On the other hand, I'm also aware of the role porn has played in gay liberation, as well as the arguments advanced by folks such as Patrick Califia that what people do with their bodies is no one's business but their own—even if, as Jim Goad points out, the sorts of people tend to go into porn usually start out a few rocks of crystal meth short a trailer park in the first place.

As any "ex-gay" born-again Christian (or trample fetishist) can tell you, though, we actually have very little conscious control over what we find sexy, and I have to admit that I'm a guy who really likes ogling, and, yes, even occasionally wanking to pictures of pale, dark-haired waifs with damaged psyches, perky boobs and tattoos in interesting places. (Which is OK, since my girlfriend does, too.) My predilection for punk rawk bad girls is why, much like a priest to the boy's bathroom, I've been drawn to SuicideGirls.

For those unfamiliar with SG, the outfit is run by Spooky Suicide (AKA Sean), who handles the business end, and Missy Suicide, who handles the photography. (No, they're not married—they have more of an incestuous brother and sister vibe about them.) Like many others, it's a pay site, but in addition to its daily dose of nekkid naifs, SuicideGirls is also, as any member will point out, a virtual community, complete with message boards, bios, groups, and Web journals. So, on the one hand, yes, they show naked girls on the Web, which is commonly understood as pornography. On the other hand, hey, it's porn with blogs.

Still, does this amount of self-expression make "porn" into "art"? Call a strip club a "gentleman's cabaret," and it doesn't change its essential nature. In the past, I've been quick to accuse SuicideGirls of alternately rehydrating some glossy Richard Kern books from Taschen like out-of-date Ramen noodles and jumping the shark with siliconed, airbrushed Playboy bunnies. I mean, it's not like there's anything wrong with pornography (unless it's that softcore Spice Channel shit), but why not call a spade a spade?

I have to admit, I've been forced to reevaluate my feelings about the whole SG mystique in light of the new softcore but hardcover SuicideGirl book from Feral House (a brilliant choice of publishers, since Feral head honcho Adam Parfrey has been one of the illuminati of the whole Industrial Burlesque aesthetic for two decades now). Seeing Missy's photography on the Web, where the good shots are thrown in with the not-so-good, doesn't do it justice. By carefully selecting which photos to include, and being able to show them somewhere besides the 256-color gamma glare of a computer monitor, Missy's photography, and her models, are shown to their best advantage. In some of the shots, the models, if not for their lip rings and tattoos, would recall real-life versions of Vargas pinup girls.

Though the Richard Kern punk-rawk-naif-in-a-dirty-East-Village-apartment aesthetic is an indisputable influence on the particular eros that is SG (Kern even did a photo shoot for SG earlier this year), the gaze of Missy's camera is completely different. There really is a difference in this generation's porn made for mixed audiences. Over 10 years ago, Andrea Dworkin wrote in her speech "Pornography Happens to Women":

In pornography we literally see the will of women as men want to experience it. This will is expressed through concrete scenarios, the ways in which women's bodies are positioned and used. We see, for instance, that the object wants to be penetrated; and so there is a motif in pornography of self-penetration. . . . In fact we are told all the time that pornography is really about ideas. Well, a rectum doesn't have an idea, and a vagina doesn't have an idea, and the mouths of women in pornography do not express ideas; and when a woman has a penis thrust down to the bottom of her throat, as in the film Deep Throat, that throat is not part of a human being who is involved in discussing ideas. I am talking now about pornography without visible violence. I am talking about the cruelty of dehumanizing someone who has a right to more.

Not so with SuicideGirls: For what it's worth, the girls on the site are completely different from the bland, bottle-blonde McBimbos that have come to define feminine beauty. The SG's personalities come through in Missy's photography; they look, by turn, pouty, insouciant, bored, and playful. You wonder what these girls are like, what they think, what their parents are thinking, what they had for breakfast.

Raised in a world where constant stimulation blares at us from every bus shelter and storefront, we've absorbed the message that sex sells and made the commercialization of our bodies a means of self-expression. Whatever your feelings about pornography, if nothing else, SuicideGirls has forced us to reconsider the boundries between art, erotica, politics, and ordinary commerical smut—and that is what puts them on the (self-) cutting edge of the infotainment industry.

So, yeah, it's porn. But hey: At least it's well done porn.