VenusAngelic, a prominent, 15-year-old member of online ball-jointed-doll fandom, describes how she uses cosmetics to make herself look like a doll, narrating it in a kind of whispering, Asian-inflected voice. I confess that this isn’t my subculture or interest, and VenusAngelic’s opening remarks, “Hello my dolly molly inky pinky cotton candy clouds!” are not the sort of thing that I’d be likely to say to other people. But VenusAngelic’s cultural identity seems to me to have the kind of deeply transgressive edge that characterizes the best teenaged subcultures, the kind of thing that evokes panicked, hostile, knee-jerk reactions from grownups. The YouTube comments on her video are a kind of pure, distilled youtubidity — vile, misogynist, patronizing, incoherent — which suggests that she’s touching a nerve…
Continue reading… “How to make yourself into a doll”
