San Francisco- The woman onscreen is nearly naked, with a bashful grin and half her body screaming with tattoos. She lets out a sigh under the buzz of her boyfriend’s tattoo gun, and pops a sedative. She is Adahlia Suicide, a 22-year-old Oakland woman who has recently joined SuicideGirls.com.

“I needed the cash,” she says flatly over drinks in her new apartment, referring to the hefty check the site cuts for its models.

Launched four years ago as a meeting place for punk “girls” in their 20s and 30s with tattoos and piercings, SuicideGirls.com has become a large feminist subculture meant to counter the big-boobs-no-brain standard of beauty — all by posting nude Goth girls online. Some join for the sex between members, others for the online journals. Almost all SuicideGirls define the site’s purpose differently — as an activist platform, a porn site, a networking space — agreeing only that it has huge party potential. Each model — there are now 752, with a new one added daily — adopts the last name “Suicide” as a member of the site’s extended alterna-fem family.

“SuicideGirls are all about fighting the ridiculous Playboy Size-3 stereotype,” Adahlia says, adding that each SuicideGirl, from the lanky to the plump, has more than her share of unique blemishes.

Some members bare nipples, others a bit more. Some keep their emotions hidden from the site, others post them daily. And unlike MySpace.com and Friendster.com, which also offer blogs and photo sets, SuicideGirls meet in person every day for rock shows, dinners, sports and sex throughout the world — Portland, Los Angeles, New Zealand, Antarctica — and nowhere in greater numbers than in the Bay Area.

To join, women submit online applications. The site’s administrators select from them, and membership has nearly tripled in the past year. The site now attracts more than a million visitors weekly. There are 71,000 pictures and 12 million comments on the site.

“It’s about self-expression and having fun,” says co-founder Missy Suicide, 27, an erotic flicker in her voice. “It’s very feminist. Why? Because it’s feminist for women to be exactly who we are, and we come in all packages and shapes and attitudes.”

“I started SuicideGirls in 2001 to celebrate my friends who look nothing like the images I’d been seeing in fashion magazines,” she says by phone from Los Angeles, where she runs the company. Yes, company. SuicideGirls has become a pop empire, having gained serious pop culture cred in 2002 when the SuicideGirls’ hardcover photo book premiered at No. 1 on Amazon’s Art & Photo section.

SuicideGirls got their name, members say, from “Fight Club” author Chuck Palahniuk’s 2000 novel “Survivor.”

Also unlike MySpace.com, for instance, SuicideGirls sends out a year-round national burlesque group with a rotating SuicideGirls lineup. A DVD featuring a live recording of the tour will air in November on Showtime, and last week the DVD became available to the public through punk label Epitaph, with previously unheard music from Sparta, Head Automatica and 30 other punk bands.

The burlesque tour took form when a few SuicideGirls decided to expand on the thrill they felt during at-home photo shoots.

The inaugural tour in 2003 relied on trial and error, members say. For last year’s tour, they hired a choreographer and hit mainstream stages such as the Great American Music Hall, which in the 1930s was a burlesque theater.

Burlesque began in the 1840s and faded by the mid-20th century. It began with so-called lower-class men and women making fun of upper-class social events, and when attendance began to drop, the performers would show some skin to keep the men attentive.

A burlesque revival began in New York in the early ’90s, when the United States was gearing up for Operation Desert Storm. “Burlesque thrives on depression,” wrote Irving Zeidman in his 1967 book “The American Burlesque Show.” And, as arts writer Tricia Romano wrote two years ago in the Village Voice, perhaps “people just need a little escapism amid increasingly dire straits.”

SuicideGirls’ burlesque, however, does not evolve from such wartime jitters. It evolves from women’s social resistance to the pomposity and inaccessibility of Barbie Doll imagery — and from a love of flesh.

The DVD captures SuicideGirls dancing, conducting photo shoots with cabdrivers on Geary Street at midnight, interviewing each other and staging other, less-printable antics.

“SuicideGirls is gigantic in the Bay Area,” Adahlia says, “because San Francisco is a huge party town.”

San Francisco hosts the group’s biggest annual event — the prom, which takes place every May. It began two years ago at Thee Parkside, a Potrero Hill bar. Each year, it includes live shows by the Lovemakers, Oakland’s biggest new band, along with giveaways, DJs and stripteases. Hundreds of SuicideGirls fly to San Francisco to attend.

Thee Parkside’s bartender, Terrence Ryan, launched the prom as a way for SuicideGirls to reclaim the very concept of proms, he says. He also moderates the site’s chat boards.

The irony of punk-Goth “girls” dressing up for a mainstream prom isn’t lost on them. Most SuicideGirls weren’t “the queens of our school proms,” Missy says. “This is our way to take back the prom.”

Hours before the 2002 prom, members recall, a who’s-who of SuicideGirls played kickball across the street at the Jackson Playground, then feasted on curry at Thee Parkside. (SuicideGirls host Curry Fridays and Sushi Mondays throughout San Francisco.)

In 2003, the prom changed venues to the Red Devil Lounge on Polk Street to accommodate a bump in attendance. “The prom is a good way to meet new members,” Adahlia says.

She and Thistle Suicide, 22, who moved to Oakland this weekend from Santa Cruz, met online and are now best friends. It’s become tradition for SuicideGirls to carry the prom over to North Beach, where the party goes until morning, Thistle says. “By the end, we all share showers and beds at Hotel San Remo, so it can get a bit wild.”

With short hair, a pierced septum and a detailed tattoo of Albrecht Dürer’s “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” she looks at ease, as if her canvas of a body were a statement of her confidence.

Thistle works in the “food- service industry” in Santa Cruz and Oakland, she says, “like any good college grad should.” She hangs out with Adahlia every week, but friendship isn’t Thistle’s reason for joining.

“I’d just gotten out of a controlling relationship,” she says. “Doing what I want with my body is a way of saying f — you to him.”

Although some men have posted messages claiming that SuicideGirls are anti-male, the women explain that being in control of their own bodies isn’t the same thing as hating men. Many SuicideGirls have boyfriends, although not all the boyfriends are supportive of the organization.

“My boyfriend’s into the SuicideGirls,” Thistle says.

“My boyfriend’s undecided,” Adahlia says. “He’ll just have to get over it.”

Many boyfriends and girlfriends strongly support SuicideGirls’ promiscuity. Mike Peters (a pseudonym), however, is not one of them.

“I can’t stand that my girlfriend’s a SuicideGirl,” he groans, eating a burrito in the Fillmore district. He requests the pseudonym to shield himself from his girlfriend’s wrath, he says.

“I don’t think she knows just how loathsome, putrid, despicable and contemptuous I think SuicideGirls really is. … Think about it,” he adds. “It’s a porn site that lets you interact with my naked girlfriend. Is that supposed to be ‘cool’ for me?

“And the prom!” he says. “That’s just the pinnacle of stupidity. She goes home with some random dude from New York.”

Thistle considers such concerns male-centered, repressive and finally irrelevant. “So many guys think we’re all stupid,” she says, “that we don’t study and that we’re really slutty. We’re not.” Adahlia provides a counterpoint: “I fully enjoy being a slut,” she says.

Apparently, SuicideGirls’ identities cut in many directions, and what’s important to one member is laughable to another. That variety defines the site.

A common thread uniting the models, however, is tattoos. Adahlia has plenty. She works in a tattoo shop and, on Sunday, began getting her right-arm tattoo sleeve.

She grew up hitchhiking the United States and living in closets. Her dad died when she was a kid, and her mom was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “She’s on a morphine drip in the hospital,” Adahlia says. “She sleeps all day.”

Cancer runs in her family, so Adahlia has avoided getting tattoos on her breasts. The Bay Area’s Holly Suicide, 27, also lost her mom to cancer, six years ago. Holly’s upper-chest tattoo says “Eternal Amour” in her mother’s honor. Holly works at Thee Parkside with Ryan; the two live together in the Mission District. She organizes the SuicideGirls’ annual Christmas parties at her house and also works at Boogaloos, a Valencia Street cafe.

She graduated from college with a photography degree, “which translates to waitress,” she says. On Friday, she flew to Seattle to attend Bumbershoot, a sprawling annual arts festival. But shortly before her outbound flight, she realized the obvious: She needed a place to stay. So she posted an online ad and, hours later, received a free offer from Lottie Suicide, in Seattle.

“Problem solved,” Holly says.

Travel accommodations are a big perk for SuicideGirls. Beginning Saturday, Adahlia will host two SuicideGirls from Italy whom she’s never met.

“Meeting new SuicideGirls is the best part,” says Lola, one of San Francisco’s original SuicideGirls. She moved to the Bay Area from New Hampshire. In high school there, a classmate wrote “Dyke” on her locker, and the school dean allegedly refused to wash it off. So Lola left her hometown because she “couldn’t stand the homophobic, classist, racist students I had to deal with.”

During Gay Pride weekend this year, she posted a gay photo set with two other SuicideGirls. Her boyfriend, who lives with her in the Mission, supports her sexuality.

Among Lola’s tattoos is an elegant word string that wraps her right arm. It’s a line, in Sanskrit, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 fable “The Little Prince”: “It is only with the heart that once can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

But Lola is no sap. She wears a fiercer biohazard tattoo on her other arm, to balance the gentleness.

Lola spends 40 hours each week at school and 30 more working for Apple Computer.

“I don’t care what it means to other people,” she says of SuicideGirls. “It means self-expression and meeting people, to me.”

“It’s a forum for girls whose bodies are modified of our own accord,” says Thora Suicide, 37, another San Francisco member, with platform boots and pierced everything. Thora spent eight years modeling in Paris. “In modeling, I couldn’t have an artistic eye during my own photo shoots. With SuicideGirls, it’s entirely up to me.”

Despite the site’s advocacy for self-reliance and social purpose, one of Adahlia’s close friends, Chanel Parker, a tattooed 20-year-old in San Diego, refused to join, after great consideration.

“It’s sort-core porn,” she says. “That’s beyond my own boundaries.” In San Diego, she say, it’s nearly impossible to get office work with her piercings and tattoos. “Most employers don’t see me as professional,” she says.

She hopes the SuicideGirls, with or without her, will do something to change that.