Suicide Girls: Beauty Redefined - Tapa dura

Suicide Girls - Beauty Redefined explores the Suicide Girl phenomenon from their start in 2001 to their websites one million unique weekly visitors today. This giant tome provides a timely look at the fascinating women who created and inhabit the SG community. With an introduction by SG founder, Missy Suicide and images of hundreds of SuicideGirls world-wide, this title shines a light on a new female aesthetic - a look reminiscent of vintage Betty Page and Bunny Yeager photos, but with a decisively 21st century edge. "There's no other place in the media to see girls (like these) who are tremendously smart and beautiful in their own way" says Missy, "Everywhere you look you just see the super-thin, super-tall, bleach blonde Baywatch babe. There are a lot of people out there who want to see a different kind of beauty."

Combining her love of pin-up photography, music and art with personal ideals of female empowerment nurtured in DIY culture, Missy founded SuicideGirls as a place where a woman can be herself and where her confidence, creativity and uniqueness are what defines her. While it is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Missy found the camera lens of mainstream media a bit myopic for her taste. SuicideGirls began and has grown from a desire to expand mainstream culture's definition of what is beautiful, and to show that it can be realized in a more diverse range of women than those who grace the pages of most fashion magazines and movie posters. What started for Missy as personal expression has now become a revolution.

Raised in Portland, Oregon in what could be described as an eclectic and artistic environment, Missy combines her traditional fine arts training with new media business acumen in the operation of SuicideGirls. In addition, Missy continues to photograph women for the site. Her photography focuses on depicting how each model feels sexiest about themselves in the photos and has inspired a generation of young women to embrace their bodies and showcase their confidence.

Since launching SuicideGirls, Missy has become a voice for the culture on sexuality outside of what mainstream media is reporting. She has been interviewed on issues relating to music, the Internet, pop culture and body image on numerous radio stations and in publications such as the New York Times, Wired, Spin and Elle. Recently featured as one of the top "12 Sexiest Jobs in Hollywood" and the "20 Sexiest Jobs on the Web", Missy has appeared on HBO, Fox News, the new hit series "CSI: NY" on CBS, as well as the two SuicideGirls movies in constant rotation on Showtime. She hosts a weekly SuicideGirls talk radio show on LA's Indie 103.1 and was recently chosen to model as part of peta2's 2008 "Ink, Not Mink" celebrity, anti-fur ad campaign.