So my quest to become a contributor to the SuicideGirls newswire continues undaunted, with my latest submission. domokun I could be getting ahead of myself, but it seems to me that Suicide Girls, as a community, seems to forget itself a great deal. It seems that people have the fallback position that the newswire shouldn't aspire to any great heights because this is a porn/boob/nudie/insert your defeatist vernacular here website. My response to that is simple; ******** off.
It might be easy for someone who has pursued vigorous political debate on a
website centered around the making of cutesy anime themed avatars, but bear with me here. Imagine how much darker the world would have been if Hugh Heffner had sat back and said "I'm making a titty mag here people; if you want respectable, readable content pick up an issue of Esquire and good luck masturbating to that!"
Suicide Girls is to Playboy what humans are to chimpanzees; a highly evolved specimen that shows up it's predecessor for the faded anachronism that it is. Of course this comes along with the undeniable fact that a great deal of the format and execution of Suicide Girls hearken back to innovations and ideas that were either pioneered or popularized by Playboy.
Along with the arguably tasteful but lacking in artistic value nudity came
written contributions from the 20th century's greatest literary minds including Norman Mailler, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. The pattern is repeated here in the Newswire with the columns we get from the likes of Brad Warner and Warren Ellis in particular.
Brad has already written voluminously on what it means to be a punk rock Zen Buddhist writing a column for Suicide Girls, so I'd rather look at how Suicide Girls falls into Warren Ellis' thoughts on culture and counter-culture, and see if that explains the apathetic fatalism the members seem to have about the site's potential.
The prognosis already seems dim from a glance through his most recent column, that opens with a profoundly Zarathustrian proclamation that alt culture is dead, then later goes on to say that:
Quote:
The DIY-ambience in portrait photography that this very site pioneered is now meaningless because it's everywhere.
That a quick jaunt through Ember's sets from her debut to her most recent suggests an evolution in the photography at the site is largely irrelevant because Ellis segues into a familiar rant about his old nemesis the Monoculture.
The existence of the Monoculture- in stark contrast to Islamofascism- is inarguable. There is a seemingly semi-sentient being at the core of western pop culture that devours and homogenizes everything in it's path. The beast itself has existed for hundreds of years, but only gained wide acceptance with the emergence of the contemporary counter culture of the nineteen sixties (apparently Dadaism just wasn't cool enough), and advancing technology only shortened the atomic half life of the counter cultural chic du jour, creating the evolutionary phenomenon that biologists refer to as The Red Queen (which originates with the scene in Through the Looking Glass in which Alice is running from the Red Queen but can't seem to gain any ground), in which a creature must be in a state of constant evolution to survive.
Ellis- through his anecdotes- postulates that the monoculture has worn down the ever evolving alt culture to the point where it has essentially been swallowed and shat out the other end, that culture is quickly decaying into nothing but a mess of completely referential material; an entire culture of Tarantino movies.
It paints a fairly bleak picture in which the alt-culture is floating in the half digested muck trying to dust it off as new because it's the only thing that hasn't been resuscitated more times than Santana's career. But whose fault is that? Could it be that we ran so hard from the encroaching Monoculture that we stopped thinking about what we were jettisoning off behind us for it to devour while we concocted something newer, stranger, and more obscure?
I would imagine that if Hugh Hefner were able to pull himself out of the
depressing parody of his former glory and gain some perspective, he'd see the bits of his legacy that went into building Suicide Girls. Thus, if the Monoculture is starting to look particularily hideous, what happens when the current generation, the proverbial us, stares it in the eye and sees their own blue eyes looking back?
Thankfully, Zoetica (who supplied the original quote inspiring Ellis' column) provides us with the perspective we need going into this new alt-less era in discussing
goth inspired fashion in the mainstream:
Quote:
I used to get furious when I saw gothic-inspired shoots in magazines like Vogue. In my mind, the designers were capitalizing on a scene that was not theirs to own, tauntingly improving on certain fronts with their $70-a-yard fabric while raking in the cash for their soulless, safe interpretations while the real designers starved. Of course you had your occasional unique voice such as Vivienne Westwood, but for the most part what I saw looked like pure thievery. These days, I can enjoy an image like this without such malice. In today’s high-visibility networking culture, the most talented alt designers are fully capable of producing such high-fashion images on their own and getting published; just check out these impressive press pages from alt designers Atsuko Kudo and Cyberoptix.
And the ripoff factor? Well, there are a lot of anecdotes about how Jean-Paul Gaultier used to frequent London’s fetish clubs and stalk around Camden Market to subsequently fill the runway with directly-inspired, uncredited designs in the 90s. But when he turns around and comes up with something like this or this, is all not forgiven? A whole new generation of alt designers now finds inspiration in Gaultier’s work, completing the cycle. It’s a symbiotic relationship, one that’s healthier today then it’s ever been.
The bottom line is that you're responsible for what you create and how you view your creations no matter where you do it, especially in this rapidly flattening world. Take pride in your work, because no matter where you put it, it's still yours. After all, the Marquis de Sade has become an indelible part of western culture and he wrote on the walls of his cell with his own s**t.
![[Colonel] Roy Mustang's avatar](https://a1cdn.gaiaonline.com/dress-up/avatar/ava/2b/16/3991163215162b_flip.png?t=1625681043_6.00_00)
Reply
