Waller first submitted a set — shot by a New England School of Photography student — of her posed with a static-y TV. Too dark. Then she tried another one, of her lounging around and dunking cinnamon sticks into a coffee mug. That didn’t get accepted either. “On my second-to-last set, I had a lot of comments saying, ‘that’s boring.’ I thought it was pretty. Pretty boobs!” Then Palo and Dan Wherren tag-team photographed a “Midnight Snack”–themed set that had Waller raiding the refrigerator in a nightgown. Alas, even though that didn’t make the cut either, Waller says the process was fun. “Lexie was there as my fluffer.”

Waller posts links to her rejected pictures on the SG Hopefuls group, inviting public critiques, some of which can be brutal. “An established model or an established member can say, ‘I know exactly why that wasn’t accepted: because every single one of your expressions was the same and that’s boring and you don’t know how to pose flatteringly for your body type.’ ” Says Waller: “Ouch.”

Still, she dreams of being a SuicideGirl. It isn’t about the money or even about nude modeling. To her, and to the other countless hopefuls, SuicideGirls has a certain standing. “If I weren’t concerned with status, I would’ve gone to Oberlin or the University of Oklahoma, instead of Harvard.”

The drama
“I’m not gonna lie, I actually had to stop some drama today,” admits Sid about halfway through a 90-minute conversation over a bowl of chicken-noodle soup at the Greenhouse Coffee Shop, in Harvard Square. “The story is, I thought I offended somebody. I honestly couldn’t pinpoint a time or place when I could have offended this person. . . . I came to find out it was all based on a lie that somebody else believed. I feel bad, but I at least didn’t do anything wrong.”

Anyone who reads Sid’s public journal knows she’s been troubled by a few people in the SGBoston community over the past few weeks. The day before, she’d lamented, “No matter how good of a person you try to be, there is always one fucking bitch there cutting you down behind your back.”

Members hint at the gossipy, catty side of SuicideGirls in an offhand way, because it doesn’t square with all their talk about support and friendship and community. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise: sisterly mini scandals can erupt among any group of “confident,” “opinionated” women with “strong personalities” — no matter how punk, hot, enlightened, empowered, nude, or tattooed they are. What’s more important to members and SGs is that friendship coexists with occasional conflict. “The community is just amazing, and I’ve gotten to be so close with the people here, I didn’t ever expect it,” says Kera, who’s too busy with her academic life at UMass Boston to be bothered with she-said–she-said hearsay. “So when drama happens either in my real life or online, I just ignore it.”

That’s pretty much how she and the newer SuicideGirls seem to view the mass departure of last fall. “I don’t really know what the allegations were, but they all seemed very far-fetched,” Kera says. “So it didn’t really affect the way I thought about myself as being part of the community.”

Having heard the nasty epithets hurled at the site, many of the younger SGs don’t seem to idealize SG as some sort of feminist utopia. For them, gender empowerment isn’t really a consideration. “The idea of feminism never came into play when I applied, nor does it enter my mind to this day,” Lexie writes in an e-mail about why she applied to become a SuicideGirl. (Her personal profile says she did SG because “my vagina told me to.”) “I never did it for social equality, nor womens interests.” She adds, “In my daily life, the mass-model exodus had no affect on me.”

Yet even some loyal members believe the site is not the strong-willed sisterhood it’s cracked up to be. “I’m sure that 90 percent of what’s out there that’s negative is true,” says Allston resident Dan Wherren, who’s been a willing SG consumer for four years. “But even though I don’t believe in PepsiCo and CocaCola, I still buy their products.”

SuicideGirls do keep disappearing individually (some for personal reasons, like pregnancy). So do members: observers point out that any time a subscriber posts an anti-SG rant in her journal, she gets “zotted” — her profile mysteriously disappears. And an affiliated promotion that has MySpace members voting for a weekly “SuicideGirl Beauty Queen” has ruffled some feathers. (It’s worth noting that one of the site’s biggest defenders from last fall, site programmer and SuicideGirl Olivia, recently disappeared from the site.)

“There’s drama everywhere,” says Bailey, who’s recently watched many of her first-generation peers disappear. “I’m amused by it because I’m like, ‘Are people forgetting that this is a porn site?’ That’s all it comes down to in the end. You’re naked on the Internet.’ ”

Bowie, who became a SuicideGirl after the squabble, couldn’t care less. “I don’t really think that I’m doing SuicideGirls because I want to empower myself. I thought it’d be fun. I just like boobs.”

On the Web
SuicideGirls: //www.suicidegirls.com