Suicide Girls is owned by a right winger who treats women like shit. Or: why I don’t link to them
It seems that not enough people know the truth about the Suicide Girls and still think it’s some sort of hip, progressive, women owned and operated porn company.
Suicide Girls is owned by Sean Suhl. “Missy” is just a figurehead, and Playboy has or had some sort of partnership with Suicide Girls, but they do not own it. Suhl’s listed as the only authorized representative for the company. If Missy ever owned a stake in it, she doesn’t now.
Suhl’s a neoconservative white male. The site’s blog used to be filled with right wing rants. Mostly foreign policy stuff like pro-war and violent anti-Palestinian stuff. But perhaps they’ve realized they were alienating a lot of their readers and models and have now made the blog open for anyone to post, and it now appears to lean towards the left. There’s no easy way to browse the archives that I can see, but here’s a post by Suhl from April 2004.
Update: the above post has been deleted, it can still be found on archive.org here. Here are two other examples of Sean’s political posts on SG: Shooting Children in the Back and A Loving Tribute to Some Truly Wonderful People.
The first place I came across him being described as a neoconservative was this Willamette Weekly story quite a while back. I can’t find any specific examples of him calling himself neoconservative, but various blog and forum posters indicate that he has described himself as such.
And most importantly: the models get treated badly. Here’s a Live Journal community dedicated to SG discussions and here’s a thread there about alternatives. I’m happy to see that the Blue Blood family of sites got pretty good comments from models.
Many of the above links are from the comments on this blog. And here’s a good rant about them on Slashdot.
I know a lot of models probably get ripped off by porn sites, and a lot of porn owners probably have politics I don’t agree with. I wonder if I’d even be able to continue this blog if I knew everything that went on behind the scenes at every porn site I link to. But Suhl made the mistake of pissing off a lot of Internet savvy women, and using his business’s site as a political soap box for views that probably don’t mesh with his customers’.
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Richard said,
Wrote on September 13, 2005 @ 1:42 pm
It was no more than a week ago I saw yet a new article describing SG.com as feminism with tits. I’m sure many of the women would rather be elsewhere but SG’s success isn’t easily duplicated. All those inbound links give them Google page rank.
It is funny that AdBrite is running one of those stupid ‘overmasturbation’ ads here. Hope noboby clicks on it.
Not that I’m criticising you about that. I remember my shock when Google AdSense started advertising gay “cures” on one of my sites.
al benk said,
Wrote on September 13, 2005 @ 3:43 pm
I have no idea whether the women are treated worse than other sites, but your argument about not linking to the site because the owner is a “right wing conservative white male” is about as ridiculous as someone not linking to you because you are a pro-palestinian liberal (or whatever you want to describe yourself).
As to being violently anti-palestinian, you picked a poor blog post to make your point. His April 2004 post arguing that the Arab world needs to modernize and improve their human rights policies is not exactly an anti-palestinian rant.
And isn’t it a little odd to be worrying about offending the Arab world, a highly misogynistic region where there are few rights and no legal porn?
Al
al benk said,
Wrote on September 13, 2005 @ 3:59 pm
Oh, by the way, I notice you link to AFF. While you are on your morality kick, you might read…
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff117706.htm
And by the way, all of those cute girls in the AFF banner ad are fakes. If you log on to AFF and do a search on any of the women in the banner ads, they all come up with ‘Sorry, this member has removed his/her profile.’ Talk about sleeze.
Administrator said,
Wrote on September 13, 2005 @ 6:14 pm
Al - I don’t think it would be ridiculous for someone who disagreed with my politics to boycott my site. And it wasn’t just the difference of political opinion anyway… when I first read that Suhl was a neocon I didn’t take my SG link from Technoccult down. It was the vitrole on the SG blog that eventually made me take it down. AWolf, who runs Now Tease Me and Nude Chaos, has pretty different political views from me, but I still link to his site.
I know the link I included isn’t particularly damning, but it was the only thing I could find. But even in that link, he didn’t just say that Islamic culture needs to be modernized, he lumped all Arabic people together and said they were all “fucked up.”
Thanks for the AFF link… I’d been thinking about dropping them for a while now because their business does seem questionable. Will do more research.
channel null said,
Wrote on September 13, 2005 @ 6:36 pm
This is the strangest place for a political debate… There a girls having sex with robots here, and paintings of amputee porn. Anyway, I think Doug Rushkoff put it best: Let My People Go. Of course, that’s just some ultra-leftist polemic, it could never happen, right? Or is it a poverty of imagination and logick on your part?
“There is nothing so rich that it cannot stand constant enrichment.”
Richard said,
Wrote on September 14, 2005 @ 3:54 pm
It is impossible to disentangle sexuality and politics. I wish it were otherwise since I live in a country that calls itself the Land of the Free that won’t let me marry my partner. Won’t let my partner relocate to the US.
And would happily crush this site and some of my own in the interests of the fundagelical political agenda.
Richard
Fell said,
Wrote on September 16, 2005 @ 8:42 am
Yeah I agree with Channel Null, funny place for this come up. But interesting, thanks for posting it.
R said,
Wrote on July 5, 2006 @ 10:27 am
Old topic I know, but just now stumbled across it and felt like commenting …
I was living in PDX back when SG was born, living in the same building as the owners in fact, so met many of the originial models for the site. In the begining it was exactly what it tries to represent itself as — psudo-feminist pron, featuring quite a few of the punk girls you’d see around town working at various coffee shops or places like Red Light ( clothing store ) …
But like all good things that generate a profit, it was quickly snatched up, changed ownership, though attempts to keep the facade of Missy as the figurehead. Now it’s just another dumping ground for pron of any naked girl with tattoos or piercings .. just look at the listing of models on the site and you won’t see PDX as being anyone’s ‘location’ — the original models are all listed as ‘location :unknown’ as it seems the site itself is somehow trying to distance itself from it’s humble beginings in a PDX apartment building.