Who would have thought an evening involving seven goth/punk girls taking off their clothes to a variety of catchy tunes in front of a packed audience could be so boring?

I'd been bragging for weeks that I was going to see the Suicide Girls, who I've been a big fan of for many years now. Their first international tour, I trumpeted. And I'm going to be there.

So I turned up at the Metro in the guise of a second wave feminist and checked out the crowd alongside Dave, a genius photographer. He snapped and I interviewed all kinds of Gothic hotties - asking what they expected from the show, why there were there and so on. It turned out this would be the most entertaining and enlightening part of the night.

Most of these attractive audience members answered with the obvious - they were there to see tits, with an emphasis on size. Some mentioned positive depictions of female sexuality, and Master Tom from the Hellfire Club told me he was there to see some women who were sexy, but outside the norm.

In the end, they were all going to be disappointed in one way or another...especially the delightfully misguided young lady who told me she was looking forward to seeing "women making a positive image for themselves without using their sexuality".

For iconoclasts breaking the mold and making their own way in the world of burlesque and titillation, the Suicide Girls were suspiciously similar to the college chicks in those "Girls Gone Wild" videos.

There was nothing groundbreaking about the show, no real tease to the strip and a distinct lack of interesting props, sets and setpieces. Plus, they all had C-cups or less, except for one woman with the worst boob job ever.

There was the usual tartan skirt routine and so forth, but the meat of the act involved a variety of re-enactments. Blonde MC Reagan dressed as Napoleon Dynamite and stripped to Jamiroquai's Canned Heat, leading us to wonder what the fuck that was all about, and there was a strange reimagining of the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs complete with a lesbian kiss.

It may sound all right so far, but the worst part was this: all but three of the girls had their nipples covered with gaffer tape the whole time...and all seven kept their knickers on. It's the sort of mindblowing stripper theory espoused by Jessica Alba in Sin City and Brittany Murphy in Spun.

So in the end, the Suicide Girls had the last laugh. We paid $50 each to see some American skanks, who can't dance, parade round in their knickers and spray us with beer. Was this a deliberate attempt to educate us on the follies of sexualising women - be they eyelash-batting ingenues or fire-breathing, tattooed root machines - or were we taken in by a show that would have the dodgiest flesh joint in King's Cross in an uproar?

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