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.
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. 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’.
This post originally appeared at American Samizdat