My culture isn’t your costume! Comes to
Mind every time I see the term goth for these girls.
As a man, I didn’t spend my formative years getting my ass beat for being dressed like Robert Smith’s butch little sister for you to slap on some lipstick and get celebrated!
Same here, but the older girls loved it. I went to school with bright red tights once just to show how far I was willing to push the envelope. This super hot Hispanic girl who was a sophomore came up & said "i had to talk to the guy who was wearing the red pants" I was a freshman & that was my first glimpse of notoriety.. i think ive been subconsciously chasing that feeling ever since. Wish I knew her name now.. i want to say it was like Jenna or something. Hope shes living her best life 😉🫠
I would dress in my girl friends’ clothes and let them do my make up about once a year at our conservative Christian college, because I knew it would make people upset.
I also loved to wear wild stuff and the reactions spanned the entire range of human emotions. There were people who thought it was lame, people who thought it was hot, people who got angry (probably because they were mad they thought it was hot). My favorite reaction was on a day some asshole started a rumor that someone was going to shoot up the school, one of the star football players came up to me in English class and asked "Hey man, I know we don't talk much, but we're cool right?" And I said "Is this about the shooting rumor? I would never do something like that I promise" and he said "Yeah yeah, of course....but.... we're cool right?" And I said "Yeah, we're cool." He sighed in relief and went to tell his teammates in the class they were safe.
Same goes with colored hair, in HS I used to get roasted for having bleached blonde hair but funnily enough the same guys who made fun of me eventually ended up getting their hair bleached too as the years went on and all those emo rappers started to become popular..
I wore skinny jeans in high school. Best clap back I ever had was when some drunk 30 year old said “I think my little sister has those same pants.” I said “wouldn’t know, she wasn’t wearing anything last time I saw her.”
100% was about to get my ass beat in a TGIFs if his friends didn’t step in. Still worth it.
Dude, I understand perfectly, the late 80’s and early 90’s in the UK I had to search the women’s section for tight jeans as they disappeared with new wave and all in the blokes section in alt clothing shops were oversize baggy monstrosities
Same same. The girl that shared her jeans with me told half the school we fucked, because “I really didn’t want anyone making fun of you for being gay.”
Part of the half of the school that heard we hooked up, told her mom, who was my mom’s best friend. So her mom came into school and literally pulled me out of class by the ear the next day to berate me for having sex.
Then I had to tell her that it wasn’t true. What teenager ever wants to say “yeah I didn’t actually have sex with her.”
Anyways, thanks for bringing up a weird memory. Don’t mind my share!
Also, I am not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Just a regular hetero.
I was an adult when I learned that the marks on trees along hiking trails were called blazes, and then I thought, "oh shit, that's why they're called trailblazers"
There’s a difference between actually being goth and doing what she does. That’s the important thing here. Goth is a music based subculture. She larps the aesthetic for her only fans.
Its called e-goth, based around internet culture and aesthetic appraisal, its crazy having to scroll down this far to see someone mention subculture like this
Like, yea, it is goth, its a subculture of goth thay focuses almost entirely on the aesthetic
As a man, I didn’t spend my formative years fleeing the Huns, crossing the Danube, and sacking Rome for you to throw on some studded bracelets and call yourself a Goth!
I like appropriation when it comes to the styles of different cultures and wouldn't mind seeing it be more commonplace. The issue is lying about being apart of that community. Egirls dressing up like Mavis and calling themselves goth has given the goth community the stereotype of being all high-libido, dommy women.
If you're judging the goth subculture by its representation on the internet, sure. There's tons of garbage online. It's where all the elitist gatekeepers live now, arguing about e-girls and their goth credentials. It's the Papers, Please side of goth, and is not at all representative of IRL experience.
In the real world every goth scene I've been a part of in 25 years has been welcoming, inclusive, and incredibly supportive.
Right, it just makes you an emo vamp poser. There was ever only one single true goth, and it was Edgar Allen Poe. Everyone else, including you, is not really a goth but just calls themself that because they think it makes them cool.
It’s definitely shitty and watering down the whole goth “scene” but hey, to each their own. I’m fine with anyone being/wearing what they want as long as they aren’t being a complete chode
u/gr1mmcr33p3r you just killed me. You and your awesome username and your Robert Smith’s butch little sister formative years fashion sense took me out, dead. Now I’m a ghost. A ghost haunting Reddit. DAMN IT I THOUGHT THERE WAS GONNA BE A BAND!
I feel the same way, brother. I didn't spend my formative years getting suspended for beating y'all's asses just for it to become a thing some rich asshole pays lavishly to celebrate. We were trying to get rid of this sort of thing... now it all feels like such a waste of time.
Important thing is that we all had fun with it at the time though, right?
My skinny jeans, boobies bracelets, and long wooshy hair with a Neff beanie didnt suffer years of bullying and screamo music to be worn as a costume by some onlyfans bitch
Fight the power, take back Goth and please keep the Emos out, they did so much damage to the Goth vibe by making people think Goths are just emos in black
And black clothes. And the eyeliner or whatever. I don’t know from makeup. And comically pale skin. Looks reasonably goth-y to me. Or at least some kind of scene type thing? Emo? Again, I don’t know from subcultures.
As someone who grew up in the Oakland punk scene and was very adjacent to other alt subcultures (including goth, emo, and later, scene), her look is none of those things. That's also true of most OF "goth/alt" girls. It's mostly just costumes from Shein that non-alt women use to commodify and profit off of non-alt dudes' fantasies of what an alt girl might be like.
Now, there are a few exceptions. But if you're not part of any alt scene I'm not sure you'd be able to learn to spot them. But a sort of okay rule of thumb is that if she's got BIG, difficult to hide tattoos that match the aesthetic she's going for, or facial piercings that are not a septum ring (easy to hide), or like, a very alt haircut that cannot be a wig like a skullet or chelsea cut or something like that, basically anything that means she's really committed to the look, there's a better chance that she really is into the culture.
But makeup and a black wig is, you know, not that.
This is it. In the digital age it's no longer reasonable to sequester broad-reaching aesthetics into a neatly delineated subculture. The reality is we have both goth in the sense of a tight-knit music community and we have goth in the sense of a broader group of aesthetics. They both exist de facto and neither has the ability to delegitimize the other.
As someone who has been a part of the goth scene for 26 years I can’t express how wrong you are. The posers who were in it for the aesthetics constituted a fraction of the people in the scene. The majority of goths remained goths as the music, aesthetics and community genuinely resonated with them. Maybe go to a goth club and spend some time talking to goths and see what it’s actually about.
You're not wrong exactly, but I think your experience paints a different picture. In the 2000s/early 2010s, goth/scene/emo are all an aesthetic that kind of melded together in the consciousness. Of course, you might say that these are all distinct groups, and you'd be correct in many respects, but that isn't how they were all perceived back in the day.
I'll say, as someone who grew up loving those aesthetics (and still does), I didn't really have a clear distinction between them at the time. I tried to look and dress like them, and I liked some emo music, but I couldn't truly tell you what the community was "about." I was in a rural area and my primary exposure to them was through the Internet; there were no local goth clubs or anything I could go to.
None of this is to say that you're "wrong" by any stretch, but just the perspective of myself and how I believe others perceive it. "Goth," to the general public, has always referred to a style more than a subculture for a large part of the public. I can easily understand why that would be annoying to someone actually in the subculture, but it's one of those language hiccups that has unfortunately been cemented in common parlance.
I have a genuine question and I mean in total sincerity because I genuinely want your perspective as someone who’s been in the scene nearly as long as I’ve been alive.
I don’t dress “goth” but one of my favorite bands for both their music and aesthetic is Ghost.
What am I? A poser? A goth-adjacent fan? Or just a regular person? Again, I’m not trying to be snarky or anythin, I’m genuinely curious.
Nah, this girl would be called goth in 2007 and would have a flock of nerds behind her in each situation.
Doesn't depend on time, depends in people who care about subcultures.
Na. This is a thing that really only exists post-rise of Twitch/OF. She's just a regular chick cosplaying as the "big tiddy goth gf" meme. 07 emo was a lot different than this both in spirit and visually.
Can't have changed that fast. Goths at my school in 2005 were historical quasi-victorian with the rotted/ripped addition of a bit of grunge aesthetic.. how I remember the good old days of buying lace at the thrift store and dyeing it black on the stove 🖤
In Slavic communities girls like this were called herki (херки) during my boomer times. A multi-level pun on gender (though, similar wannabi. goth guys were also calked like this), a band HIM popular among them (thry apparently used something like HIM and HER for US tours) and the word herovyy (херовый) heang a slang to "of shitty quality" (literally it means "dick quality").
... she's also dyed her hair black, has white foundation on her face, is wearing black clothing with metal hardware, and has almost vampire fangs, but sure, she just slapped on some black lipstick.
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u/PipedInFromIthaca 15h ago
In the big 2026, "goth" apparently just means "black lipstick".