Why I love Jessica Hopper.

[__christopher]

Suicidegirls.com hinges itself on the idea that there is no male gaze, that pornography can exist outside the bounds of subject/object relations, that there is no soft-focus power imbalance inherent in paying to look at naked girls. Behind this facade, convenient principles of second-wave feminism are folded into convenient principles of "fuck me

Comments

"letting the cat out of the bag"

[triptothemoon]

i was one step away from working/modeling for them. i know, i know, just like every girl in pdx. i have the book/used to have a membership too, and i found the really cute girls to be totally different from most of them shown in ads or whatever.

but yeah, i don't have tattoos, or piercings, so i guess they didn't want me. too bad!

[thisxsucks]

does this mean you won't love me anymore once i tell you i decided to work for them?

siiiiike.

HomicideChicks

[anonymous]

I think suicidegirls.com is nothing more than a porn site with a different theme. I really don't care about the supposed ethics or self-imposed exploitation or whatever. Pornography is the result of a society that represses natural urges like sex. However, I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Re: HomicideChicks

[__christopher]

I've no problem debating things, but I wish people would sign their posts.

Fact is, I agree with you. It's just that suicidegirls has been masquerading as this sort of sex-positive, female-empowering website that happens to have naked girls, when it's really just more lifestyle consumerism. Suicide Girls is to Playboy what Hot Topic is to The Gap, and, as the saying goes, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Hopper and Marshall are definitely from the school of feminism that considers pornography inherently misogynystic, and trumps any free speech concerns (Marshall gushes in her blog that she was writing in the same city [Minneapolis] where Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin wrote an ordinance identifying pornography as a breech of women's civil rights). This is obviously problematic and depends whether or not you think there's a male-gaze (Christopher's answer: sort-of), but it doesn't take away from their assessment of Sean Suhl, which gets obscured by any ethical and philosophical debate.