By Jedmunds
Remember when Walt Disney made the here-to-fore seedycarnival safe for children? Or how about when Vince McMahon did the same withprofessional wrestling in the 1980's? The recent attempts to do somethingsimilar with porn by Suicide Girls is being exposed as the rank facade it is.Not that they were trying to make porn safe for children as such, but anattempt to market Suicide Girls, not as something seedy and exploitative, butempowering and alternative, with an almost wholesome fondness for theexcessively pierced, tattooed hipster punk rockeress next door.
I never really got into the Suicide Girls thing, myself. Itseemed too image conscious to be the kind of true amateur porn with which mydruthers lie. But compared to the cold sterility of the spread- eagled blondeof plastic proportions in an anonymous drably-lit studio, it seemed like a step inthe right direction for mainstream porn, and if not aesthetically, than atleast ethically. As it turns out, holdingaside the empowerment vs exploitation debate, publicized by the recent resignation of 30 models, Suicide Girls is not the sort of empowering pornography that “even feminists can be comfortable with.” The problems “range from financial disagreements, to unauthorized modification and censorship of journals, to termination of models who shot for other companies, and even verbal abuse by Sean Suhl, a co-founder of SG.” As onemodel put it:
