Internet culture

Mommy & Me

Kyla — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Mommy blogs are big business these days. A recent Washington Post profile on ur-mommy blogger Heather Armstrong (a.k.a. Dooce) suggested that her site could be raking in up to 40 grand a month. While most mothers who blog are nowhere near as influential (and their sites nowhere near as lucrative), they take pride and satisfaction in the work they do, and the websites they maintain offer valuable community, a sense of connection to other parents, and occasionally a little pocket change. All kinds of mothers keep blogs, and the term “mommy blogs” refers to a huge range of content, from labors of love produced by one impassioned writer to online communities made up of moms writing collectively. And yet the image of the mommy blogger is about as progressive as June Cleaver—it overlooks the legions of mom bloggers who aren’t white, heterosexual, married women.  

The digital divide has been well documented: According to the Pew Research Center, in 2005 57 percent of African-Americans went online, compared to 70 percent of whites, and according to their 2007 report, 56 percent of Latinos went online. Given that blogging takes time and energy as well as money for access, there’s a class divide at play as well as a racial/ethnic one. But how much of the absence of moms of color in the large mommy community is due to the digital divide and how much to racism, overt or otherwise? 

The lack of women of color in the established mommy blogosphere—BabyCenter.com’s MOMformation, Offsprung, and Club Mom, to name a few—likely results from a lack of recruitment. One fast-growing community, SV Moms Group, which currently has six blogs featuring more than 150 writers, boasts only a small handful of bloggers of color. Jill Asher, the site’s cofounder and editor, says she mainly uses word-of-mouth techniques like e-mails to her existing writers to recruit new writers, but she also surfs the web, looking for that new writer who has “the right voice.” Yet such limited outreach doesn’t push individuals to look beyond their own circles for new voices and results in mommy blogs that suffer from sameness. The lack of moms of color matters for the simple reason that our different backgrounds—e.g., ethnicity, class, religion—are reflected in the way we parent; this difference should be seen on blogs that claim to represent moms in general. 

When Mommy Blogger A waxes rhapsodic over the $5-a-pound local, organic heirloom tomatoes she picked up at Whole Foods, does that resonate with readers (or other mommy bloggers) who struggle to put an entire dinner on the table for $5? If Mommy Blogger B brilliantly paints the picture of how she had to fire her nanny over religious differences, can a working-class mom of color feel that story after her own 10-hour workday? This cross-cultural division extends to the comments section of blogs: What does it say to writers in a community when someone’s snarky post about nanny stealing gets a ton of responses and another’s post about explaining sexism and racism in the presidential race to her 10-year-old daughter gets not a peep?  

A writer from the Chicago Moms Blog (a blog for which—full disclosure—I write) has said that one reason she likes mommy blogging communities is that they do offer a diversity of views and a huge amount of support. Still, these communities only offer that if you fit into the community that is already there. The ultimate question is this: Is it reasonable to expect that communities like Chicago Moms Blog or Babble have a diversity of voices, ones from all corners of race and class and religion?  

At the 2007 BlogHer conference, devoted to women who blog, blogger Mocha Momma questioned the lack of diversity on mommy blogs and wondered why marketers don’t target the blogs of moms of color. Given the huge number of perks—from books and body lotions to test runs of minivans and kiddie cell phones—that flow into the momosphere, when the blogs of mothers of color miss out on marketing, they miss out on not just these freebies but valuable ad revenue as well. They also miss out on a basic sense of acknowledgment and representation.  

So how do we get more parents of color on mainstream sites—and, perhaps more important, ensure that they don’t feel tokenized or out of place in those spaces? One solution is to support the work of mothers of color within existing communities. Commenting, blogrolling, and networking can be great tools for this. Another answer is to dig a little deeper and seek out equally popular but less commercially driven sites formed by parents of color, like Anti-Racist Parent, Mocha Moms, and Kimchi Mamas. These sites are opening eyes by engaging their readers in a conversation about raising children in a racist society. Jump in, start reading, and hopefully you’ll find a few like-minded moms to create a community with, free diapers or not.  

Veronica I. Arreola is a professional feminist, amateur mom, seasoned wife, and newbie freelance writer.

From the Archive: Wack Attack

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:08:00 -0500

We were under attack. It was late on an August night. I was trying not to come down with a cold and just about to go to bed. But I was also guest-blogging at Feministe that week, so I logged on to check my e-mail and moderate comments one last time before I turned in.

I was already overwhelmed. I’d done my fair share of blogging, but never before on a site with so much traffic or such active commenters. Between writing timely posts, separating the trolls and spammers from the innocents in the moderation filter, and trying to maintain a civil debate between polarized commenters on my threads, I was marveling that anyone could do this week in and week out and still keep a day job.

Then I got word that a loosely organized cybermob known as Anonymous was attempting to crash feminist sites, including Feministe, flooding comments sections with misogynist rants and threatening feminist bloggers with rape and other violence. This had happened before, but never with such organized force. No one was sure which systems would hold and which would fail; we didn’t even know which site would be attacked next. Privately, we worried about our safety and strategized about how to defend our sites and ourselves. Publicly, we decried these attacks in blog after blog. We knew our attackers wanted to silence us, and we refused to give them that satisfaction.

It turned out that we were wrong. Wrong about what their goals were and wrong about what our response should have been.

A little background I lacked at the time: Anonymous was not formed to carry out an antifeminist agenda. Anonymous exists to create hostile chaos on the web—or, as Anonymous itself likes to put it, to produce “lulz.” Lulz, a corrupted form of “lols” (chat-room speak for “laughing out loud”), at its simplest translates to “laughs.” It’s used by a group of websites and message boards that are dedicated to a very particular brand of humor. What brings on lulz? Teenage suicide attempts, obscene experiments in Photoshopping, and anything else that will get a strong reaction of shock or outrage from someone. In the past year, Anonymous’s activities have included posting a fake BDSM ad in Craigslist’s Women-Seeking-Men Casual Encounters section, and then publishing the responses, photos, and e-mails of every man who responded; attacking and successfully disabling several white-supremacist websites; and hacking the account of a popular young woman on YouTube in order to replace her videos with their own sexually violent ones and to issue damaging and embarrassing communications on her behalf. As this piece went to press, Anonymous was making national headlines with an attack on the Church of Scientology’s site. One of their many mottos is, “Anonymous: Because none of us are as cruel as all of us.”

When they turned their attention to feminist websites, their goal was not, in fact, to silence us. Just like a schoolyard bully, Anonymous was out to get a reaction from us and brag about it. But also like a bully’s actions, their attacks had real and damaging consequences for us. So react we did.

Even as the attacks were happening, there was much debate within the feminist blogosphere about how to respond to them. Part of the issue was that some people had greater knowledge of Anonymous than others, but it went deeper than that: While Anonymous’s targets may be random, their methods are not. The culture of lulz is saturated with juvenile, racist, misogynist, and homophobic language and imagery. They use “fag” and “faggot” as blanket insults against each other and everyone else, even appending it to other words to make compound insults (like “newfag” for a newbie). They make jokes about raping your mother, and define rape as, among other things, “commonly known as black sex (as that is how it is traditionally done in Africa).” They even use the term “image raep” (wacky spelling and intentional typos being another hallmark of the Anonymous community) to describe one of their favorite methods for trying to take down a website: using a program to automatically reload any and all images on that site over and over until the monthly bandwidth for that site is used up and the site host is forced to take it down.

So when they decided to get some lulz out of feminists, they didn’t exactly have to work hard to find the strategies that would piss us off the most. In addition to launching what’s known as “distributed denial of service” or ddos attacks, in which the goal is to use up the bandwidth of the site or otherwise interfere with it technically so it can no longer be accessed by readers (“image raeping” being only one of numerous ways to accomplish this), they flooded comments sections and bloggers’ inboxes with hateful rants and threats of violence:

Heart, this is horrible. I’m sorry that this is happening to you. These people want nothing to do but to hurt you and your cause. I feel for you.
In fact, I want to feel you now. I’d like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I’d penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in.

They zeroed in on one particular blogger, whose online name is Biting Beaver, posting her home address and calling for Anonymous members to kidnap her son and place damning phone calls to her neighbors and her local police.

These attacks were hardly taking place in a vacuum. They came only months after violent, gendered threats on technology writer Kathy Sierra made international headlines when they blossomed unchecked on popular and respected tech blogs, even going so far as to include her personal address and phone number, and ultimately causing her to withdraw from public speaking and shut down her blog. They came less than a year after the law-school website AutoAdmit was sued for supporting a culture in which female law students were systematically harassed and threatened in discussion threads that invited commenters to vote on the relative hotness of nonconsenting women, discussed some women’s daily routines in terrifying detail, and threatened to “hatefuck” them when the women dared to object.

Female bloggers writing on not-explicitly-feminist sites, even progressive ones, knew that no matter what topic they were addressing, comments would inevitably devolve either into discussions of their fuckability, or of their extreme status as “feminazis.” And, according to a 2006 University of Maryland School of Engineering study, female-named chat-room users got more threatening and/or sexually explicit messages than male-named users—25 times more, in fact. The phrase “blogging while female” had already entered the cultural lexicon, and every feminist blogger knew it.

So, though coolheaded techies familiar with Anonymous suggested we ignore them until they went away, most of us were angry and scared, sick of being angry and scared, and ready to take a stand. We would never consent to being bullied or silenced in “real life,” and we weren’t going to take it online either.

But what does “not taking it” look like online? It’s nearly impossible to find agreement. Reporting threats and harassment to authorities is much easier said than done in a world where identities are invented with the click of a key and making one’s location untraceable is second nature to a seasoned cyberstalker. Add in the global jurisdiction issues that plague most Internet crime, and a law-enforcement infrastructure that in many instances discounts women’s claims in the physical realm, let alone online, and there’s not a lot of justice to be found through official channels.

Meanwhile, the personal toll on bloggers was mounting. I was losing sleep and getting sicker worrying about my safety and the safety of the site, to the point where I missed two days of work. A blogger who declined to be named for this article pulled out of a conference appearance because she didn’t want to sacrifice her anonymity. Mary Borsellino, who runs the site Girl-Wonder.org, one of the first sites to be attacked, hit a more serious breaking point: “Health-wise, the attacks were yet another stress in a stressful workload—I ended up in the emergency room because my body stopped coping with my weariness, and I became very ill.”

These costs are common when women are attacked online. Sierra’s widely publicized case, aside from causing her to quit blogging, ultimately led her to fear leaving her house. Jill Filipovic, a house blogger at Feministe and one of the targets of the AutoAdmit threads, has sought therapy to help her cope with the stresses of online attacks and their aftermath. Even veteran techie and pop culture writer Annalee Newitz confesses that after a particularly ugly comment thread about her weight erupted on Slashdot she responded by losing 15 pounds.

And the systemic costs are just as troubling. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study reported on in the Washington Post in April 2007 found that the number of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plummeted from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, due to women dropping out in response to “worrisome behavior in chat rooms.” When the Anonymous attacks hit, many bloggers scrambled to install comment moderation, beef up their online aliases, and improve their privacy settings on social-networking sites like Flickr and Facebook.

This naturally resulting defensiveness not only takes time, energy, and skill, it also squelches discourse and makes it harder to organize for change. “I would have loved to have established some sort of private e-mail conversation between Biting Beaver, Heart, Kathy Sierra, and other feminist and female bloggers who have faced harassment,” says Filipovic, “but that becomes difficult when the first logical reaction to harassment is to hide all of your personal and contact information, and to immediately distrust strangers who contact you.”

So what’s a web-savvy woman to do? Some see the very fear created for women online as the greatest danger, and advise women to disengage from it at all costs.

“Women are often told to be more afraid of things like [online threats] than men are. It’s part of a culture that wants to keep women from being part of the Internet community,” says Newitz. “It’s propaganda. There’s going to be that tiny percentage of time when a guy who’s being a wanker turns out to be a serious threat, but that’s always going to happen, whether you’re on the Internet or walking down the street. Most of the time, these are tactics used to intimidate women into being afraid to speak out online. I just don’t want to have any of that. I’d rather take the risk.”

Her colleagues working in tech fields tend to agree. Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency, a consulting group that helps companies strengthen communities online, advocates “taking it like a man”: “The ‘boys’ get harassed, threatened, bullied, etc., every day and just brush it off. They concentrate on the positive feedback (or those who are successful do).”

But “taking it like a man” is easier said than done when we not only don’t get attacked the way men do online, but also have different real-life contexts for understanding those attacks. Many women have already been victims of sexual and other violence long before they start speaking out online, which makes it nearly impossible for some to just “brush off” explicit threats, no matter how infrequently anyone makes good on those threats. (For the record, everyone I spoke with for this article agreed that online threats are almost never acted upon in real life.) It’s a heck of a lot easier to “take it like a man” if you’ve got the life experience and privilege of, well, a man.

Women of color have it particularly bad, as they’re attacked racially as well as sexually in ways that painfully mirror real-life experience. Jenn Fang, author of the blog Reappropriate, describes her experiences online:

When I participated in a popular APIA [Asia & Pacific Internet Association] forum…feminist voices were shot down by male participants who threw around words like ‘whore’ and ‘slut’ within their counterarguments. In another forum, men angry that I am unabashedly partnered in a stable, eight-year-long interracial relationship have accused me of ‘loving to suck white dick,’ having ‘daddy issues,’ and worse. They re-posted photos of my loved ones (that I used to host on this site to share with real-life friends) and made racially and sexually derogatory remarks about the people in them, including mean-spirited mockery of my boyfriend’s mother. I no longer host personal photos for this reason. Still others have e-mailed me hateful judgments and presuppositions of my personal life while assuming materialistic, superficial motivations for all Asian-American women. In all these behaviors—commonly received by many women in cyberspace—it is the woman and her experience that becomes decentralized; even in assaulting us, male aggressors shift the focus from a female blogger’s feminism to a denial of her self-worth based exclusively upon the men in her life. It is certainly enough to make any sane woman question why she exposes herself to such treatment.

What’s more, not publicly discussing the ways we’re being harassed and intimidated online isolates the women who are most vulnerable from both community support and the know-how necessary to fight back. Even those who advocate ignoring harassment as the best defense acknowledged that the attention paid to attacks on women online in the wake of the Sierra case has helped women with similar problems find each other and begin to work on solutions.

Lisa Stone, cofounder of the conference and online community BlogHer, advises women to make like the Amish and shun cyberharassers, but concedes, “If there is a silver lining to the recent attention given to online attacks on prominent women, it’s that many women now know they are not the only ones receiving this kind of abuse.”

What the cacophony of opinion and experience suggests is a nuanced response, with consideration given to each situation, the people involved, and the perception of the risks at hand. “As a general rule, I’m a proponent of speaking out and shutting down those who harass, threaten, and attack people online, but context matters,” says Filipovic. “The AutoAdmit attacks are a good example—I knew about them for months and assumed that if I just didn’t respond, they’d go away. They didn’t; in fact, they escalated. When I finally responded with a post on my blog and had a bit of a back-and-forth with the commenters, the attacks initially escalated further but then petered out. I think a lot of people who leave comments on message boards like that can forget that they’re talking about real people who may be reading their words. Once you humanize yourself, some of them will knock it off. Others, of course, will just become angrier, but that’s the risk you take.”

Of course, in the case of Anonymous, that’s exactly what happened. Nearly every blogger who condemned the attacks became a target, because a reaction they could laugh about was exactly what Anonymous was after. (I’ll very likely be their next target once this article makes the rounds. Hi, Anonymous!) And the public debate between those who argued for ignoring them and those who argued against silence at any cost just amused them further.

There are some pieces of advice, though, that cut across situation and opinion. Here are a few principles upon which nearly everyone I spoke with agreed:

1. Don't Silence Yourself.

Even the staunchest advocates for ignoring harassment support this stance, because they want women to keep writing online. Do whatever you need to do to feel safe, but don’t quit. Your silence gives every fearmonger and troll a thrill of victory. The more women who insist on being heard online, the better place the web will be for feminist voices.

2. We Must Change the Culture Together

Hold offending sites accountable for the culture they create, and if they refuse to respond, shun them in favor of sites that welcome women’s voices. Report the identities of attackers to authorities whenever possible, and shame them online whenever practical. Pressure media outlets to cover online attacks on women as a serious issue without contributing to the culture of fear that leads to the silencing of women. Call on the men who claim to be our allies to do this work alongside us, and hold them accountable for moderating their spaces responsibly and for reading and linking to women bloggers at the same rate they do men. Join a group that’s concerned with these issues, such as the feminist bloggers’ listserv (contact here) or Take Back the Tech. Make this their problem more than ours.

3. The Best Defense is Good Tech.

If we’re going to be challenging the cyber–status quo, it pays to be technologically prepared. Says Kevin Andre Elliott, who writes as Thin Black Duke and suffered heinous racial attacks when he dared to speak out against Anonymous, “I kept up on [Anonymous’s] boards for some time, and I remember at one point many of the members were lamenting that Biting Beaver and Heart were just too web savvy for them to effectively do what they wanted to do. That made me smile.”

There are many ways to protect your site from attack and shut down offenders before they start, including hosting your photos separately from your blog (so that “image raep” techniques don’t work), and hosting your site on a feminist-friendly ISP like MayFirst, which understands the political as well as technical issues involved and will work with you to keep your site safe on your terms.

4. Better Together.

Another way to stay protected is to blog in a group—that way you can share responsibility, support each other, exchange knowledge, and have greater coverage when it counts. Girl-Wonder.org’s Borsellino learned this lesson the hard way:

The moderators had been dealing with threads full of pornography for hours and hours—they had the power to delete the threads, but not to ban the posters. Only I, as the sole admin at the time, could do that. Needless to say, there are a lot more people with admin powers on the boards now! It’s monitored 24 hours a day, every day. The site was taken over by amazing people while I recovered, and so in the end it was a major boon for the site. But for me it was a huge cost, one I wish I hadn’t had to pay.

Several activists have floated the idea of forming a Tech Defense Force, available to help with preventive measures as well as to respond to female bloggers under attack with crucial tech knowledge and support. But without funding, it’s hard to imagine it coming together, as the radical techies required for such a project are already overstretched with good works and good work.

In the end, it’s no easier to imagine an Internet without misogyny than it is to imagine a world without misogyny. We’re working on it, but it’s going to take a long time to get there. In the meantime, as Borsellino puts it, “We’ll just get better at fighting back.”

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer and performer. She wrote about the online attacks on Kathy Sierra in Bitch no. 36.

Sex, Dreads, and Rock 'n' Roll

Debbie Rasmussen — Sun, 15 Dec 2002 17:36:33 -0500

“People think I have the greatest job in the world,” says “Spooky” Suicide. On any given day, he’s busy coding, designing, or holding up the business end of his website. It doesn’t sound too glamorous—until you realize that his site, Suicide Girls, is probably the best known in a growing trend in adult entertainment: alternative, independent web porn. Of course, amateur pornography is nothing new—the popularity of home videos and webcams have made it relatively easy and cheap to produce—but the average amateur site doesn’t feature girls with baby-blue dreadlocks and septum piercings. As one Suicide Girls slogan declares, “We’ve kidnapped your daughter and given her a tattoo.”

Though this kind of alternative web porn has gained momentum only recently, its roots reach back a few years—practically an eon in web history—to the mid-to- late ’90s, when the popularity of webcam-based pay sites (especially Jennicam.com, which documents a young woman’s home life in real time) suggested that people were willing to pay for a peek into someone else’s life. The same era saw the launch of web-based magazine Nerve, which brought its thought-provoking self-described “literate smut” to audiences looking for a mix of essays, interviews, photographs, and community. All the while, increasingly affordable technology encouraged entrepreneurs to develop their own projects.

The eventual result of these trends is a variety of subculture-specific porn sites. In the mood for Day-Glo hair? Check out Raverporn. How about a straight-edge girl? Try Friction USA. Mods playing with Star Wars dolls? Head to Supercult. Most of these sites go beyond the standard naked-picture fare, offering not just erotic writing but also scene reports and record reviews. Others offer even more, with member profiles or—in the case of Burning Angel—interviews with punk bands, exotic-dancer union organizers, and pro-porn documentary filmmakers. There’s no question that these “indie” porn sites stand out from the thousands of other salacious sites out there. Generally speaking, they’re designed better and they avoid sleazy pornspeak. Instead of showcasing peroxide, stilettos, and silicone, their main features are piercings, tattoos, and dyed hair. You’re more likely to find a self-described feminist anarchist gardener at these sites than a hot ’n’ horny, barely legal teen. But are they really challenging the old guard, or is it just the same old boobs in a punk-rock bra?

Suicide Girls sprang up about a year ago, when Spooky and his friend Missy had grown tired of pornography that only featured pneumatic-breasted, big-haired women. Despite the abundance of adult websites, Spooky and Missy couldn’t find any that featured punk, goth, and emo girls. So with Missy’s photography skills and Spooky’s technical know-how, they joined the adult entertainment world and started their own site. Now in its second year, Suicide Girls is the place to see girls with pink hair, girls with vivid tattoos, girls with plugs in their ears, girls with black lipstick (as with most porn, it’s always “girls,” never “women”). But it’s not just nudie shots, says Spooky. “It’s so much more than that. We have a community that gets traffic like you wouldn’t believe.” He points to the site’s message boards, member profiles, chat rooms, and online calendar—all content generated by paying customers. Spooky seems happy that many of the site’s members hold real-life gatherings, attend Suicide Girls burlesque shows, and even find dates through the site.

Along with the community offerings, the appeal of Suicide Girls lies in the girls’ interactions with members. Each Suicide Girl has her own section, which holds her profile, photo sets, and journals. Members can leave notes for their favorite Suicide Girl, drop her an e-mail, or check in on what she’s up to. Girls typically update their journals a few times each week (some more, others less) with whatever they feel like sharing.

Through the journals, photo sets, and message boards, it’s easy to see that the Suicide Girls enjoy expressing their sexuality to an eager audience. The Girls look genuinely happy to be posing, and, says Spooky, “We hope to be cute and naughty instead of dirty and sleazy.” In contrast to the often-degrading images of traditional pornography, the Suicide Girls call their own shots—literally. They choose the themes of their own photo shoots and control everything from the poses right down to the color of their thongs—making the site a genuine and refreshing example of women actively in touch with their sexuality without the trappings of shame or exploitation. Erotic filmmaker Candida Royalle, a former porn actress herself and a longtime champion of women’s sexuality, sees the Suicide Girls’ philosophy as part of a larger shift in societal attitudes. “The next generation of sexually empowered young women is definitely pushing the envelope even more than my generation,” she says. “They’re a lot more aggressive in proclaiming their right to great sex and freedom of sexual expression. They’re not sugarcoating it at all.”

And the goal of Suicide Girls and sites like it is to make these women more than just anonymous T&A shilling illicit online kicks for horny guys. In the offering of distinct personalities, the site stands out from mainstream adult sites and magazines. Sure, Playboy has always profiled its Playmates, but does anybody really believe that Miss March gets turned on by long walks on the beach? Conversely, the Suicide Girls’ profiles and journals are believable. The profiles list their favorite bands, books, and movies, and if the format is meant to titillate, many of the girls insist on doing so at their own pace—as with those who finish the sentence “I lost my virginity...” with sassy lines like “but I still have the box it came in” or “and it sucked.” The journal format is well used in porn to grant customers the illusion that they’re being given a glimpse into the girls’ personal lives; but at Suicide Girls, the journals are introspective and—as with one girl’s story of being assaulted, or another’s description of family strife following the death of her grandmother—often not erotic at all. It’s a startling shift from fantastical reality to real reality. In these cases, the Suicide Girls are not only physically naked; they’re also emotionally fleshed out.

But one major way in which Suicide Girls are not that different from their Playboy counterparts is that despite their tattoos, hair coloring, and creative piercings, they fall neatly within the confines of mainstream beauty standards. Imagine giving the varsity cheerleading squad makeovers at Hot Topic, and you wouldn’t be too far off. Most of the models here (and on other indie-porn sites, too) are thin, white, and traditionally beautiful. Fat girls—hell, even average plump girls—aren’t Suicide Girls, and with only a couple of exceptions, neither are girls of color. It’s not that punk and indie scenes are devoid of these women, so their apparent exclusion from the site suggests that Suicide Girls and others aren’t seeing the alternatives in “alternative.” There’s a certain kind of hypocrisy in a site that pats itself on the back for being “different,” yet seems to equate that only with being different from others featuring blond Pamela Anderson manquŽs, a fact that Spooky himself admits in a recent issue of Punk Planet: “There is an idea of beauty that is just Western media, and it permeates how we choose girls as well. And that’s where we may be failing.”

So what are the site’s creators looking for in a new model? “Someone who is attractive, who has a unique style, who has something interesting to say,” Spooky says. “We want them to be interested in becoming a Suicide Girl for the right reasons. It’s not going to happen if they just want a quick buck or to piss off their boyfriend.” He adds that being a Suicide Girl requires a commitment to keeping a journal, not just a one-time photo shoot. But it seems to be well worth it for participants in search of a little naked notoriety: A house advertisement boasts of the “World-Famous Suicide Girls,” and while the site is hardly a household name, the boast is more than mere marketing savvy. Becoming a Suicide Girl is a fast ticket to moderate celebrity, a sign that you’re someone. The perks range from free show tickets and records to the more lavish: Courtney Love brought some models to appear with her on MTV, as did members of the Strokes. Whenever a new set of photos appears, compliments from fellow models and members follow. It’s a near-constant flow of admiration and approval—something that many punk and goth girls have never heard before.

It’s no wonder, then, that many women are vying to become part of the nude elite. Each week, a new Suicide Girl is introduced; most come from online applications. The number of would-be models is staggering: An average of 350 young women a week apply to become Suicide Girls. They send in a picture, explain why they want to join the site, and wait as Missy and Spooky evaluate the applicants. Of these hundreds of hopefuls, relatively few are considered. Those women then answer essay questions, get to know Missy and Spooky, and are perhaps eventually inducted. With all the essay questions and interviews, the application process is almost like rushing a punk-rock porn sorority. Many will apply, but few will be chosen. The irony is that punk and goth subcultures have traditionally been welcoming places for the social misfit; now there’s a whole new level of weeding out the (un)desirables.

And there’s always a fresh new face wanting to be more desirable than the last. In more than a few journals, models quietly admit to insecurities heightened by their involvement. They don’t feel as pretty as the new girls—or, as one girl laments, being part of the site has “done a number” on her self-esteem. The initial rush of being a Suicide Girl—seeing yourself looking sexy, hearing others discuss your naked hotness, answering friendly fan mail—doesn’t always last. For every Suicide Girl who feels validated and beautiful, there are hundreds left wondering why they didn’t make the cut.

Suicide Girls also distinguishes itself from its more mainstream competition by staying fairly tame. “We won’t do penetration or spread shots,” Spooky promises. “We want to keep it on the R-rated or Playboy level.” Yet a cursory look through the newest photo sets proves otherwise. In one, a redhead named Morgan licks a popsicle before spreading her legs for the camera. Another set features Sasha putting a vibrator in her vagina. When later asked about this discrepancy, Spooky says that he had no idea that such content was on the site. “Missy does not censor the girls,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s debatable whether something is a spread shot or not. The idea is that we never focus on requiring the girls to do something like this. If a photo is important to a model, that’s why it goes up.”

It’s a convenient answer, one that seems full of female empowerment. In fact, that’s the subtle message surrounding the site: Naked sisters doin’ it for ourselves! And it’s the fact that women have a say in the site’s content that really sets Suicide Girls apart, even from other indie sites. “Are there any other sites where the models are as involved with what’s going on with the site?” Spooky asks. But the models’ creative input invites some other contentious questions: If the girls are writing journals, posting in message boards, and making decisions about their photo shoots, why aren’t they making more money? Suicide Girls pays between $100 and $200 for each photo shoot. When you factor in the time the Suicide Girls spend updating their pages and participating in the online community, it’s not a very good wage. Money is a touchy issue in the land of Suicide Girls. Spooky and Missy aren’t living the Hefner high life, but the site does earn more than enough to cover their $10,000 in monthly expenses. So for all the talk of having models involved in running the site—and, to be fair, some Suicide Girls work full-time as html coders or in order fulfillment—it’s a little disappointing that they aren’t sharing in more of the wealth. Yes, Suicide Girls is a business, but since its owners insist that it’s also so much more, one might expect its pay scale to be more progressive.

Spooky bristles when asked if he and Missy run Suicide Girls from a feminist perspective. “I don’t consider us either feminist or antifeminist,” he says. “I think that for some girls, posing for the site is a feminist act. The intention of us giving the girls journals is not to promote the idea that women have something to say, it’s that we are interested in what they have to say...but not for a political goal.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Candida Royalle: “I don’t see [Suicide Girls] as a feminist site, in the same way that people were quick to label my movies as feminist porn. The point is, not everything is black and white. Yes, the act of taking charge of the means of production and doing what we want is an act of feminism, but I don’t think it necessarily means [the product is] feminist.”

Royalle’s comments perfectly capture the conflicts and ambiguities of Suicide Girls. Whether the intention exists or not, much of the site is produced in at least a slightly feminist fashion. Missy and Spooky do defy the stereotype of the exploitative pornographer, and the models have full control over their images. Everyone involved is overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the project because, they say, it differs from other adult sites. Yet despite the message boards and model profiles, the tattoos and the pink hair, Suicide Girls succeeds only in being a different-looking version of traditional pornography. It borrows loosely from the tenets of punk and feminism, but winds up being a version of existing porn dressed up with a new fashion statement, rather than a true revision of it. Turns out Suicide Girls has more in common with Playboy than the minds and bodies behind it would like to imagine.

All photos, journal entries, etc. used in title image are courtesy of and copyrighted by Suicide Girls.

Annie Tomlin gets naked every day before stepping into the shower. She keeps a journal at http://annie.newdream.net.

The Washingtonienne

Debbie Rasmussen — Thu, 15 Apr 1999 18:11:20 -0400

“I have a ‘glamour job’ on the Hill. That is, I could not care less about gov or politics, but working for a Senator looks good on my resume. And these marble hallways are such great places for meeting boys and showing off my outfits.” So begins The Washingtonienne, the short-lived blog of one Jessica Cutler, a young Capitol Hill Staff Assistant since dubbed the “New-insky” for her chronicling of kinky sex among D.C.’s power elite. Using her e-nom de plume, Cutler spent a few weeks earlier this year posting online commentary regarding her job, her shoes, and her liaisons with six Hill-dwelling dudes—er, Men of Power—ranging from MD (“Dude from the Senate office I interned at”) to R (“aka ‘Threesome Dude’”) to F (married government Chief of Staff paying her for sex). This cash-dispensing, anal sex-loving crew will presumably be fleshed out, so to speak, in The Washingtonienne’s upcoming eponymous novel, for which she recently received a reported six-figure advance (from HyperionDisney, that avatar of family values).

What with the hubbub about the 26-year-old Cutler and her sexcapades, I decided a read-through would be in order, and I curled up the other day with the blog and a martini in a state of high anticipation. I was expecting salacious. Purple. Titillating. Highballs and low morals, detailed with evil glee and sophisticated immorality.

Not.

In fact, it was the opposite: as I read, I started to feel gawky, uncomfortable. Giggly. I fought the urge to make prank phone calls and toilet-paper the house. I was regressing. I finally realized why: with the exception of the sex-for-money scenes (okay, all the sex scenes), this twentysomething’s blog read a lot like my own eighth-grade diary. Squirming with embarrassment, I recognized the hallmarks of myself at age fourteen-the self-conscious coquetry (“Item! A new contender for my fair hand”), the supreme self-confidence (“I know I’m hot and everything”) juxtaposed with adolescent gawkiness (“I got nervous and acted weird. Shit!”). Most of all, I was struck by the resilience of youth, the ability - for better and for worse - to move forward from difficult experiences without emerging scarred for life. Cutler may be down (“I feel bad about what I did to MK”) (translation: “I feel bad about cheating on a serious, long-term partner”) but she’s not out. Turns out that “new stuff from Martha Stewart!” facilitates the healing process just as well as, say, honest communication.

It’s fitting that Cutler’s blog was originally brought to light by another blog: Political e-gossipmonger Wonkette broke the “news” of Ms. Cutler’s online journal several months ago, and if the writing style is any indication, the friendship between Wonkette and Washingtonienne is off to a beautiful start. “WASHINGTONIENNE SPEAKS!! WONKETTE EXCLUSIVE!! MUST CREDIT WONKETTE!! THE WASHINGTONIENNE INTERVIEW!!” So Wonkette hyperventilated last May, fanning the embers of a sophomoric blog into a scoop and trumpeting her own role as star-finder in the process. Attracted by the scent of all those capital letters, other Web-trawlers and bloggers converged, and soon Washingtonienne was appearing in rants and raves throughout the virtual world (e.g. Wizbangblog, Swamp-City, PoliticalWire), all bristling with feedback from readers—and, of course, linking to each other.

Given the fuss, it was only a matter of time before the debacle ensnared more mainstream print media outlets. The Washington Post interviewed Cutler, while Playboy went one better and paid her to pose nude. (Never one to miss a business opportunity, the magazine has since posted a casting call on its website: “Attention Interns: Pose for Playboy Magazine!”) Our culture rewards self-promotion in exactly the way the self-promoter would want: with visibility, in this case literally. The preliminary groundwork for that visibility is relatively easy thanks to the Web, where increased accessibility of information breeds increased appetite for information, and vice versa. The more press that was generated about Washingtonienne, the more readers wanted to know, and the more press was generated, and the more readers wanted to know. Cutler was happy to oblige.

But given Washingtonienne’s sophomoric prose and extremely short lifespan, what’s the brouhaha about? Well, we all love a guessing game. (Although if you have anything to do with government, chances are the list of suspects—identified by their initials and their positions, governmental and sexual—will be easily deciphered. For the rest of us, it might be time to learn the names of our elected officials.) And no, none of the suspects works at the political level of Dick Cheney. “Absolutely not,” Ms. Cutler tells Playboy. “I think I would have tried to cash in on that earlier.” (Good lord, whom to root for in that battle?) And do we even need to acknowledge that we get off on sex and power? Who can resist a peek at the salaciousness seething behind the sober suits and marble halls of American government? Finally, we love a good villainess-a sexually voracious woman incurs our particularly punitive wrath. Slut! Whore! we cry, wringing our hands, our eyes glued to her cleavage.

But these kinds of puritanical, knee-jerk catchwords are too easy, and they obscure a more complicated truth. Jessica Cutler is a sexually voracious woman. But her problem is not appetite—it’s etiquette, or lack thereof. Her gleefully tawdry publishing of the sexual secrets of people she purports to care about is tacky and disrespectful, and it’s this, not her sexual zealousness, that should incur our eye-rolling. Take her latest beau: Turns out this fellow (a committee staffer in her office, former cop, “looks just like George Clooney when he takes off his glasses,” initials RS—how hard would it be to figure out his identity?) “cannot finish with a condom on. He can barely stay hard.” On the other hand, he did ejaculate twice in one evening, so maybe that lessens the sting? A cursory read through the rest of the blog gave no evidence that RS had sinned badly enough to deserve this kind of outing. So… why, Washingtonienne, why? Likewise, the hapless R, “aka Threesome Dude.” So Ms. Cutler had a three-way with two other consenting adults? Bully for her. What’s appalling is not the encounter, but the way Cutler chooses to present it to the world. Not only is this Dude probably recognizable to his peers, but his earnest, awkward attempt at a thank-you note merits this online comment from our narrator: “Jesus, what a douche.”

It’s one thing to slam sexual partners to their face, or to a best friend, or to a therapist. It’s another to broadcast their thinly disguised identities and their shortcomings to the entire online world via non-password-protected, real-time updates. And it’s this breathtaking lack of respect-not the number of partners or choice of sexual positions- that left me wanting to scrub the virtual bathroom walls free of Cutler’s callous graffiti.

Cutler is not the first, or even the nastiest, blip in the blogosphere. But she has been able to parlay her private exploits into a public spectacle thanks to an ally arguably more powerful than any wealthy political appointee: the Web. Without it, she might have been just another exhibitionist, albeit one who’s rather boorish, opportunistic and, despite her claim of an IQ exceeding 140, not too bright. (From her Playboy interview: “I’m registered as a Republican. That doesn’t mean much, though. I’m from New York. New York’s different. I’m more the Giuliani/Pataki style Republican, which basically means you’re against crime.”)

But so what? From the Lascaux cave painters to Jenna Jameson, humans have always been willing to make their sexuality a part—or the whole—of their public image. What’s so modern about this affair is not Cutler’s character, nor the desire to publicize her dalliances, but rather the ease with which she was able to broadcast her exhibitionism and bad manners to the world. Back in the pre-wired days, she might have limned her encounters in a letter, or waited for friends to visit before drawing them aside in the parlor to whisper her indiscretions. But thanks to the internet, anyone can, with the literal click of a button, eradicate the boundaries between us and All Information Everywhere.

With that in mind, it’s Cutler’s manipulation that becomes the focus of the story. Initially, I tried to see her as a victim—an emotionally vulnerable young woman alone in the big city, manipulated by powerful men and shocked—shocked!—to discover that with “a blog, you can’t expect your private life to be private anymore. You just never know.” But she isn’t a victim—at least, not of anything other than her own psyche. In fact, reading her recent Washington Post interview, I began to feel that she was not only unmannered, but unbalanced. She protests that she “feels bad” for a lot of people around her, but the claims come across as the wide-eyed, theoretical compassion of someone who has never actually experienced the emotion. She tells a reporter, “I was only blogging for, what, less than two weeks? Some people with blogs are never going to get famous, and they’ve been doing it for, like, over a year. I feel bad for them.” On behalf of all the less-notorious bloggers and other struggling-writer types: thanks for the sympathy. On behalf of the hundreds of female interns and assistants who come to D.C. to work and learn—not just meet guys and show off cute outfits—thanks for further damaging our reputation and rendering questionable our motivations. As for the men formerly in her life? “I feel really bad for the guys,” she says. “They didn’t deserve this”-as if “this” were a consequence of god pointing the finger, rather than Jessica Cutler typing out their sexual secrets onto her computer screen. Item! Good sex and good manners? Not mutually exclusive, even in politics.

Juliet Eastland’s writing appears in print and online venues. She lives in New York City.