Every two weeks we rotate out from the decaying underground labyrinth seemingly designed to cause environmental hazards to my server cluster. I get some vitamin D (take that as you will) and hit the town like a sailor on shore leave in 1930s Shanghai. In the kind of luck that always comes my way the Suicide Girls burlesque show was in town on my week off but I was jammed full of bitch stick on day one of the savage tide.
I spent my first Saturday in forever uploading some vodka shots, standing is a jam-packed room of screaming fanboys, and having someone hot grinding against me while tattooed girls with dyed hair, electrical tape pasties and the ability to thrash artistically to deafening levels of Marilyn Manson stripped for me onstage. There I was, ground zero of the feminist movement. Peering crazily into the whispering eye of women’s sexuality. I couldn’t look at a single thong-splt buttcrack without asking myself if I should be enjoying it as much as I was.
William Burroughs once said never get in the middle of a boy girl fight. But he clearly never had to survive the 90s with a bunch of lesbians. I once witnessed a serious debate between two radical feminist lesbians on whether vibrators were inherently patriarchal and whether you could have your gold star dyke papers pulled if you used one. One side of the argument centered on ‘what’s the point of being a lesbian if I’m going to require a phallus to have sex’ and the other side was mainly pulling for logic reason and big dicks with the philosophy that ‘it feels good to have something big jammed in my pussy, don’t tell me what to do just because you’re scared of the D’.
Luckily, advancement in dildo technology have rendered those sorts of arguments moot, just ask Miley Cyrus and her ‘double-jointed thumb’ special.
Sure, it’s not for beginners but hey, it’s not a cock. It’s not really even cock shaped. It may seem like a stroke of marketing genius to sell people sex toys that, literally, come as standard issue to everyone in pairs, but if your girlfriend has big, meaty hands and you’re on the small side you can’t really rely on getting the genuine article up in there. Score one for the good guys.
As much as scientific advances into teledildonics gets me wet It’s nothing compared to what scientists have achieved on the QT and suddenly sprung on the world last week. They done the impossible and that makes them mighty. They built working vaginas for four unlucky bastards born without one. And not like, a plastic slot that looks real, we’re talking full-on vagtastic, bring your fist to Miley town working lady-parts.
The organs… were implanted between June 2005 and October 2008 in four teenage girls who each lacked or had an underdeveloped vagina and uterus, the result of a rare genetic condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome.
Years after the two-hour procedures, annual follow-up visits showed that the surgeries had been a success: The new organs functioned normally, including during sex, and their tissue was indistinguishable from the native tissue that had already been there.
Here’s what Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina coquettishly says about their research in the latest issue of The Lancet
We noted no long-term postoperative surgical complications. Yearly serial biopsies showed a tri-layered structure, consisting of an epithelial cell-lined lumen surrounded by matrix and muscle, with expected components of vaginal tissue present. Immunohistochemical analysis confirmed the presence of phenotypically normal smooth muscle and epithelia. The MRIs, which showed the extent of the vaginal aplasia before surgery, showed the engineered organs and the absence of abnormalities after surgery, which was confirmed with yearly vaginoscopy. A validated self-administered Female Sexual Function Index questionnaire showed variables in the normal range in all areas tested, such as desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and painless intercourse.
Fuck me, this is why I love science. Fifty years ago if you were born without a ham-wallet you could expect to maybe live a life of quiet misery, childless and sexless. A hundred years ago you could maybe find work in a special kind of circus sideshow. A thousand years ago they’d just set your ass on fire as a witch for good measure. Take that, anti-vaxers and Millions Against Monsanto; you and your ‘my limited understanding of science means it must be bad’ stance would have us living in the fucking dark ages without vaginas. ‘But what does all this have to do with Suicide Girls?’, you ask while furiously masturbating to try and retain your erection.
The SuicideGirls Blackheart Burlesque is the first tour the group has taken since the mid 2000s. Back then they were bringing burlesque to the younger generation. A six year hiatus is a pretty long coffee break and in the interim a lot of burlesque interest has gained some swell. There’s nothing like the feeling of creating something cool and then a bunch of other people take the applause for it while you’re not looking so maybe it was a sense of ownership that has sent the SG on tour again. After seeing the show it’s far more likely a straight-up sense of revenue streaming. My overwhelming impression of Blackheart Burlesque is that it’s like a vagina built in a lab: perfectly functional but you never stop having the feeling it was artificially created by a team of experts to scientific specifications. In this case designed to elicit a sense of near-attainability with the girls that makes young men get a membership to the SG website.
Blackheart Burlesque is not so much a striptease as it is a straight-up shill. An elemental con for your money as obvious as someone lifting your wallet while you’re busy starting at bouncing tits. We live in a great and terrible time for the renaissance of viral marketing. On the interwebs you have to assume that every funny photo, every screencapped clueless facebook exchange, every video of a girl twerking who sets herself on fire has to be some kind of planned fake; that’s what I hate about viral marketing. You get taken in by a flash mob flinging their own feces at people in Vatican Square and it turns out to be some obscure ad campaign for Virgin Mobile; nothing is genuine. In the old days of the travelling medicine show it was as easy as planting a co-grifter into the crowd of townspeople at your medicine show; a toad-eating flunkie who learns how to walk again after a gulp of your snake oil. And it’s that time-honoured tradition of inauthentic charisma that is the beating organ at the center of Blackheart Burlesque.
Full disclosure I was a huge fangirl of Suicide Girls, oh say, a decade ago. In 2004 their battle cry of ‘changing the definition of female beauty’ was an obscure stance that needed some traction. It may seem pretty high-concept for a porn website but people vote with the dollars far more effectively than their actual votes and the availability of porn that glorified everything that mainstream porn was not (not blonde, not boob-jobbed, not necessarily skinny or a mainstream beauty and ethnically diverse) allowed men and women to have a voice in what kind of porn they wanted instead of the existing model of taking whatever Barbie-doll Jenna Jamieson porno valley threw at us as the next mainstream aesthetic. Suicide Girls wasn’t exactly challenging the ideal of female beauty on the cover of Vogue but then most men don’t read Vogue but all men now access porn on the internet; you tell me which one has more impact on how women are viewed today.
At this year’s AVNs (the Oscars of the porn world) the industry was struggling to come to grips with the detonation of their old business model and the rise of tube sites as the dominant delivery method of today’s porn. It’s pretty telling that the 2014 performer of the year award went to Bonnie Rotten, an actress covered in zombie tattoos with spiderweb tats radiating from both nipples.
It’s not that I didn’t have a great time watching the seven Suicide Girls onstage do their thing, it’s just I felt like my intelligence was being insulted virtually the entire time someone wasn’t showing me her tits. Which is a strange reversal from what I’m used to. The routines themselves were clever, well choreographed, energetic and seemingly designed by reading my mind to find the nerd triggers that make me go sploosh.
There’s kindof a biker bar frenetic drunken slattern vibe from the first moment of the show. Maybe that’s just how they roll in Los Angeles. And it has more in common with straight-up strip club pole-flossing than it does with burlesque. As my companion put it, the show was all strip and no tease. The outfits at the beginning of the routine were only nominally less exposing than the final bow when they give the big reveal.
The club is a tiny venue, way smaller than stages local burlesque shows play on and it’s my first hint what’s going down. Without an actual elevated stage there’s not going to be much in the way of subtlety or ground effects – none that you’ll be able to spot over this crowd of punks, hipsters, frat boys, the odd hard case and their associated girlfriends along for the ride. They’re turning away a falling-down drunk street punk with her backpack at the door while she brandishes a ticket from the 7 o’clock show. It’s three-deep at the bar and they seem to be selling nothing but cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon by the armload. What the fuck happened there? A decade ago the hipsters started drinking it ironically in a trend that drove market researchers insane trying to predict what unholy swill the younger generation wanted to buy, but somewhere along the way it caught on and now it’s made a legitimate comeback. That’s the problem with ironic purchases: they’re still purchases; and every dollar is a vote. The last obstacle between me and more vodka is some rail-thin, dreadlocked git with a duck dynasty beard and a pristine Outlaw bikers patch. He’s either a new pledge or watched too many episodes of Sons of Anarchy, but if real bikers catch him wearing a 1%er patch they will stomp him till his bones snap and drag him down a dirt road by his face.
Dead on the hour the DJ hits the music cue and we watch a tray of 12 shots go backstage. Always a good sign. Most of them actually get used in the first act; the dancer shoots three or four of them straight to Marilyn Manson before spitting the contents of the rest into the ‘splash zone’ of the crowd or over her (mostly) naked body. She’s gymnastically energetic, managing full-speed front flips back and forth over a stage maybe fifteen feet wide. It’s a generic routine but it’s enough to get people’s attention. By the end of the night the number of routines that require a mop and bucket brigade to sponge the various fluids off the stage is alarming; I begin to worry if a too-enthusiastic dance move is going to lay out some topless punk with a septum pierce.
Suicide Girls all get to pick their ‘porn name’ in the tradition of the co-founder ‘missy’ suicide. I take to identifying the performers by their corporate titles, beginning with ‘emcee’ suicide. The performers themselves are all legitimately hot, perhaps too uniformly so. They came, as advertised, pierced, tattooed, multi-racial and with colourfully dyed hair. I’m not in a business of criticizing the female form for any reason but aside from ‘septum-pierce’ suicide who had an extra helping of curves that made me go a little gushy, the ‘redefining of female beauty’ the SG burlesque promoted looked an awful lot like traditionally skinny, hot chicks with rock-hard abs and no body fat.
Aside from the dance choreography itself, which is pretty impressive (same guy that does Beyoncé, so they say), the Suicide Girls manage to cling to the shreds of burlesque via their pop-culture homages – with gyrating, thongs and boobs – that propel what would be nominally stripper routines into sexually charged geek fantasies. They ranged from the obvious (a Game of Thrones/Dungeons and Dragons routine with two dragon girls in chains) to the oddly maudlin (a slow time combat between the Bride and Go-Go Ubari set to Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Banf Bang’ or the slow reveal of septum-pierce suicide from Donnie Darko’s Frank the rabbit costume set to ‘Mad World’) and beloved cult classics (a Big Lebowski ‘Gutterballs’ tribute set to ‘Just Dropped in (To See What Condition My Condition Was In). Video game nerds were well represented with routines for Portal (Still Alive) and Legend of Zelda. Along the way we hit Superheroes, Planet of the Apes, Rocky Horror and predictably made our way to a big finish with a lockstep Star Wars stormtrooper routine.
The emcee is, economically, also a performer and every few routines she takes a breather and talks up the crowd, allows for major costume changes or lines of coke or whatever and, less conspicuously, promotes the real reason they’re doing this tour, which is to drive up hits on the SuicideGirls web site. Unlike most shows where they tell everyone to take out their cameraphones to snap as many posed pictures as they can up front and put them away for the rest of the performance, emcee suicide demands the crowd is obliged to continuously take snaps and videos and, more importantly, tweet, facebook and liveblog that shit as much as possible. It’s at this moment I have to wonder if the cost of the tour is even being offset by door returns at venues this small. Or if it’s potentially being run at a loss to make spikes in their internet presence. In this case the show itself is the shill, the end goal, like those tube sites putting the ‘big names’ in porn like Evil Angel and Vivid out of business, SuicideGirls knows the real porn money comes out of complex algorithms of page hits and web traffic, not titty shows.
Every word spoken that night is a grift. A con. The oldest game in the book. Every joke about masturbating backstage, every cake-smeared cleavage pushed into a guy’s face, every faux-innocent reluctance by ‘merch’ suicide to strip down to her bra and panties so she can model *this year’s* SG tour dress, every intentional double –entendre that the dancers are viewable spread-eagled (and potentially literally sexually available that night) to the lucky guy who goes home and pays for a membership at SuicideGirls dot com is a pantomime with the playfulness siphoned from it. But hey, at least it’s a living, right? Septum-pierce suicide might be playing the audience but it’s better than the 9-5. The only truly uncomfortable moment I have that night is the audience participation portion of the show where three drunken girls from the crowd get onstage and, in responses ranging from the dead-eyed to the enthusiastic, they twerk their best for the crowd onstage, entirely oblivious to the rules of the game and genuinely ignorant of their own part in making someone else money. I found myself hoping they were audience plants. I’d rather believe they were toad-eating medicine show grifters just so I didn’t have to feel betrayed by my own gender.
(here’s some video, you filthy animals, because I know the only reason you clicked was to see some tits)
SPOILER ALERT: False Positive 