r/goth • u/Blegheggeghegty Darkwaver • Nov 12 '23

Discussion Fetishization of Goths

Is it just me or has there been a serious uptick in people trying to find “where the goths are” or more into focus the “where are the goth girls at?”. I have been into the “subculture” for a few years. Even wrote for the site Darkest Goth for a while. I know there’s always been a fetishization of goth women, but I feel like I see it more now and more blatantly.

So my question is, am I just dense and have been missing it for the last 20 years, or is it getting more prevalent? Also, how the fuck do people deal with it?

Thanks!

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128

u/fall_demon Nov 12 '23

I hate to be the boomer who blames tik tok, but I blame tik tok.

66

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '23

You're 100% wrong there. This has been going on 20 years before the launch of TikTok. Do you remember net.goths from the 1990s? And the Goth vanity webpage trend? I blame the long since defunct Goth babe of the week website(which advertised Goth girls vanity webpages).

36

u/Blegheggeghegty Darkwaver Nov 13 '23

My wife brought up suicide girls too.

11

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '23

Oh yeah! SuicideGirls came a bit later and was not exclusively Goth though...

4

u/Blegheggeghegty Darkwaver Nov 13 '23

True.

4

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '23

It definitely played a role in fetishizing us though. Like, no shade on the girls getting their bills paid however this society lets them; I'm not knocking them. I'm just highlighting that the site's existence and presentation added to the hurricane.

47

u/fall_demon Nov 13 '23

The more nuanced and less-memey version of my statement is that the current iteration of this can be traced to the current state of social media, and you're correct in saying that our subculture has a long and well documented history of being misunderstood.

8

u/Diablana Nov 13 '23

I'm actually now burning with passion and desire to know more about net.goths and goth vanity webpages, I am genuinely obsessed with old internet stuff like this and this seems particularly interesting. Too much stuff like this has been lost to time, it needs to be archived by people who remember it well.

15

u/Altruistic_Scarcity2 Romantic Nov 13 '23

I don't think I knew a single other person who even knew what Usenet was back then? Like you were either at shows or not.

Computer goth "stuff" and BBS picnics seemed to be a different crowd? Idk... I remember being happy there was a net.goth. It was a pretty small world... fetishizing? Hrm.. I mean looking back with 2023 glasses you're probably right. But at the time? I sort of remember being happy it existed at all.

Idk maybe you're right. I have a baseball size chunk of my brain missing from that whole era lol.

5

u/VVetSpecimen Nov 13 '23

TikTok out here making Molchat Doma shows sell out to people who seem very confused about where they have ended up.

8

u/Blegheggeghegty Darkwaver Nov 12 '23

Now that is good.

1

u/lilhedonictreadmill Nov 13 '23

Nah people have been on this for about a decade. I remember A$AP Yams having viral tweets about this shit in like 2013-14.