When we received Suicide Girls: Beauty Redefined in the mail this morning, I had to fight Leilani for ownership. She saw the "Beauty Redefined" tag and thought it would be an exploration of feminist art. Uhm, no.
The Suicide Girls site has been doing their very own style of highly profitable beauty defining since 2001 by featuring pictures of naked ladies that aren't your typical porn-tastically plastic adult entertainers. Most look like the girl next door, if the girl next door was into lots of ink and piercings. Many were goth-y, punk-y, or alt-y. Different, but only in relation to other porn models.
And though they were beautiful, Suicide Girls also seemed comfortingly normal. Better yet, many of the girls would actually talk to people who viewed their pictures, either via a blog or through message boards. Like getting a lap dance from an especially talkative stripper, Suicide Girls made it easy for an average Joe to imagine that he actually has a chance.
Its had an impact, sure, and pretty much single-handedly launched the alt-porn movement, but saying that Suicide Girls has redefined beauty is more than a stretch.
More (and some possibly nsfw pics) after the jump:
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2009.