This post, once again, is brought to you by Bibliotheca, aka the only thing that gets me to write when I'm under the weather. It's been a rough month in tourism and in my life, so I'm glad to have an excuse to write! This month's theme is growth, so it's a perfect chance to tackle a sensitive topic: /cgl/ on 4chan and why I (and most lolitas I know) outgrew it and the illusion of anonymity it offered.
Because this post contains a discussion of 4chan, it may be difficult to read and it includes lots of ~problematic content~.
For the gladly uninitiated, /cgl/ is the board on 4chan (the infamous imageboard/internet sewer) that discusses cosplay and (elegant) gothic lolita. These were lumped together when the board was initially created, presumably because they're both weird ways of dressing that you might see at a con. /cgl/ users tend to see themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of 4chan, with many primarily or only using /cgl/ and often commenting derisively on other boards' users. Users on /cgl/ don't normally use names or tripcodes to identify themselves, keeping things mostly anonymous. There tend to be consistent threads for certain perennial topics (i.e., works in progress, questions that don't deserve their own thread, brand releases, capsule wardrobes, LARP, and art/drawing requests) along with threads for special topics (i.e., specific conventions, individual fandoms, and lolita themes). One of the most common threads is the ita thread, where users post images of people who they believe to be wearing lolita poorly. Users tend to refer to themselves as seagulls after the pronunciation of the letters /cgl/.
That's the basics gist of it, but it gets worse.
Content warnings for the following paragraph: weight stigma/ED discussion, bullying, racism, antisemitism, transphobia, ableism.
Lolitas on /cgl/, especially in the ita thread, are notably hypercritical. They'll often post plus size lolitas just for being "fatty-chans" and trans lolitas for being "men" or "fakebois". Despite the board's alleged rules against content involving minors, kids and newbies end up in the ita thread pretty often. And although it seems to have gotten better in the past few years, people have been posted for their race, or skin color, or for having a Jew nose. Additionally, any additional aspect of a photo, such a tattoo, a mobility aid, an insulin pump, or even a dang child, are all up for critique on /cgl/. Common advice on /cgl/ includes matching pinks, wearing wigs, and losing weight for the purposes of fashion, which has sometimes lead to thinspo and pro-ED sites. There's also the issue of identity; although the posters are anonymous, the people in the photos have their faces immortalized for ridicule; these photos might come from private meets or personal pages, where the original photographer and subject did not mean for others to see the photo. Finally, there have been issues with personal targeting, known as vendettas in /cgl/ terms, where a person will post another specific person again and again, even if their coordinate is good or just nitpick-worthy, just for the purpose of harassing them.
In case you skipped it, this is bad news. One might wonder: why even go to such a place if it's so harmful and critical?
Millennials were raised to crave anonymity online, and when I was getting into lolita, /cgl/ felt like the only text- and image-based lolita platform that held that kind of impermanent anonymity I was raised to want. Livejournal was a frightening monolith of trackable screennames and visible interactions, daunting due to its permanence. I started going on /cgl/ regularly when I was about 15 or 16, despite the fact that the rules said it was for 18+. I really liked the cosplay construction and sewing advice, seeing new drawings take shape in the art thread, keeping up with new releases, and generally absorbing all the advice like the impressionable dumpling-shaped sponge I was. I only started posting when I was actually 18, and even then, it was nothing identifiable.
In my freshman year of college, when I was barely out of high school and couldn't even legally drink, I went through the lolita rite of passage: getting posted on /cgl/. Getting posted meant that someone found me objectionable enough for public ridicule, and it could (and did) happen to anyone. It was for my (admittedly childish) behavior at a tea party rather than an outfit, but I felt an upwelling of shame and regret. I still kept contributing advice and capsule wardrobes, commenting in nitpick threads, but it was with a bitter edge. My IRL comm was inaccessible due to lack of transit, so I basically stopped reaching out and curled around myself. Even if my coords weren't ita, I believed myself rotten to the core, just like Momoko.
As I grew more stressed and spiraled deeper into undergraduate depression, I spent more time posting to /cgl/, hunting down coords I disliked on Instagram for the ita threads, reposting coordinates from Facebook to the Closet of Frills thread, and generally tying my emotional state to the anonymous approval of people online. I genuinely believed, at that point, that the only value I would ever have to the lolita community was as a faceless voice in the miserable choir, coloring judgments and swaying opinions one pitiful post at a time.This was especially fraught considering that I came out twice in college, so I was exposing myself online to frequent transphobia and homophobia along with the antisemitism that pervades the internet, deluding myself into thinking that my obsessive contributions would make me One Of The Good Ones in the eyes of my faceless comrades.
And then I got real friends. Although I still had some lolita friends from college, joining a comm again (this time with transportation), getting a discord, adding more lolitas on social media-- this time I had an actual support system. Instead of proving my worth with faceless replies because I was scared to be known, I grew into a network of people I could genuinely trust with my face and voice and name, people who wouldn't post one another to the ita thread because we all knew that friendship was more important than being Right and Good at styling a coord. I learned to trust again.
So my growth was moving past the fear of being known. Even if anonymity was real, the people who liked my contributions on /cgl/ liked the contributions, whereas the people who know the me I am today see the whole.
Although this is my specific story, it's not unique. Most lolitas I know who've been in the fashion since 2014 or before have something similar they share; how at their lowest point in life, /cgl/ was there to drag them into the septic depths of schadenfreude. But no matter how deep we were in, we moved past it, moved beyond the urge to hide under the anonymous veil and back towards personal, human, imperfect interaction. No matter how how many >replies a post gets, not even a screenshot will last the way a genuine smile or a laugh in voice chat would. So growth, for secrecy-obsessed lolitas, isn't all about coording tips or wardrobe composition: it can also be the process of learning to stop hedging bets with the invisibility of anonymous fora and to start the risky trial of human connection.
This isn't to say people who still post to /cgl/ are bad or evil, just that there is life after 4chan.
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