Going Pink: The Suicide Girls Story

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The girls come in all sizes, shapes, and colors — hair colors too: Kool-Aid red, traffic light yellow, neon green, deep purple. Most have piercings; all have tattoos. They call each other babes, and that's what they are.

In two days they'll head down the coast to San Diego and perform at Comic-Con to represent the 14-year-old alt-girl pinup site that bears their name. You can be a Suicide Girl, but you can also go to Suicide Girls. It's a website, a label, a community, and an aesthetic borne out of the so-called alternative moment of the early aughts. Even though that moment has passed, the Suicide Girls movement has never been stronger.

The Blackheart Burlesque tour. Photo: Getty Images

The girls hit up a dozen different conventions a year, promoting the site's various projects and selling Suicide Girls merchandise, but their last couple Comic-Con appearances have been particularly important. Live performances are now an integral part of the Suicide Girls experience, and Comic-Con is where they'll try out new material for their Blackheart Burlesque show. Next month, they'll embark on a 12-week tour, their biggest yet.

Twenty-two-year-old Liryc Suicide is the dance manager. Each number has a specific theme and follows a particular formula, and it's Liryc's job to make sure practice stays on track. For every dance they rehearse, the girls start off in costume — fursuits, Rocky Horror ensembles, sexy superhero looks. There is tight choreography, plus the requisite body rolling and booty smacking, as the girls flirt with the audience and one another. Eventually they strip down to just their panties, and sometimes tube socks, too. There's a chair dance to Nine Inch Nails; there's a Lara Croft act that sometimes involves fire.

"Saw our ad on Christian Mingle?" Sunny Suicide asks the would-be crowd. The bubbly New Yorker is one of the show's two hosts, along with her British counterpart Katherine Suicide. "Don't think that's it — I posted on JDate," retorts Katherine. "Nah, these fuckers are on Tinder!" Sunny bursts out laughing. The girls have little black heart tattoos for every tour they've been on; Sunny has one next to her eye.

"You get to see girls like Sunny and me totally naked," Katherine continues, adding with a wink that "photographs are on the internet forever." Sunny jumps in on cue, "But we don't care about that! Suicide Girls is about real women. We want you to take as many photos as possible." She teases that she and Katherine are going to make out backstage.

They carry on their back and forth while Liryc keeps the time. "Let's find some babes!" Katherine announces, pulling Missy Suicide to the center of the studio while they all dance to "Bubble Butt." Turn around, stick it out, show the world you got it. The Suicide Girls revolution started with Missy, and the girls' affection for her is obvious as they goof around on the floor. She's the reason this all exists; she's the reason they've found a home online and with each other.

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A few months earlier, Missy is sitting in her office at Suicide Girls headquarters in LA. Art — both Suicide Girls-related and not — lines the walls, and beyond a pair of French doors, signs for the site hang from a shallow balcony.

"In the early 2000s, there were really only two types of beautiful women that were represented," she explains, her retro bob dyed Suicide Girls pink, septum pierced with a silver hoop. "There was either the stick-thin, waif, blonde Kate Moss-type supermodel, or the silicone-enhanced, buxom Pamela Anderson fantasy of what a woman should be, and there were very few things in between."

"The girls I knew were some of the most beautiful women in the world," she continues. "They were pierced and tattooed and had interesting stories and interesting bodies. They had interesting things that they did and interesting ways that they carried themselves."

Inspiration struck when Missy (who then went by her given name, Selena Mooney) found a stack of old pinup images of Betty Page at a thrift store. She realized something was different about these photos: they had been taken by a woman. "The way Betty felt so comfortable in front of another woman, you know she wasn't putting on airs," she says. "She wasn't trying to be sexy in that same sort of way."

Missy with models at a Suicide Girls DVD signing in 2005. Photo: Getty Images

Missy decided she would portray her friends using Betty as a template and began taking their photographs. But where would she display them? At the time, she was a "dot-com refugee" who had just moved back to Portland to study photography after working as a web designer and producer for several years in California (her last job before the bubble burst was director of technology for Ticketmaster). Uploading her photos to a website made sense.

"My friend Sean built a site around the girls," says Missy. Sean is Sean Suhl, who still runs the site along with Missy, though he no longer grants interviews about Suicide Girls. Missy calls it a "fluid partnership," with Sean (also known as Spooky) overseeing most of the tech efforts, and Missy the business ones. "We gave the girls blogs and put up message boards and posted these photos."

She called the site Suicide Girls: "I hated the word alternative. Nobody lived in these John Hughes compartmentalized sects of people anymore, with the squares and the punks and the goths. I felt like alternative was the worst — like, alt to what?" She adopted the phrase "suicide girls" from Chuck Palahniuk's book Survivor, where it's used to describe "girls who chose to commit social suicide by not fitting in."

While Missy may not be a fan of the word "alternative," it's a term that's used again and again, by the girls and on the site itself, which has a widget that counts how many days it has "been celebrating alternative pinup girls." For better or worse, it's a catchall phrase for the aesthetic popularized by Suicide Girls, the self-described "sorority of badass bombshells and geek goddesses." As the site's press page states, "We consider ourselves the sexiest, smartest, most dangerous collection of outsider women in the world."

Suicide Girls officially launched a couple of weeks before September 11, 2001 and a community — now one of the internet's oldest and most enduring — instantly formed. A group of fans called the Suicide Girls Army was tasked with getting the word out, spray-painting the site's logo on walls and putting stickers on cop cars. "If you get the logo tattooed on you, you get a lifetime membership. There's probably hundreds or thousands of people with the SG logo tattooed on them. One girl just got it tattooed on her neck!" Missy laughs. "It's an aggressive move. It's not subtle."

Missy, however, is. She's warm and soft-spoken — and also totally in charge. It's easy to see why the girls admire her. At 37, she's a married mother of two who still fiercely believes in her site's mission and leads her troops with quiet confidence. Since the start, she's acted as den mother, protecting and guiding her girls.

In the beginning, Missy took all of the site's photos, meeting potential models for interviews at coffee shops. "It was so they could know that I wasn't creepy," she says, "and I would know they were cool and doing it for the right reasons. I've always been very idealistic about it. I'd say, ‘Do you understand your picture's going to be up forever?' And I'd lay out how it was all going to go, tell them I'm not going to be weird. I imagined it would be really hard to be naked in front of somebody, so I wanted to make sure everything was cool before we shot."

Photo by Elizabeth Daniels for Racked

Soon, girls outside of Portland wanted to be featured on the site, so Missy wrote up a photo guide and sent it to prospective models who inquired from around the globe. "Now we've got photographers all over the world, and we've got Suicide Girls from every continent including Antarctica!" Antarctica? "Yeah! A woman was stationed there in this science lab and she took photos outside in the snow."

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Five million people visit Suicide Girls every month, with the audience leaning ever-so-slightly female at 51 percent. Over the past 14 years, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of women have submitted millions of pictures to the site in hopes of becoming an official Suicide Girl.

Photo sets are the site's centerpiece and consist of anywhere from 40 to 60 photographs. They must start with the model fully clothed and end with them fully nude; nudity begins in the first third of the set. Sets have to be consistent, with the same location and concept throughout. But what makes them particularly unique is that the models, not the photographers, are the ones quite literally calling the shots.

"The photo shoots are designed to showcase how each girl feels sexiest about herself," explains Missy. "That in itself is different from 99.9 percent of all shoots because usually it's about how the photographer sees the world. Our girls sit with the photographer and talk about what they want — like, ‘I'm really into Pokemon, and I want to be Squirtle.' Then they approve all the images before they get sent off to us."

Just don't call it porn; Suicide Girls classifies itself as erotica. "We're a nude site, but we're quite a bit different from porn." says Lyxzen Suicide, the site's director of models and operations. "A lot of other sites have more of a porn angle. I would rather model and do tasteful pinup photos where my boobs are out, my bum is out, but I don't have to show any of my lady parts or do spread shots or have sex with somebody else. I'm totally in control of how I'm portraying my sexuality."

"It's art and it's beautiful and it's a kind of self-expression," says Missy. "It's nothing like porn, which has a dirty connotation. I don't see anything dirty about Suicide Girls. It's about celebrating the beauty of women."

This was a point of contention during the George W. Bush years, when in 2005 the site complied with Department of Justice requests to remove images that could be deemed obscene. "The attorney general had the Spirit of Justice statue covered up because she was naked — that was the level of what was happening back then," says Missy. "I don't really want to go to jail, so I do what the Department of Justice tells me to do." The images went back up in 2007, right before Barack Obama took office.

But back to the girls: All prospective models must fill out an application, which involves submitting photos of yourself and explaining why you want to be a Suicide Girl. If your application is accepted by the team at SG HQ, you become a "hopeful" and a shoot is facilitated. The resulting photos are posted to the member review section of the site, where the community gives feedback on sets from hopefuls and Suicide Girls alike. If you're a hopeful and your photos are chosen as the Set of the Day, you "go pink" and the name on your profile is permanently highlighted a distinct shade of rose. You're a real Suicide Girl now.

Most models pick a special name to use on the site, adding "Suicide" to the end when they go pink. "It's become a point of pride for girls," explains Lyxzen, whose first name is a reference to her favorite musician, Refused's Dennis Lyxzen. "They feel like they've earned that name. It's pretty cool because when I first happened upon the site, it seemed like a lot of these girls were so close and were hanging out. They were almost like sisters, so it made sense for them to all have this last name in common."

Suicide Girls at the 2008 Scream Awards. Photo: Getty Images

"I used to say we had a thousand applications a month," says Missy, "but about six months ago I asked if that was still right and was told it's actually 25,000 a year. Just the other day, I heard it's about 30,000 now." Only 2,798 girls have gone pink in the site's 14 years. "Within the first five minutes of meeting them, they'll tell you they're a Suicide Girl."

Models are paid $500 when their photos are chosen as Sets of the Day; the initial fee back in 2001 was $50. The site employs staff photographers and also pays freelance photographers for sets that are bought. This is why you have to pay to be a member on the site. Membership costs $12 a month or $48 a year, though it's free for life if you become a Suicide Girl. You can pay for membership via Visa, MasterCard, or Bitcoin.

"It was a business from the beginning," says Missy. "We wanted to be able to pay the models." She knew she couldn't rely solely on advertising revenue — not for a site full of naked women, especially not in the early 2000s — particularly since she and Sean didn't want to clutter their site with ads.

"We got a lot of flack," Missy says, noting that she and Sean never took money from investors. "Look, it's $4 a month if you buy the yearly membership, and it's been the same price since 2001. The reason it's $4 is because that's how much a pack of cigarettes cost at the time, and then if you buy it on a monthly basis, it's the cost of a movie ticket. We tried to make it the cheapest, most reasonable amount possible that paid for our bandwidth."

Portland was Suicide Girls' home until 2003, when the company signed its first book deal with Feral House, which happened to coincide with a compilation CD and a DVD release from Epitaph Records. Feral and Epitaph were both located in Los Angeles, and Missy saw that a move to LA made fiscal sense. In order for Suicide Girls to grow, it needed to follow the money; the subscription model was successful for the site, but the entertainment industry offered more lucrative opportunities. Missy had seen the internet bubble burst once and was determined to make Suicide Girls a lasting, viable business.

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Sunny Suicide long idolized the Suicide Girls: logging on to her friends' accounts, watching video specials on Showtime, following the girls on social media. "I would go to the site trying to look at the pictures, hoping that maybe today would be different and I wouldn't have to pay for membership," the 28-year-old explains, sitting on a folding chair outside of the rehearsal room. "I thought it was naughty to have to pay for something like that as a woman, and then eventually I used one of my friend's memberships. I loved going on and reading the blogs."

A lifelong performer, Sunny had moved from Manhattan to upstate New York to go to school for music and theater. After college, she worked in state government and then as a lobbyist, teaching non-traditional burlesque classes on the side. When a photo promoting Blackheart Burlesque popped up on the Suicide Girls Instagram in 2013, Sunny was stunned: "It was two of my favorite things. It was like, there are girls that dance like me?"

This was actually the second coming of Suicide Girls burlesque; the site had previously run a successful burlesque tour beginning in 2002. "The first iteration of the tour was a lot more gritty and raw," says Lyxzen. "The girls weren't doing polished choreographed dances, they were just doing their own thing. A lot of them were creating their own costumes, creating their own themes. There was a lot of fake blood and chocolate syrup and whipped cream and beer shot on the audience — it was like being at a Gwar concert in some ways."

The tour went on indefinite hiatus in 2007. "But then we sent the girls on a book signing tour and there were 500 people standing outside a bookshop in Santa Cruz just to get two girls' autographs," says Missy. "We were like, ‘We can do a better show than that.' Clearly people wanted a live experience, so we created this thing and now they've been touring consistently for two-and-a-half years."

Sunny bought tickets to a show in New York City and ended up dancing onstage with the girls — this anecdote is now part of the intro hype speech she and Katherine give. Sunny decided it was now or never: She needed to be at the next round of auditions. She was nearly broke, but spent what little money she could pull together on a trip to LA.

Manwé Sauls-Addison, the tour's creative director and choreographer who has worked with the likes of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, recognized her from the New York show. "He was like, ‘You're a crazy bitch!'" Sunny recalls. "‘Do not disappoint me today.'" And she didn't. When she made the cut, she broke down crying. "I was so excited. I had been waiting for such a long time for this."

Then Missy and Sean came up to her and asked if she wanted to host the show, not just dance in it. She flew back to New York, packed up her apartment, and moved to LA the next week. Since then she's performed for sold-out crowds across Australia, Canada, and the States, with a one-off show in London. She's co-hosting the three-month US tour that kicks off in September; a South American tour is in early planning stages.

Sunny had never shot a set for the site before joining the tour, but once she made the troupe, she "decided to go all in" and become a true Suicide Girl.

"My whole life is pretty much consumed by it," she says. "I live only a few minutes away from my boss's house because I want to be close as possible to all the models. I am still a big fan. Now I have my own place that looks just like the place I had in Albany, decorated with posters and pictures of the girls."

Sunny says people back home don't get what she does or why she decided to leave her "real job" in New York to dance in her underwear on stage: "Last time I checked, this is a real job. Very real. It pays my bill, doesn't it? It takes care of me!"

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Suicide Girls is as much about community as it is about naked photos of tattooed women. Creating a respectful, tight-knit sisterhood was something Missy saw as the site's end game.

As she explains it, "Before MySpace or Facebook or anything, I was like, ‘We're going to put blogs up online for the girls to share their thoughts and feelings with the world.' People asked, ‘Why would anyone want to share their thoughts and feelings with the world?' I told them, ‘Because they can connect with one another and you can see what other people are experiencing.' Everyone thought it was insane."

The blogs (which both models and regular members can set up on their profiles) were a hit, as were message boards that evolved into groups, both public and private, that members could join and post to. The most popular group may be "Big Boob Appreciation," but group topics run the gamut from gaming and comics to photography and fitness. There's a group for Christians, and another for atheists; one for metalheads, and another for hip-hop fans. The site also used to have a newswire section with columns, interviews, and news items and counted embedded war reporter Michael Totten among its contributors.

Staff outside the Suicide Girls office. Photo by Elizabeth Daniels for Racked

"There were all these touch points of connectivity," Missy explains. "The initial touch point was that Suicide Girls were attractive. People came to see them and then they're like, ‘I really like Batman comic books,' so they join the Batman group and meet someone from their hometown or from Sweden or wherever that is really into Batman comics too. They share similar experiences where they connect about other things — so many friendships have been made, businesses have started, bands have formed. It's been nuts." She adds, "Dozens of babies were born because their parents met on Suicide Girls."

Missy monitors the site and helps facilitate communication among members by assigning weekly "blog homework" (last week's assignment: post photos of your high school style) along with Lyxzen and Rambo Suicide, the site's model and photographer recruiter. Lyxzen and Rambo were both models on the site for years before becoming employed full-time by Suicide Girls.

A Portland native, Lyxzen was familiar with Suicide Girls from the time she was a teenager thanks to the site's roots in the city: "I had a lot of friends in the alternative community, and when I was about 19, I started thinking more about getting into alternative modeling. One of my friends recommended that I look at SG, and as soon as I saw it, I signed up to be a member. I fell in love with the photography and how cool and different so many of the girls were."

Once Lyxzen joined the site in 2005, she started interacting with members online, but initially felt intimidated going to in-person meetups. "Then there was a tattoo convention up in Spokane, Washington, and Suicide Girl Silencia had just moved to Portland and was going to run the booth," she says. Lyxzen heard Silencia needed help with staffing and volunteered to lend a hand so long as she could get a ride to the event.

"Mind you," she continues, "we didn't know each other at all! We really barely interacted on the site. But we became instant friends! We shared a hotel room, ran the booth. We actually ended up getting matching tattoos with a couple of the other girls that weekend — we got little pink traditional diamonds by one of the tattoo artists there. Silencia's still one of my best friends to this day, probably my very best friend."

Every Suicide Girl has a story like this. "I made friends with some other hopeful girls online, and that sense of community was what gave me the final push to go ahead and do a shoot," Rambo says of her introduction to the site in 2006. "All the groups were really active, there were meetups all the time — people setting up brunch dates, or board games parties, all kinds of fun stuff."

Rambo says the community is just as active now, if not more so, thanks to the tours. She still attends meetups in San Francisco once a month.

"I have never been to a site where the women are so supportive of other women," she says. "For a lot of us, it's a safe space, a safe part of the internet and the world where we can go and make friends with other women who have the same interests as us. It's a place for us to celebrate each other."

Suicide Girls, 2004. Photo: Getty Images

There are, of course, men on the site too. Official membership numbers put the male population at 49 percent, though the women are ones who most actively put up blog posts and converse with one another, leaving the men to exist more as admirers than participants. It's clear that girls are in charge here, though you can join the private Suicide Boys group if you so desire.

"It's a group on the site that we've pretty much had since the beginning, where members can post photos of their members," says Missy. The SEO title on the page is "Show the Cock."

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Suicide Girls is uncommonly respectful for an internet community, in large part due to its strict moderation standards. "We've always been a moderated community because we are membership-based," says Missy. "If someone online leaves troll-y, dickish comments, we warn them and then we kick them off. Your $4 is not worth saying whatever jerky thing you want to!"

But while the on-site community is kind and encouraging, the expanded community on social media is not.

"We get all sorts of weird comments on our social platforms, so we have to really monitor them," says the site's 28-year-old PR and marketing director Alexandra Capriola. "We see people who are either rude or too out there, making sexual comments that are really degrading."

Suicide Girls has huge followings on Twitter and Tumblr, but Instagram and Facebook is where it really excels, with 3.6 and 6.3 million fans, respectively. You can view SG videos on YouTube and Vimeo, and the team is always quick to adopt new platforms. Periscope has been its most recent social hit; the Suicide Girls account has amassed almost a half million followers in the five months since the app launched.

The team obsesses over numbers, holding weekly meetings to go over which posts hit (and which didn't) and why, as well as to track goals. Alexandra and social media manager Lexi post on the accounts during the day from LA; while they're sleeping, Vorpal Suicide takes over from Australia. Then there's Yana Sinner, a Suicide Girl in Saint Petersburg who maintains the brand's presence on VK, Russia's massive social media site.

Suicide Girls' current strategy is to provide context around photos posted to social, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, in what feels like a callback to Missy's original hunch about the site's blogs: fans want to know who the Suicide Girls are.

"The most popular time for engagement is actually during work hours, which is one of the reasons we put NSFW disclaimers on Twitter and Facebook," says Alex. "But we also have do that because if we don't and a link brings you to a gallery of a nude woman, then we could be banned. It could get to the point where they just deleted our whole Facebook page. I would be devastated."

Instagram in particular has helped to build Suicide Girls' visibility, as well as individual models' brands. Katherine, the British tour host, has 248,000 followers; Erica Fett, who goes by Phecda Suicide on the site, just reached a million.

But as the numbers climb, so does the hate. "It's a side effect of any social media really," says Katherine. "You always get the assholes who comment something nasty."

"It's crazy that you can go on any social media site — Instagram, Twitter, whatever — and there are comments that are so negative, or derogatory, or just plain sexually harassing the girl," echoes Rambo. "But you go on Suicide Girls and every single comment is positive, supportive, uplifting, respectful." After 14 years, Suicide Girls is still a safe haven.

"With Suicide Girls, you have girls that are naked and baring their souls and talking about so many things that are so personal," says Missy. "And then you have our community, which is so supportive. What I'm most proud of is that we can be a bastion of civility in the internet world."

There have been times of unrest, like in 2005 when dozens of models (artist Molly Crabapple among them) left the site en masse, citing issues with their contracts' non-compete clause and alleged censorship (as per the moderation guidelines, members who lash out against the site, its owners, or other members are banned). A few hurled allegations of misogyny at Sean.

"You've got a community of free-spirited readers that have lots of ideas," says Missy, "and they have people that love them and appreciate them and give them a platform to speak their mind. But you can't make everybody happy all of the time, and we try to be as transparent and upfront as possible."

This transparency is seen in blog posts like the one Missy put up earlier this year explaining why some Suicide Girls profiles were archived.

"All of the girls who were archived recently either asked to be archived, or exhibited such a pattern of unhappiness with SG that it became clear that it was best for us to part ways," she wrote. "We love all of the girls and made several attempts to find out what their grievances were and to try to rectify anything that we could. It is painful to say goodbye to the beautiful strong women we have recently added to the archive, but ultimately their unhappiness was not good for them or for us or for the other SG's who's experiences were being effected [sic] by their negativity."

She went on to detail the unraveling of the site's relationship with Damsel, a popular Suicide Girl who began "publicly attacking us and lobbing serious accusations" of mistreatment, emphasizing that the site harbors no ill will towards Damsel, but that the model's claims were unfounded as evidenced by a review of the staff's texts and emails with her.

"When I was a lot younger, I handled things in a different way," says Missy. "I would be on the defensive and have more of a reaction, but that's not the way that grownups handle things and that's not good for anybody. Now I'm trying to be more upfront and adult about it by sharing communications and letting people judge on their own in cases where people are comparing me to apartheid-level oppressors and Nazis. I've got no bad feelings. I want everyone to enjoy their experience, and if they're not, then it's not good for you and it's not good for everybody else."

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Though Missy has been around from the start, the site has seen many Suicide Girls come and go.

"There are definitely some folks that are still around, we call them our old school members," says Lyxzen. "We have some of our original SGs around too, but they're not as involved. Some of them have moved on entirely — they're too busy with family life or they've just kind of grown out of nude modeling. It's natural to gravitate away from it, and on top of that, people move through different communities throughout their lives."

Photo by Elizabeth Daniels for Racked

For those who stay in the community, there are opportunities to remain involved beyond modeling, as both Lyxzen and Rambo have discovered. Though Lyxzen hasn't modeled for the site in a couple of years, she hasn't ruled out doing another set at some point. For now, her attention is centered on her work at SG HQ and her burgeoning photography career. Rambo hasn't shot a set since giving birth to her daughter two years ago and is focused on recruiting new talent for the site.

"I have absolutely no regrets," says Rambo. "Suicide Girls is the best thing I have ever done. It completely changed my life. I want my daughter to grow up knowing that she can be whatever person she wants to be and that there are incredible people out there that you can find and connect with. I want her to know about Suicide Girls, and I want her to grow up being friends with my friends that I have made through Suicide Girls."

New membership sign-up is at an all-time high, and the community is becoming more global. "There's a pattern of growth for us," says Missy. "Somebody hears about it and gets interested in a small town, and we get a model from there, and then a photographer from there, and it just grows and grows."

After all, she adds, "Everybody should be able find their own little corner on the internet where they feel at home."

Editor: Leslie Price