THE SUICIDE GIRLS TURN LUCKY 13: SEE EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS FROM THE NEW BOOK
Thirteen years and over 3,000 official Suicide Girls later, SuicideGirls is far more than just a website with punk-rock pinups. Over the span of the last decade, SG has been at the vanguard of ushering in a new global perspective on what beauty is, spawning, along the way, movies, photos, comic books, a clothing line, a burlesque tour, and more, not to mention becoming a social-media juggernaut with a combined reach of over 12 million faithful followers.
In honor of their lucky 13th anniversary this week — and the release of their fourth book,Geekology — we talked with soft-spoken co-founder Selena Mooney, aka Missy Suicide, about humble beginnings, cultural shifts, and why she's a new kind of feminist. Here are the highlights of what she had to say:
Back in 2001, there were really only two types of women celebrated as being beautiful: either a stick-thin waif blonde supermodel like Kate Moss, or the silicone-enhanced blonde, like Pam Anderson. I thought women came in a much larger range of beauty than just those two, and I thought my friends were some of the most beautiful girls in the world. In 2001, girls with tattoos and piercings and such were not celebrated anywhere as being beautiful, so I wanted to take pictures of them feeling sexy and beautiful and proud of themselves, showcasing their artwork and their bodies and lives. So I started taking pictures of them in the same vein as Bunny Yeager did Bettie Page. I wanted to show how they felt sexy about themselves.
I put the photos up online, and gave each of the girls blogs, which, in 2001, was not something that anybody had. It gave them a way they could express themselves and their own work, and created a community around it. People at the time thought I was insane and a) that tattooed girls and nude images would never be popular in any way, shape, or form, and b) that people would not want to see boobies and keep journals about their lives, those things did not mix. People did not want to share themselves, and especially not around boobs. But 13 years later, here we are. We've had hundred of thousands of members.
I think it's a different time than when we started the site. I feel like back in 2001, if we had naked pictures online, it was a different sort of perception. But now almost every person has taken some sort of a naked selfie and sent it to their significant other.
We have a group on SuicideGirls called Suicide Boys, it's been around for probably 10, 12 years now, where members post photos of their members.
We have clothes, we've got books, we've got movies... I think seven movies. We call them video wallpaper. They're like really loose documentary, it's just filming girls, shooting photo sets, and then little interviews. "What's it like to hang out with all these beautiful girls in this house in Italy?" We also have a burlesque tour that's getting ready to hit the States October 14 through December 7. The new book is geek-themed, and the numbers in our burlesque show have a pop-culture geeky bend to them as well. There's a Donnie Darkonumber that's amazing, and Link from Legend of Zelda.
We work with PETA. We also have a charity we do, which is called Pinups for Troops. We send care packages to currently deployed soldiers.
Six or seven years ago, I did an interview with a magazine where they asked if I was feminist, and I blindly walked into that whole minefield. I was like, "Yeah, you know, I do think that I'm a feminist, and I think what SuicideGirls does is feminist." I naively didn't realize that feminism means so many different things to so many different people. They take that word so strongly.
First of all, if you walk into any art museum in the world, you're going to see more boobs than you'll see if you go on SuicideGirls. The female form is the most celebrated subject matter in all of art history. Women should be proud of their bodies and embrace them. The more comfortable you are with your sexuality and your body, the more confident you are and comfortable you are functioning in the world in general. There shouldn't be anything that we should be ashamed about, and the girls on SuicideGirls are embracing their bodies and their femininity. And I feel like that's feminist.
I get letters every day from women around the world thanking me for starting SuicideGirls because they never found women they could relate to that were being celebrated as being beautiful. Hopefully everybody in the world one day will have somebody that they can relate to, that they can look up to and be like, "Hey, I'm cool, everything's good," you know? The world would be a much happier place.
I think that people have this preconceived notion of what a girl with tattoos and piercings and crazy colored hair, what their life looks like, and it's not a very favorable picture. But on SuicideGirls, we have doctors and lawyers and teachers, writers, mothers, and everyone you can imagine. You can't judge a book by its cover, to be cliché.
love this interview @missy this is the link of the page http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/suicide-girls-missy-suicide-photos?src=soc_fcbks