empowering! They’re run by a woman!). 

But when the company was incorporated shortly after launch, documents listed Sean as president and Selena as secretary (how delightfully reductive). Today, SuicideGirl’s website cites Selena as the “leader of the SuicideGirls. Everyone reports to her, and she is in charge of day to day operations and business.” As early as 2003, however, former models claimed Sean was the one actually in charge. Their LiveJournal posts from the era almost always named him as one of the primary reasons for their exit, and made no mention at all of Selena–multiple women recalled him referring to the models as “whores” and “talentless.” "Some of the stupidest girls in the world are SuicideGirls," he once told one model. Another model, who left the site to pursue a career as a writer, told a journalist that "Sean always seemed to have short man's complex. Like one of those geeks in high school who suddenly gets pussy and he's not overjoyed - he's thinking, 'I'm going to get back at them now.'”

A primary component of the SuicideGirls website was its emphasis on community–models were encouraged to post blogs and interact with members in comments, even though they were not being paid to do so. In fact, the only way in which models were paid for anything was if their photo sets passed “member review” and were selected as “set of the day,” which initially resulted in a $50 payout that has now, over 20 years later, increased to $500.

SuicideGirl hopefuls were (and still are) expected to submit sets of 40-60 photos (in which nudity is a necessity), preferably shot with a SuicideGirl sanctioned photographer models were expected to pay out of pocket (“Since it is not guaranteed your set will be accepted, we currently allow our staff photographers to ask for payment for their time”). While it was possible to submit a set solely for staff review and not give thousands of paid members the opportunity to gawk at and judge their pussies for free, the site’s FAQ warned, “We accept only the best sets through staff review - sets that we think are among the top 10 best sets of all time, and sets that are absolutely mind-blowingly amazing and are incredibly [sic] quality. Please keep this in mind when you are submitting your sets.”

Nine years ago, an ex-model wrote, “Suicide Girls pays $500 to the model for each set bought. However, which sets get bought is up to the members, who vote on which sets they want to see as Set of the Day. This basically means it's a popularity contest - you gotta kiss ass if you want to get paid. A LOT of ass. It also means that the girls with the most mass-market aesthetic will be the most popular, which is why some of the more extreme-looking models from the early days of the site can't get their sets bought anymore. The model guide advises shooting in "natural" makeup and not having too out-there of an outfit. That's why SG's "alternative" look has slid steadily downhill since they switched to Member Review. If your set DOESN'T get bought, it sits in member review until you take it down. So, paying members are seeing your content without you being paid. You can have a dozen sets on the site that are viewable to all members without ever making a dime off of them.”

The model guide also advised, “DO NOT be comfortable. If you are comfortable, it doesn't look good on camera. Your entire body should be tense head to toe - if you're doing it right, you'll be sore the next day.”

“If your set is accepted,” the FAQ read, “you and the staff photographers will each be paid $500 by SG, and the photographer may reimburse you [their] initial fee.” Photographers owned the photos if a set was rejected; if a set was accepted, SuicideGirls owned them in perpetuity. By 2017, the site was receiving 50,000 applications per year; as of 2024, there were only 4,000 “official” (read: paid) SuicideGirls. The current cost of site membership is $19 a month or $99 a year; in a 2021 promotional video, the site claimed to have 500,000 subscribers. 

If you were lucky enough to be selected as an official SuicideGirl, the label followed you for life. The model release form gave SuicideGirls “the exclusive, perpetual and irrevocable right…to copy, use and reuse, publish, distribute, edit…and otherwise exploit Model’s image, picture, likeness, persona, performance and voice…for any and all uses…throughout the universe,” lying in sharp contrast to Selena’s declaration that “the girls are in control of their image and how they’re presented on the site.”   

“If my employer / family / friend finds out, will you take down my pictures?” a question in the FAQ asked. “No,” was the response. “You may ask for your profile and pictures to be archived at any time, but they will remain accessible to members. If you are frightened of someone finding out, please do not apply to be a SuicideGirl.” When a model left in 2004 to pursue a career working for children’s charities, her request to be removed from the site was ignored. That same year, another former model wrote, “Sean has posted on the site on multiple occasions that, once the model has sold her set of pictures to the site, she has NO rights of ownership over those pictures any more. If he wants to put their pictures on playboy.com, or even filthycamsluts.com, he has every right to do so legally – from one particular post he made, in the SG feminists group no less, he implied that the girls should be grateful that he DIDN’T do so.” Around the same time period, one model recalled an instance in which a woman “threatened suicide to Sean on the phone over [her] pictures remaining up, and he said he HOPED SHE DID DIE so she'd stop bothering him.”

Claiming mistreatment, a mass exodus of some of the site’s most popular models took place in 2005. "It’s exploitational to women, and abusive," one of them told the Boston Press, "because it lures women in with a marketing scheme that purports feminism, when in actuality the sole owner of the company is an active misogynist."

In response, SuicideGirls sold low-quality, rejected photo sets of them to a third party distributor, who marketed packages containing 19,000 images for a one time fee of $500. This lifetime fee allowed purchasers to use the images on their own pornographic websites–not only as content, but for promotional purposes. Licensees could incorporate models’ likenesses in advertisements and even logos for sites that claimed to show models “begging for cock” and “loving it from behind.” The package came with full 2257 documentation, which included models’ legal names, birth dates and copies of their ID, essentially doxxing them. It was revenge porn before revenge porn even existed.

SuicideGirls also vigorously defended the non-compete clause it had written into its model contract, threatening former SuicideGirls who worked for similar sites (as well as the sites themselves) with lawsuits.

A neo-conservative Zionist who supported the war in Iraq, Sean would write blog entries on the site with titles like “Are we allowed to say Arab culture is fucked up?” Expressing an opinion counter to his, or really any criticism at all of the website and its workings, would result in models and members being unceremoniously banned.

In 2004, a former SuicideGirl recalled, “I was kicked off the site for a comment which was deemed racist (I've been doing anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing for the last three years) by Sean Suhl, who then turned around and called for an all-out slaughter and genocide against Palestinians.” (A 2006 article quotes him as posting, “all the Palestinians dying of smallpox is hopeful thinking for me. Sue me. It's a death cult not a civilization.”)

In 2008, Sean bought the Los Feliz house for $1.95 million; it’s now valued at almost $3.5 million. The garage of my rent controlled apartment now contains three carloads of merchandise taken from his garage. I am loathe to try and sell the costumes, as a model who danced for SuicideGirls’ burlesque troupe is already attempting to sell them on eBay for $10 to $15 each.

Selena has moved back to Portland; in her last Instagram post, she shows off a fresh dye job and the “bling” she got from the “Portland Tooth Fairy.” Sean’s last post, from November 2023, advertises his latest marijuana business venture, infused pre-rolls with flavors like “Strawberry Milkshake” and “Black Cherry Bomb-Pop”. Where he went, I can’t say. Maybe he joined the IDF. Kidding. The IDF has a height requirement.

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