The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'suicide girls'
2005/9/29
The FBI's War On Pornography draws its first blood before it even begins: purveyor of nekkid-goth-chick-pictures Suicide Girls has taken down some photographs, preemptively, in the hope of avoiding a FBI raid. (Because we all know the devoutly religious types Ashcroft had appointed would love to take those darkness-worshipping punks down with maximum force.)
We have received no formal government notice to remove these images, however, in the course of our involvement, as witnesses, in a federal criminal prosecution that does not target SG, we have been made aware of the risks posting such content poses the owners of the company. Given the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' new war on porn task force and it's intent to bring obscenity charges against their loosely defined "Deviant" imagery, we have removed any images with fake blood and any images we felt could be wrongfully construed as sadist or masochist.It could probably be argued that piercings and punk/goth paraphernalia automatically constitute "deviant" imagery. Perhaps not strongly enough to win a court case, but enough to keep the site offline until the matter is dragged, expensively, though the courts.
I wonder how long until the War On Porn spreads to Australia. (Given the Family First presence in the Senate, the government's paternalistic style, the lack of US-style constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and senior Tories' periodic thumping of the wowser-moral-values tub, I wouldn't rule it out.) Perhaps one day soon we'll wake up and read in the Age or hear on RRR about the Australian Federal Police raiding I Shot Myself and impounding their servers or something.
(Warning: some links in this post may contain erototoxins.)
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 8
2005/6/24
Hubble captures baleful Sauron-like eye around the star Fomalhaut, which I recall was the home of some of H.P. Lovecraft's elder gods/eldritch abominations (including Cthugha, said to resemble a "giant ball of fire").
Meanwhile, a Google search for "fomalhaut lovecraft" returns, among its top 10 results, the Suicide Girls homepage of someone who's into H.P. Lovecraft and Ayn Rand.
2004/1/21
First online porn sites started driving old-fashioned paper porno mags out of business, and now they're getting into the articles business. Case in point: SuicideGirls.com (I believe they're one of those n3kkid-goth/raver-chicks-with-piercings/emo-glasses sites) has an article section, mostly consisting of interviews with hip, edgy celebrities, including Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin, Neve Campbell (who apparently was a teen-slasher-movie star or something; anyway, the interview is there on the grounds of her being a "Goth" icon) and Jewsploitation-movie star Adam Goldberg. (via bOING bOING)
2002/6/27
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Bootywhang: A piece on the rise of 'alternaporn' sites. These are independently-run online soft- to medium-core porn sites with subcultural themes (raver, goth, geek, punk, and others), 'real' models who often have online journals, and a distinct paucity of the ugly, degrading, exploitative material that your typical spamvertised commercial porn site pushes. And, perhaps surprisingly, many of their subscribers are heterosexual women.
"I want to take the sketchiness and smuttiness out of porn," said Chase Lisbon, 28, who launched Supercult in August 2001. "I don't use words like tits or ass or pussy anywhere on the site." Supercult is a mod-styled website featuring pictures of naked hipsters posing with Lambretta scooters and Star Wars action figures. Chase estimates that 30 percent of the site's paying users are female.
(Well, someone had to put Mod revivalism/retro hipsterism and porn together sometime...)
Anyway, as far as porn has been with us since the Etruscan era, if not cave paintings, and is likely to be with us as long as we have sex and symbols, it's a good thing to know that it's not all misanthropic, envelope-pushing brutality and ugliness ("Teenage sluts get banged hard by farm animals!"), and that perhaps porn can be humanistic and positive. Of course, the religious right don't agree. (via bOING bOING)