Anatomy of an ethical porn site

Verbal abuse, exploitation, sneaky marketing tactics… could alt-porn giantess SuicideGirls’ female-friendly reputation be nothing but a façade? YEN dissects the rumours and innuendo to find out what’s going on behind the site’s recent exodus

If the world of online erotica was a high school, SuicideGirls.com would be the cool, alternative girl who wrote poetry and smoked in the toilets to Jenna Jameson's head cheerleader.

Founded and run by Selena Mooney (who prefers to go by her SuicideGirls name, 'Missy'), a young woman with a passion for challenging normative perceptions of beauty, the site made waves soon after its 2001 launch because it seemed to put its money where its mouth was. SuicideGirls models were more than just hot bodies – they were real people, and visibly so, interacting with members through the site's blogs and forums. SuicideGirls was porn that even the most militant of feminists could, if not like, at least concede wasn't as bad as most of the stuff out there.

And then in September 2005 over 30 models left the site, a vocal group of them claiming that its image as a woman-friendly operation was little more than a façade, and that while "Missy" was the public face of SuicideGirls, co-founder Sean Suhl was pulling the strings behind the scenes. At around the same time, the site removed some of its more explicit photos, intimating pressure from the FBI. And perhaps most strangely of all, as allegations began to spread around the web, models and SuicideGirls members who asked what was going on say they were removed from the site without explanation.

The allegations soon spread from the net to mainstream US press like Wired and the Washington Post. Could it be? Underneath the tattoos and pink sparkly icons, was SuicideGirls really just "the McDonald's of the fetish/goth/punk erotica community", low on nutrients and high on exploitation?


TROUBLE ON TOUR
While disaffected models left the site as early as 2002, the catalyst for the recent exodus was the events of the SuicideGirls Live burlesque tour and DVD.

Jennifer Caravella, a 28-year-old from San Francisco who modeled for SuicideGirls for two years under the name 'Sicily', has become the unofficial spokeswoman for the anti-SG movement. While other models have spoken out against the site and the people who run it, it is Caravella who speaks with the most detail and conviction. She is also one of only a handful of models willing to speak to the media under her real name.

Caravella performed in the first two of three SuicideGirls tours and claims she was "thrown off without an explanation" when she inquired to Sean Suhl about having a contract drawn up to ensure the models who worked on the DVD would receive the royalties she says they'd been promised if it recouped its costs. It was after that argument that she left the site.

But Caravella says that such arguments and outbursts were not unusual for Suhl – they just weren't usually directed at her. While Caravella says the two of them were friends at first, she also says she saw him yell at other models and staff members on regular basis throughout the tour, a claim supported by Kelly Kleinert - or 'Shera' – who told the Boston Phoenix that Suhl called tour girls "talentless, whores, and ugly".


A CLASH OF EGOS
Ryan Marshall, an independent tour manager who has managed all three SuicideGirls tours so far, says this isn't the case. "These girls would never let anyone be rude to them. For any one of them to say that Sean would call them a 'slut' or a 'whore' is outrageous. None of them would stand for it and I wouldn't stand by and watch it."

While Marshall admits that tensions arose during the second tour, he says they were caused by the stress of trying to put together a good show after the first one sold out theatres but bombed with the press. "Sean and Missy have an incredible work ethic," he says. "They built the site from scratch into this very popular thing in a short period of time. The frustration was picking a group of people we thought would handle [the pressure] and work very hard and have them be lazy and not treat it the way they should.

"Sean is a guy who has to be the boss and unfortunately sometimes you have to be the bad guy when you're in that role. You all stand upstairs and review the show two weeks before it goes out… but Sean's the one who has to go downstairs and tell everyone what's wrong with it - so Sean's the bad guy."

But that Suhl was the "boss" while Missy was the public face and voice of the site was one of the main reasons the girls who left the site felt so betrayed. Caravella claims Suhl told her point blank that SuicideGirls had been his idea. Another former model, 'Apnea', who was booted off the site for modeling for a competitor in a breach of her SuicideGirls contract, says of the working relationship between the two, "I'm pretty sure what [the public] see is not how it is."


WHO CALLS THE SHOTS?
Missy is audibly upset by the suggestion that she and Suhl are not equals in the management of the site. "I run all of the day to day operations of the site. I have since the beginning," she says. "I work 14-16 hours a day and it's a little insulting to think that somebody would say that I'm just a figurehead. It pisses me off, quite honestly."

Olivia Ball, the site's programmer and one of four co-owners, wrote in her onsite blog, "If you believe that business dealings are the most important part of SG, then you would be right in thinking Sean runs the show. The business side of things has become his job. Missy runs the model and content side of things.

"In the end though, SG is Missy's baby. She is the person that it all hinges on. She is the one we all call the boss, and she calls the important shots."

And Missy is keen to defend her baby's credentials. "SuicideGirls is a place where women of all shapes, sizes and forms of beauty can be appreciated as being beautiful," she says with obvious passion. "Where a girl's mind is just as sexy as her body. Where girls can meet people around the world and share their interests."

To its credit, SuicideGirls uses predominantly female photographers, and models are able to choose not only which photographers they were work with, but direct their own lighting, outfits and makeup. Then there are the creative opportunities the site gives its models. SuicideGirl 'Manko' tells the story of how slashing a t-shirt into a minidress in front of Suhl one night turned into an offer to design clothes for the site's online shop. 'Twwly' says site staff taught her more about photo retouching than her Bachelors degree in Art did. The majority of SuicideGirls employees are women, and most of those are former models.


PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY
It would seem the problem is less one of blatant exploitation and more one of personality and presentation. Caravella admits that for the most part, her experiences with SuicideGirls were positive. "I had some really amazing experiences working for SuicideGirls," she says. "I got to tour the country as a performer in the burlesque show, I met quite a few wonderful people – in fact, a couple of my closest friends were found via SuicideGirls. I loved the actual modeling aspect and putting creative effort into my sets." Former models 'Misty Dawn' and Apnea report similarly positive experiences with the site up to their departure.

But that the complaints are mostly personality-based does not mean that they are not worth airing. If what Caravella alleges of Suhl is true – that he talks down to women, "loves a girl who acts like a little girl [and] treats them accordingly", calls them 'sluts', 'whores' and 'fucked up', and has been known to make remarks like "Have you seen what girls look like after they turn 30?" – there are obvious contradictions between the co-owner of this progressive porn site and the values it purports to stand for.

'Dia', an outspoken former SuicideGirl who left in 2002, claims to have heard Suhl say worse, ranging from, "You do know we are planning on selling the site to a major porn conglomerate eventually, like Hustler?" over lunch the day they met to, "You know what the best part about running SuicideGirls is? All the free cam whores."

Throughout her 6-month involvement with the site, Dia noticed other ways SuicideGirls' rhetoric contradicted its practice. She says models were not permitted to discuss their significant others on the site, but were encouraged to fight with one another to improve what Suhl called 'ratings'. "Ratings are big to Sean. He has hit counters and charts on all of his models and their sets. Really, just like the stock market. His models are, to him, product, even the ones he's really fond of, still product. If that isn't the antithesis of feminism and humanism both, I don't know what is."


WHERE TO FROM HERE?
Both Dia and Jennifer Caravella say they want more people to know about the darker side of SuicideGirls, in the hope that it will help them make more informed choices about what they get involved in. Caravella says, "SuicideGirls is not empowering - it's actually quite competitive. SuicideGirls tracks every comment made about you, they have sets of the month, it's basically a huge popularity contest – and I think that an environment like that weakens women psychologically and pits them against one another, whether they're conscious of it or not."

Are their words having any effect? Dia says, "I've taken to calling the predictable reaction of members now, when confronted with information, the Voluntary Ignorance Movement. Although I also find that when people receive the testimony of enough models, they choose to leave."

On the modeling side of things, while 48 girls became inactive over July-October 2005, 135 new models joined to replace them in that same period. The site receives around 1000 applications from wannabe SuicideGirls each month and shows no sign of letting up.

For Missy, the statistics speak for themselves. "It's three girls in the history of the site, and there's probably close to 1000 girls on the site at this time," she says. "To have three girls who are that upset in 1000 of very opinionated, strong-willed women - if there are only three that are that upset, I must be doing something right."

- Rachel Hills

Published in YEN, February/March 2006.