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SuicideGirls.
Fanny Suicide is in a bubbly, chatty mood, having just come
home from a vegan meal out in Soho. She's been living in London
for the last 18 months working as a production assistant for
MTV, but is currently in the process of moving to Berlin and
preparing for the upcoming Australian SuicideGirls tour.
Depending on who you ask, SuicideGirls is either an alternative softcore porn site featuring girls in the punk/goth/emo vein, or an alternative online community featuring nude photosets and blogs of girls and interviews with alternative artists. It was not long before she left Sydney and started travelling that Fanny applied to become a member. Shortly thereafter her first photoset was placed on the site and she started blogging. Since then it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride.
"I ended up touring America with the Suicide Girls from September to November last year," she explains. "While I was over there they started talking about doing a tour in Australia. I wasn't so much involved in planning it, but I was like 'Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I would love to take it home!'" explains Fanny, excitedly.
There are several hundred SuicideGirls, but the Australian representation is only just starting to grow. "In comparison to the rest of the site, no, there's only ten Australian SuicideGirls," says Fanny. "Some of them, like myself, aren't even in Australia at the moment: there are a couple here in London, and a couple elsewhere, I think. The case is that it's only just starting to take off in Australia. But there's more joining all the time."
I ask Fanny if she likes the exclusivity of being a SuicideGirl. "Well actually helps to have lots of people into it," she admits. "When I first joined up in early 2004, basically nobody had heard of Suicide Girls, had no idea what it was. So at the time, when I was explaining to people what I was doing, because I was so excited about it, people would be like 'What?' Trying to make it not sound like some dirty hardcore porn site was actually quite difficult. But as soon as I hit America and the UK, everybody knows what a Suicide Girl is, from people that I work with to people in the street. Everybody knows, even if they don't go to the site. So it doesn't bother me that it's getting bigger. The bigger it gets, the more opportunities the girls get. Like, for the tour some of the girls are designing underwear for the merchandising part of the site, there's the radio show the girls do. So many girls get so many opportunities, it brings you so much more than just being a pinup."
It's not uncommon for people to question what Fanny does on
the website, so when I ask her about it, she's ready with an
answer. "I used to be a hardcore socialist feminist, so I'm
always up for questions about what I do," replies Fanny. "I
know what position I'm taking. I used to have a real class-based
analysis of what I did and stuff like that. I'm not so much
into that anymore. But in terms of my feminist position on being
a pinup and doing burlesque, stuff like porn and stripping have
always been seen as oppressive and where women are degraded
and they are seen to be doing it out of desperation. I think
that by taking on board these things and reinterpreting them
in the way that we're doing, by making them more empowering
to us, by doing most of the work ourselves, we're taking it
and making it accessible in a way that isn't oppressive towards
us. We have full control in what we do, and I think a lot of
what we do, why the pinups and burlesque have become as big
as it has, is because people have gone back to pre-sexual revolution
ideas and reinterpreting them in another way again. They still
have that element of tease, whereas porn and stripping has been
pushed as hardcore as they can now. You can go out and see someone
get fucked on stage now at a strip club. It's all been pushed
so far, that people now want to take it back to these previous
notions of desire, allure and tease. It's a way of making it
something that people are actually interested in again."
Eddie Chan
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The Suicide Girls tour comes to Fowler's Live on Wed 5 April.
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