Issue date: 10/20/04 Section: Culture

Media Credit: Tina Larkin Vanessa Wooten, a Suicide Girl, sits with her mother, Yolanda Jones at the Frontier Restaurant on Tuesday

Vanessa Wooten said she was a shy, reserved adolescent growing up.

Wooten, 21, is a Suicide Girl, posing naked on a Web site for everyone to see.

Suicide Girls, once an underground Web site, now features more than 400 girls worldwide. An alternative to Playboy and other adult sites, Suicide Girls must be different from the typical pinups.

"If you look at me, I am really skinny and don't really have anything," she said. "It's nice, because a lot of people think the ideal woman has blond hair and big boobs. But on this Web site, being the opposite of that is considered beautiful."

The name Suicide Girls is from a reference in a Chuck Palahniuk book in which he writes about women who are gloomy and dark. Wooten said it is also a play on the saying that if one poses naked, it is suicide for his or her career.

Wooten said she heard about the site through a friend. Before, the thought of posing naked scared her, but when she broke up with her boyfriend, she chucked her inhibitions out the window.

"I said 'Screw everything,'" she said. "I applied, and they accepted me. It was kind of like a liberation for me."

Many girls from New Mexico have applied to be a Suicide Girl, but so far only three have made it. Competition isn't lax. Wooten flew out to Los Angeles where she met with the owner of the site.

"We met at a coffee shop," she said. "They interviewed 10 of us and they picked three."

Then she had her first paid photo shoot, which Wooten said was a bit intimidating.

"After a while, it gets a lot easier," she said.

The majority of Suicide Girls have tattoos and multi-colored hair. Next to the girls' pictures is a box that asks what body modifications they have.

"You don't necessarily have to have anything pierced," Wooten said. "You just have to have a certain demeanor."

Wooten doesn't believe the site is about porn.

"I guess it could be labeled porn," she said. "But most of it is just artistic nude pictures. There isn't any penetration or anything."

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