Lolita

Christina Patton

English 1102: Assignment One

Stewart

I have always been fascinated with Japanese pop culture. And one of my favorite things about it is that it has so many sub-cultures. Lolita just happens to be one of those subcultures that I have stumbled upon over the years. The only thing I have ever known about it up till now, is that the people who are part of this community all dress like a frilly, Victorian, porcelain, doll. The whole idea made me think that these people are immature and juts wanted attention, do to their ostentatious appearances.

Where could one possibly start research for this culture? The first thing I did was Google “Lolita”. Unfortunately, I pulled up a few nasty sites. Apparently the term “Lolita” is also the name of a fetish. However, I did pull up some very informative sites. Wikipedia is one of them. I learned that Lolita actually dress up for many different reasons. For example, they want to feel like a princess, they want to feel “lovely”, or they just do not feel comfortable wearing other types of clothing (the list of why goes on and on). I then stumbled upon a fascinating blog of a girl from Australia who lived the claimed to live the “Lolita lifestyle”. She had a closet full of frills, her entire room was pink and storybook-ish, and she referred to her mother and father as the King and Queen. She also describes her days which were full of walks around gardens, tea time, reading books, sewing, and eating cute pastries with her friends. Apparently the Lolita life is something that consists of only lovely things.

I also did a Google image search and found hundreds of pictures of Lolita’s dressed up. But I have no way of knowing if the entries on Wikipedia are accurate at all. And there are no official sites relating to the gothic Lolita culture. I decided to look for a book on Amazon.com that might help me out. I found Japanese School Girl Inferno, which had descriptions of about twenty...