Scholarly Critique of SuicideGirls.Com

Scholarly Critique of Suicidegirls.com

Danesa Bender

Communication 3320
Hamline University
November 16, 2007

Research Topic and Researchers:
Feminist sexualities, race and the internet: an investigation of suicidegirls.com by Magnet, Shoshana, in New Media & Society, August 2007, 9 (4), pp. 577-602. Retrieved from Communication & Media Complete on November 8, 2007.

Rationale of the Study:
To determine whether the website suicidegirls.com is a feminist site that liberates women rather than exploiting them, with regards to both sexuality and race.

Literature Review:

• Suicide girls was developed in 2001 as an alternative to an internet porn industry that was overrun with sites featuring fake blondes with fake parts.
• The site features atypical nude photos of tattooed and pierced, intelligent women who participate willingly in the photos and written journals on the site.
• The site claims to promote real beauty and a sex-positive community.
• The site does not claim to be feminist, but is described as such by feminist media.
• Feminist media claim the site is feminist as it redirects the male gaze by allowing women to willingly gaze at themselves—women become the subjects and objects of their own desires (Magnet, 2007, p.580)
• The sort of cybersex promoted by sites like suicidegirls is said to focus on the mind rather than the body, therefore liberating the body from the objectification of traditional pornography.
• Many participants of suicidegirls.com are also gay, bi-sexual or dabble in their attractions to women at the site, thus creating a cybersex world that does not require men.
• Disembodied sex, as such that exists on the internet, can also leave space for ethnocentrism and racism.
• For example: if the default user is assumed to be white, women of colour are often ‘passing’ online unless they explicitly articulate their racial identity. Therefore, cybersex…is not necessarily experienced as ‘liberating’ by an African Canadian woman who must choose either to disrupt the spontaneous flow of sexual discourse by ‘coming out’ as a woman of colour, or engage in cybersex as a white woman. (Magnet, 2007, p. 589)
• On suicidegirls.com, the women are predominantly white.

The authors argue that even though suicidegirls participate willingly in the site, the site still supports the same problems associated with objectivity as traditional porn sites and the site also supports ethnocentric racism.

Research Method:
To analyze the content of the website suicidegirls.com.

Subject of the Study:
The models of suicidegirls.com: including their profiles, journals, photographs and even questions posed directly to the models themselves. Member postings of reaction to photos or journal entries of the models will also be studied.


Research Findings:

• In general, the model participants on suicidegirls.com participate willingly and are more than happy to share their bodies in what they consider a non-threatening environment.
• However, many models also mention that they participate in the site for the money (Magnet, 2007, p. 587).
• Even further, models are put at risk for bodily harm when they display enough personal information for site users to find them.
• Many models experience harassment on the website.
• One model even admits that suicidegirls.com does not succeed as a feminist site because the models are paid (Magnet, 2007, p. 585).
• The site employs mainly white models and treats its minority models as cultural others that add exoticism to the site and also ignores racist comments that appear in response to photos of ethnically diverse models.
• Creators of the site are willing to hire more diverse models as more diversity would lead to a wider audience.
Short Term:
• Creators of the site definitely overlook racial equality and even sexual harassment of the models in favor of continuing to collect the revenue generated by the site.
• Models admit that they site is not necessarily sexually liberating, focused on intellect or safe for them.
• In order to succeed as a forum for women to liberate themselves from society’s traditional sexual mores, suicidegirls.com needs to take ethnicity into account and pay more attention to the treatment of its models in terms of harassment and working conditions.

My Position on this Scholarly Essay:

This article was easy to follow as a piece of narrative, but I found the way in which the author choose to compare her findings to previous literature rather than clearly outline her study a bit confusing as the previous articles read for this class were more straight forward on that point. I appreciated the quotes taken directly from the models as I think they really helped the author prove her point. I think more quotes from the members of the site would have been very interesting as well, as the members probably make the best case as to whether the site objectifies its women or not.

I was surprised to learn that the site did not go very far forward in dispelling the myths of traditional beauty. I can fully support the idea that so-called “grotesque” women should be considered beautiful, but I was disappointed to learn that not even a progressive website such as this one was able to break away from the idea of “western” beauty. Labeling some women as attractive for their “otherness” or “exoticism” reeks of the ethnocentricity of which many western nations are often guilt on many fronts, not just beauty and sexuality.

As a woman, I don’t personally think that participating in any sort of sex trade could be considered feminist, but I do applaud any decision to redefine beauty. All women deserve praise, and I agree with the author that suicidegirls.com fails to praise women in any real new way as they are still pushing minorities to the margins.