SuicideGirls burlesque show heads to Victoria
Bettina Suicide speaks about her own view of nudity, burlesque and sleeping in curlers
September 14, 2006
by Jessica Smith
SuicideGirl Bettina Suicide says, “It’s a lifestyle thing.”
“It’s a good thing, given the weather and the proximity of children,” says Bettina Suicide, about keeping her clothes on in the photo shoot in Beacon Hill Park for this article. While we’re sitting on a bench near the petting zoo, which has just been closed for fall, children walk by us occasionally and stare at Bettina’s pinky-red ’40s pin curls and theatrical makeup. She sleeps in curlers every night, she says, “It’s a lifestyle thing.”
Bettina, whose real last name is May, is a UVic political science grad, a suicide girl and a burlesque dancer. SuicideGirls (SG) is a networking website, a “lifestyle brand” and a modelling company. The models pose in pin-up photography and have a wide range of body types, often with prominent piercings and tattoos. Like in Playboy, the photos contain nudity, but no penetration or S&M. The models and members of site communicate on message boards, through journals and a news page.
SuicideGirls has branched out in the five years since its inception as a Friendster-style networking website. Now there is a SG book, a DVD and a music compilation, and suicide girls have appeared in music videos, movies and TV shows. Their live burlesque show is coming to Victoria on Sept. 21.
Bettina has been performing burlesque in Victoria since she met her first dance partner through SG three years ago. Through the site, she has been in a Probot music video, an HBO special on the rebirth of modern pin-up, the SG book and several photo shoots. She was asked to audition for SG’s burlesque tours but is too busy with her own dance troupe, her faux-fir fashion company and her office job to be away from Victoria for long. She doesn’t know exactly what to expect from this year’s show—it changes with the personalities of the different dancers—but in the past the neo-burlesque SG shows have included punk-rock girls, metal chicks and goth girls.
“It’s not so much what you’d see at a classic burlesque show with the ’40s and ’50s aesthetics.” The attitude is similar to old-style vaudeville, Bettina says, “being humorous about sexuality, making sexuality funny, because that’s what it is.”
Nixon Suicide, a dancer in the show billed as the “most dangerous burlesque tour in the world” says this year’s show is going to be bigger than ever before. “We have a lot more multiple-girl numbers than we had before,” she says on the phone from California. “If you don’t want to get messy than don’t stand in the front row.” She sees the show as a good representation of the SG brand.
“The girls on the tour have certainly tried to put a lot of themselves into it and into the act,” she says. “The one thing that the tour maybe doesn’t represent as much is that all of the girls that are on the tour are dancers, so you get a kind of similar body type.... We have a lot more variety in the photosets [on the website] than we do on the tour in that way.”
The models are in charge of their own photos. Bettina says the do-it-yourself aspect of SG modelling is what separates it from traditional pornography.
“I submit my own photos, I take my own photos, I set up the ideas. We all come up with the costumes and concepts, and put it out there ourselves,” she says. “We’re all about making our lives happen and making our dreams come true ourselves, we’re not waiting for someone else to do that for us.”
For Bettina, being a suicide girl is a different way of being a feminist.
“I know there are girls on the site who don’t picture it that way, and that’s cool too, but for me its just one more way to access my feminism,” she says. “Me choosing to express my sexuality that way, and to be positive about the female body. It’s all about women’s control.”
Nixon hesitates to call it feminism, but says she has found SG modelling empowering for her, and her fans.
“It’s definitely given me a lot of freedom to do what I want to do and I know that it has had a really good effect on the self-confidence of a lot of the girls on the site and a lot of the female members,” she says. “I got a lot of positive feedback from women who are trapped in the middle of the [United States] where people are treated as freaks or weird because they look different, and I get e-mails every week from them saying, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’”
Bettina says that to her, the difference between stripping and a burlesque show is the attitude.
“If you go to a burlesque show you’re like, ‘Ha ha that’s really funny, her clothes fell off.’ It’s in how it’s presented, not the content. You’re still seeing half-naked girls.”
Today, Bettina is a natural, making a different cute and cheeky pose for each of the 40 shots taken under a tree in the park. Whether her nude pictures are pin-up or pornography, or about feminism or exhibitionism, she says, “This isn’t just a look we put on for photos, this is just us as we are.”
