Amina Munster, member of the suicidegirls.com pinup website. Photo by Gary Thompson.

They're nude, rude and tattooed. And they want to sign up your daughter.

A phenomenally popular Web site features provocative photos of 871 young punk and goth-types with attitudes as naughty as their piercings. Suicidegirls.com -- which winked onto the Internet in 2001 -- attracts more than 1 million visitors a day (more than rollingstone.com).

Parents be afraid. Be very afraid.

"It's a celebration of the female form, which has been celebrated as artistic and beautiful for centuries," says Missy Suicide, the freelance photographer who co-founded and runs the Hollywood-based site with a webmaster named Sean Suicide. (Most of its organizers and models adopt Suicide as a surname, Ramones-style, to thwart stalkers.)

"The girls are using their bodies in order to create art," says Missy, a 28-year-old librarian-esque punk-rocker who mixes granny glasses with a septum ring. "There's no more real or true canvas than your own body." (Most Suicide Girls sport tattoos and piercings, "even if they're not that visible," Missy says.)

Users pay their $4 monthly membership fees with a credit card, which is how the site supposedly restricts access to minors.

"If we find out anybody is under 18, we revoke their membership right away," Missy says.

Although the site's name sounds heavy, it's not intended to connote self-destruction or the clinical depression often associated with the goth set. It is a term coined by "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk -- in his 2000 novel, "Survivor" -- to describe the disenfranchised skater chicks inhabiting Portland, Ore., where Missy grew up.

"It could have been called anything," Missy says, "but that seemed to fit it well at the time."

The idea of displaying nonpinup types as pinups is not new. (See the 1994 book "Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes" or any number of recent sexy senior calendars.) But suicidegirls.com is more than a fetish gallery or novelty item to its members; it's a social gathering place. According to Missy, 80 percent of her traffic heads to the message boards, not the photos, which is why she claims that nearly 45 percent of her membership is female (unheard of for a site featuring female nudity).

Users meet in groups based on shared interests -- everything from Morrissey and Nader to Bush and Metallica -- then communicate with each other via internal e-mail. Each member also gets a personal blog to broadcast their thoughts to the entire community, and many are squeamishly intimate.

"My best friend lives in Toronto," says Amina Munster, 23, a suicidegirls.com model and one of 173 members of the Las Vegas regional group. "She's this person I have everything in common with. And I never would have met her if it wasn't for the site. It just seems like all the girlfriends I have are Suicide Girls."

Missy says she was inspired to create the site by the so-called suicide girls she knew while living in Portland.

"They were comfortable and confident with their bodies and themselves, and I thought that was kind of a rare treat among women -- especially younger women," she says. "So I wanted to share that feeling and inspire other women to feel comfortable and confident with themselves and with their bodies."

Missy, who personally selects the one new model added daily (out of hundreds of applicants), shields herself from feminist criticism by showcasing women the mainstream media wouldn't. Most are regular types -- some plus-sized -- sans implants.

"Most girls can find a girl that looks similar to them on the site," Missy says. "And if that girl feels beautiful about herself and is being celebrated as being beautiful, then I think girls can find inspiration to feel more beautiful about themselves."

Munster is missing a leg, in fact. The North Las Vegas homeowner lost it to gangrene in a swimming accident as a child -- along with the tips of all five fingers of her right hand.

"Suicidegirls.com is helping to expand the idea of beauty," says Munster, who landed a brief role on A&E's "Inked" because of her exposure on the site. "Not only the 'Playboy'-type of woman, but every woman can be beautiful."

The sexism issue isn't as black and white as the more artistic photography on suicidegirls.com, however.

"I would say (the site) is exploitative, yes," says Lois Humbold, Women's Studies chair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "For me, the idea that women have to sell their bodies is an exploitative idea."

Missy counters that the models control their own images -- choosing their own poses and wardrobe, and often snapping their own photos.

"In fashion magazines, models tend to be props in the photographer's vision," she says. "Our models are active participants in how they're portrayed, and they stare down the camera, like Bettie Page. They're the ones that are in control."

Humbold concedes that suicidegirls.com empowers the women involved. But, she argues, it uses the very tools of male empowerment to do so.

"It's not about whether they're in control of their own images," Humbold says. "It's about why women are valued for what their bodies look like. The point is, why is there so much pressure for women to display their bodies?

"You can never look at something by itself," she adds. "You always have to put it in a larger context."

Such criticism hasn't hurt the site. In fact, for the past two years, suicidegirls.com has successfully branded itself beyond the Internet. There's a best-selling "Suicide Girls" photo book; a compilation CD, "Black Heart Retrospective"; a clothing line; and a DVD, aired by Showtime last month, of a touring Suicide Girls burlesque troop (which played the Las Vegas House of Blues in March 2004).

"I think the thing is that the counterculture-thinking community isn't really serviced by the mainstream media at all," Missy says.