Lonely Lolita

Transcription

Lonely Lolita

OctOber 10-OctOber 16, 2013
MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008
/B/Y ALLIE CONTI
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A portrait of Cracky-chan
drawn by Loli-chan.
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L
oli-chan is a modern-day Rapunzel locked inside
a South Miami fortress of rust and weeds on a
dead-end street. She rarely leaves a guest house
that sits in a jungle-like yard overrun with six
peacocks and half as many junked cars. Ten paces
away is her parents’ place. Wooden boards and strips of tin foil
cover its windows.
This damsel in distress is a chubby-cheeked, blue-haired,
five-foot-and-a-quarter-inch, 20-year-old womanchild in a
push-up bra and jeans with stylish zippers that zigzag across
her curvaceous frame. She doesn’t drive and has never lived
apart from her folks, except for an ill-fated year at a private
university in North Florida.
Loli and I are chatting on a quiet Friday afternoon when,
suddenly, her Razr phone lights up blue. Her half-moon eyes
turn to dinner plates when she pulls it to her dainty ear.
“We don’t have guests in our house, and you can’t either!”
her mom shouts in Colombian-accented Spanish so loud I can
hear it. Then she tells her daughter this place is no “putería”
— whorehouse.
Loli gulps a glass of Smirnoff Ice Green Apple Bite and tries
to calm herself. Her full lips swallow the tears as she translates:
“I was told to end my social engagement and that I wasn’t allowed to have people over.”
Standing nearby is her boyfriend, who cooks a mean eggplant Parmesan and tidies their shared space. Lucien has short,
strawberry-blond hair, wears a “Don’t Tread on Me” tank top
over his slender frame, and punctuates almost every sentence
with “bro.” The 22-year-old explains that Loli’s dad is probably
paranoid because the last time she invited a friend over, it ended
badly. After taking a particularly nasty brand of hallucinogenic
known as 2-CE, Loli ended up in the hospital, he says.
Now visitors are infrequent and unwelcome. “They have a
lot of handguns, bro,” Lucien says of Loli’s mom and dad. “You
should probably leave.”
The real reason for the parental paranoia is this: Loli is a
pedophile celebrity who began cultivating a following when she
posted photos of herself online at age 13. She made her name
on 4chan, the famously anarchic bulletin board that turned 10
years old this past September. She befriended hundreds of men
who would correspond with her daily over Instant Messenger.
A few tricked her into taking her clothes off, which >> p18
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Lolita
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Lonely Lolita from p17
increased her popularity. At one point, a handful
of fansites existed solely to share her images.
She is what’s known online as a Chan — one
of maybe 20 girls who became famous in the
mid-’00s for posting photos of themselves on
image boards. Many men developed a lifelong
obsession with the youngest Chan, whom they
named after the book Lolita. Although some of
these young women have gone on to achieve
mainstream or cult fame, Loli now spends her
days living a cloistered and fearful existence,
stripping for dimes in front of her webcam.
When her parents gave her an HP
computer at age 11, no one could have
predicted she would end up suspended
from her Catholic school, committed to
Jackson Memorial Hospital’s psych ward,
and resorting to sex work as an adult.
Loli isn’t a big drinker — and rarely
imbibes anything with an alcohol content
above 5 percent — but now she’s uncharacteristically downing her third beverage
in 15 minutes. She’s doing it for courage.
Slumped over on a cream-colored couch,
she admits how the whole mess began: “I
used to make friends over the internet because I couldn’t have friends in real life.”
As I head to my car, an aged beagle with
a Ping-Pong-ball-size tumor behind its right
ear follows me down the meandering driveway. Even the peacocks jut their heads threateningly. Although I’ve agreed to return, the
message is clear: Stay away from Loli-chan.
B
efore there were sexpots, there were
coffee pots. The first internet celebrity
was a first-come/first-served coffee
machine shared by computer scientists at
Cambridge University in England. The faculty
members who sat next to the machine could
smell a new pot as soon as it was prepared,
which allowed them to bogart the brew.
In 1991, the faculty set up a camera that
would allow people sitting in other rooms
to view the coffee pot remotely. They
aimed to level the playing field. But after
they posted a link to the Trojan Room Coffee Cam online, it received 2 million hits.
It was proof that people will watch
anything, even boiling water.
The first legitimate camgirl came five years
later. Jennifer Ringley was a pretty blond
Pennsylvanian who set up a live stream from
her dorm room at Dickinson College. The
20-year-old broadcast herself 24/7, chatted
with fans on message boards, and kept pub-
“WHILE I INITIALLY THOUGHT THE NAME LOLI WOULD
BE FUNNY, IT TURNED OUT I WAS THE PUNCH LINE.”
Pat Kinsella
licly viewable diaries. Ringley told the BBC
that 100 million people would log on each
week to watch her muse about romance and
perform mundane tasks. She would have sex
on camera, but Jennicam wasn’t explicitly pornographic; it was a documentation of her life.
Although Ringley and other early camgirls
of the era were in their 20s, camgirls slowly
began getting younger. “It [became] about
this fey little girl, Hello Kitty kind of thing,”
says Theresa Senft, author of a book on the
subculture called Camgirls: Celebrity and
Community in the Age of Social Networks.
“They all seem[ed] to have those big eyes
and pale skin and to fit the bill in a much
more cartoony way than a pinup way.”
The story of Loli begins with a 15-year-old
girl named Olivia, who became known as
Cracky-chan online. At 2:17 in the afternoon
on January 6, 2005, an image appeared on
4chan of an unconventionally beautiful girl
with a red-painted nose. Looking coyly into
her webcam, she flashed a simple message
written on her upturned palm: “Sup 4chan.”
Originally intended as a site to share anime
and manga images when it was launched in
2003, 4chan is now known for its affiliation
with the hacktivist group Anonymous (whose
members somehow got 4chan’s founder,
Christopher Poole, voted Time’s Most Influential Person of 2008 by manipulating the poll),
its memes (pretty much anything that’s ever
gone viral began there), and its offensive content (as Senft, the academic, said: “For adults,
4chan is sort of the ninth circle of Hell.”)
Cracky would post photos that were,
in a word, dark. First, there was a series
in which she smeared her face with menstrual blood. In others, she would take on
personas, like that of a gothic nurse. Often,
Cracky seemed lonely and sad, which made
her instantly endearing to anime nerds.
The fact that her costumes made her look
like a character also bred an obsession.
Stalkers then tracked down the girl’s
online journal, which was filled with more
photos that were shared among collectors
like priceless treasures or rare trading cards.
Cracky appeared on 4chan only a few
times before the stalker-like mob forced
her self-imposed exile from the web. Today, she has pretty much disappeared, so
it’s impossible to know her motivation
for posting. But generally, it’s clear that
4chan’s camgirls were experimenting with
their burgeoning sexuality and competing with one another for male approval.
Although every camgirl has both fans
and mockers, none has received as much
attention as Cracky. She hasn’t posted any
images since 2007 and is now in her mid-20s,
but her fansites are updated regularly. Old
photos are posted with comments such as
“how do i not be obsessed with cracky” and
“She must be at least twenty now. Probably
living a nice life. Friends, etc. I want to die.”
“I think a big part of [the Cracky phenomenon] was misogyny,” says one of Loli’s friends,
who goes by the name Camel online. She explains many of Cracky’s fans were otaku, those
who become obsessed with anime to the point
of becoming shut-ins. These fans treat camgirls
as cartoon protagonists, trade their pictures
like playing cards, and develop elaborate backstories for their “characters,” the pale New
Jersey native says. “It was extremely rapey.”
Just as Ringley inspired a legion of
“livestreamers” who would spend
>> p20
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years of their lives on cam, Cracky encouraged a new generation of artsy and insecure
millennials to become live-action cartoon
characters on the internet. She became the
de facto figurehead of a splinter subculture.
Today, a handful of fansites are dedicated to
bringing her out of hiding. The homepage
of one site, Dear Olivia, reads like an open
letter: “This page is to show you how much
you have impacted our lives. We want you
to know that we care about you. We hope
you care about yourself! From having fun
imitating your great sense of style, to becoming obsessed with various perceptions
of you... we have met friends and people
with similar interests because of you.”
Young girls, too, became obsessed with
Cracky. Instead of plastering teen heartthrobs
or boy bands across her childhood room, a
13-year-old Loli would Scotch-tape images
of Cracky on the walls. She says that as an
adolescent, she had sexual fantasies about
the mysterious girl but also dreamed that one
day she’d garner as much adulation. Most of
the friends she has today are fellow “Crackyfags” whom she Skypes and sometimes visits.
“There’s a whole religion around her,” Loli
explains. “People call her the Sky Queen.”
Why did the Cracky phenomenon take
off? “Because her photos weren’t slutty,
these guys elevated her to some sort of
holy figure,” offers Camel, who posted
nude pictures of herself as a preteen after
suffering sexual abuse and now studies business at a Canadian university.
Camel explains that a Chan name is given
by the online community to only the most
beloved camgirls and that hundreds strove
for that designation between 2005 and 2007.
She didn’t make the cut. “In the end, I wasn’t
cute enough and didn’t put enough presentation into my photos [to earn a Chan name],”
Camel says. “And thank goodness for that.”
L
oli-chan was born in March 1993.
Her first memory is of dressing up
in a blue and yellow Snow White
costume when she was 2 years old and posing for pictures. Her father, Jaime, would
often build forts with Loli, ensconcing her in
a comforter that, he said, would protect her
from the outside world. Mother Ilene was a
legal assistant, and the two ran their business
in an off-white house they shared with five
cats and a dog. (Because exploitative images
of Loli still circulate on the web, her name
and those of her family have been changed.)
Grandfather Jaime Sr. was a day laborer
turned literature professor turned lawyer.
He lived in a home on the same street and
inspired Loli with a love of learning, but he
passed away when she was only 8. Loli was an
excellent student according to her 11th- and
12th-grade English teacher, Maria Ruiz-Legg,
who remembers a brilliant writer enamored
with the book Grendel and its protagonist,
“a misunderstood monster kind of guy.”
Loli and her older brother, Todd, were
always kept on a short leash. Although
they lived in an idyllic neighborhood lined
with bougainvillea, Loli was never allowed to ride her pink Barbie bike without
an adult around. She was also taught not
to associate with neighborhood kids.
As a quiet child in elementary school, Loli
enjoyed drawing with her best friend, a tanned
girl who always wore her dark-brown hair in a
single braid. All of that ended just before middle
school, though. One day the friend said she was
only using Loli for her collection of how-todraw-manga books. “I always thought she drew
better than me, so that was weird,” Loli says.
Jaime and Ilene never enrolled Loli in
activities or sports, which suited her just
fine — she preferred to stay indoors and play
videogames anyway. So she retreated into the
world of Gaia Online, an anime-themed message board that caters to children. She was 13
years old. Her parents placed no restrictions
on the time she was allowed to spend in the
family’s computer room, and she was left to
her own devices. Loli would post on Gaia for
hours, trying to make her avatar perfect.
“I wanted little digital clothes for my little
digital person,” she remembers. “So I sent
someone pictures of my boobs and vagina.”
She had experimented with sex on
Yahoo Chat the year before, when she
was 12, having sexually themed conversations with strangers. So, she reasoned,
it wouldn’t be that much weirder to
take the next step. The whip-smart Loli
also realized it could be lucrative.
One day, she went into her parents’
bathroom and took close-up photos of
her anatomy, which she then traded for a
green Mandarin gown worth 12,000 “Gaia
Gold” pieces that she used to dress up her
avatar. “Honestly, I felt nothing,” she says.
Loli says she became a social outcast in her
Catholic middle school after admitting she
was an atheist. She found it easier to make
friends online, where her social awkwardness
was mediated by distance and the barrier of a
computer monitor. It wasn’t long before another e-friend, Josh, introduced her to 4chan.
The lanky and pale-faced boy told Loli that
4chan was more fun than Gaia, but explicitly
warned against posting pictures because the
forums there were filled with pedophiles.
There were lots of jokes about such
men on the boards, but Loli didn’t take
the rumors seriously. She began posting
photos of herself a year later, thinking the
older guys would be amused that “an actual
12-year-old” was reading their vulgar posts.
The first shot she uploaded to 4chan was
benign; Loli had the same cherubic face she
has today, but with long, light-brown hair and
bangs. She looked even younger than her age,
and that fact was exaggerated by a backdrop
of dolls and teddy bears. The message written
on her upraised hand was “Sup /b/” — a reference to the site’s board for random, non-anime
postings and an homage to Cracky’s “Sup
4chan” introduction. Soon people began referring to her as a Chan, which both empowered
her and fueled her desire to post. She says she
became addicted to the attention, like a drug,
and would check comments on her photos as
soon as she got home from school every day.
She hadn’t yet read Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita but understood the implication.
“I got given the name Loli because I
looked even younger than I actually was,” she
says. “And while I initially thought it would
be funny, it turned out I was the punch line.”
She posted her screen name on the board
and was courted by hundreds of men per
day. She would chat with them for hours
in the family computer room, where she
had arranged the tower so it would >> p22
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block her parents’ view of the monitor.
Loli-chan’s images weren’t pornographic;
many were even innocent, such as a video
in which she rapped the theme song from
the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. In
fact, that was part of the appeal for many
of the fans who found her endearing.
But for some people, those images were just a precursor to something awful waiting to happen. One
day, Jacqueline Singh, a private military contractor in Iraq who frequented
4chan, decided enough was enough.
Loli had posted a photo of herself wearing a
uniform bearing her school’s logo. Singh called
the school and told administrators about
what their young pupil was doing online.
Just after Loli began eighth grade,
her parents were called into a meeting
with the principal and head priest.
The conversation at home afterward was
awkward, Loli recalls. Her mom and brother
sat there silently as her father told Loli all of
her internet privileges were being revoked.
“It was basically super-embarrassing, and
he framed it in terms of me posting pictures
for pedophiles, which wasn’t the way I looked
at it,” she says. “Unfortunately, I saw my parents as my enemies and thought they would
never understand, and I had the attitude that
I was gonna keep taking pictures and save
them and post them all when I was 18.”
But Loli didn’t wait that long — she just
moved her internet presence deeper underground, where her parents didn’t know
to look, and posted when they weren’t
around. She would upload images on places
such as ChanSluts and check up on what
she thought of as her “fan club,” which
then numbered in the hundreds. (Even today, thousands of her photos are plastered
across the internet on image boards.)
Her first online boyfriend was upfront
about the fact that he was 30 years old, even
though she was only 14 at the time. The two
dated for eight months after chatting for a
year. Loli never knew what her beau looked
like until one day she received a picture of
a fat, nerdy guy with curly dark hair. It disgusted her, and she ended the relationship.
The second boyfriend called himself
George Peard and claimed to be only a few
months older than Loli. He sounded young
the one time they spoke on the phone, but his
sexual interests proved otherwise. He would
constantly describe sexual fantasies he had
about his 11-year-old girl cousin. “George”
would pressure Loli into sending special photos, such as her in a skirt or wearing pigtails.
Way before sexting became the topic of
national conversation, girls like Loli were
setting the prototype for self-exploitation.
And because they did so in the nascent days
of the internet, no one could have anticipated
the consequences. Today, entire academic
journals exist to study the effect of the web
on attention-seeking kids, but nothing like
that existed even a few years ago. The Chans
provide pretty much the only longitudinal study on the fallout of oversharing.
And though parents today are at least a
little internet-savvy, their counterparts in the
mid-’00s weren’t clear on how seedy the web
could be. With no one watching, girls like Loli
used the internet to explore their sexual curi-
THERE WAS A SERIES IN WHICH
SHE SMEARED HER FACE WITH
MENSTRUAL BLOOD.
Pat Kinsella
osities. Chans posted pictures of themselves
in a liminal period between the invention of
the web and the time when adults became
as knowledgeable as their offspring. To
Catch a Predator — a TV show in which host
Chris Hansen entraps would-be rapists — is
pretty much a pop-culture trope these days.
However, the kids of the previous generation
received little to no warning about such men.
Even though the mounting evidence
against Loli’s boyfriend George was overwhelming, the 14-year-old still felt a certain
amount of inertia. “I felt obligated every
month on the same day that we started dating to send him a set of pics,” she says. “He
never explicitly asked, but I thought I was
doing it in gratitude for him dating me.”
After George persuaded Loli to send
nude pictures, he posted them on 4chan.
Other posters quickly derided her as a slut.
She never dated anyone online again.
One day when she was 16 years old, Loli
met a scrawny boy named Lucien in a cemetery near her house. She had to sneak out to
see him at first. But after a year, her parents
agreed to meet him over some turkey clubs
at a local Denny’s. Loli was enamored with
his good looks, his jokes, and the fact that he
knew nothing about 4chan. Soon she made
him her first real-life boyfriend and began
calling him by the pet name Lucien-chan.
“I want my relationship with Lucien to have been my first, but I had these
pseudo-relationships first,” she says. “It
wasn’t them I was in love with — it was the
idea of them they tried to represent.”
Z
ach is drunk enough on good Scotch
that he has switched to swigging Old
Grand-Dad whiskey straight from a
plastic-capped bottle. It’s an economical decision, says the pudgy 38-year-old, because it all
tastes the same after a certain point. He’s wearing an old East German officer’s hat. At 1:30
in the morning on a Tuesday — a school night
for the University of Rhode Island senior — he
pulls up a video he’s seen hundreds of times.
Zach puts down the antique C96 Mauser
he’s brandishing to click Play on a YouTube
video of a preteen Loli spinning around in a
plush computer chair. As she squeals with
delight, a smile creeps across Zach’s face,
and he pushes his ratty shoulder-length
brown hair away from his eyes for a better
look. His bloodshot eyes begin to gloss over.
“Isn’t she cute?” he muses, although
it’s not clear whom he’s asking.
Zach is one of the many fans with whom
Loli regularly Skypes. There are also a handful of other hard-core obsessives who >> p24
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send expensive gifts such as DSLR cameras
and oddities like dresses and maid outfits befitting a doll. (Zach sends mostly books.) One fan
who lives in England even has a stick-and-poke
tattoo of Loli’s face on his forearm, she says.
But for all the men she keeps up with
online, an untold number of others hoard
her photos, a fact that haunts her every
time she steps outside. A 44-year-old
doctoral student at Temple University
named Rod Vosburgh was one of them.
In October 2006, FBI Special Agent Wade
Luders posted a link on the pedophile message board Ranchi under the alias “Bongzilla.”
Although it was advertised as a hard-core
porn video featuring a 4-year-old, the URL
really led to a computer program that would
track the IP addresses of anyone who clicked
it. Vosburgh, a Holocaust expert, was one of
the people who tried to download the video.
The FBI obtained a warrant for Vosburgh in February 2007 by tracking his
location and concluding he lived alone. The
day of his arrest, agents were on guard for
a reprisal, because they knew their target
owned more than a dozen guns. Upon hearing the sound of scraping metal emanating
from inside Vosburgh’s home in Media,
Pennsylvania, they positively freaked.
The agents knocked on his front door for
more than 30 minutes, yelling that someone
had vandalized the alleged pedophile’s car.
But the attempt to lure him outside didn’t
work. Finally, Vosburgh appeared and apologized, saying he’d been using the restroom.
He had, in fact, been in the bathroom.
Court records show that smashed thumb
drives were found floating in his toilet. Although Vosburgh was found with an AK-47,
shotguns, assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns, revolvers, and cartridges, what officers
thought to be a gun was really the sound of
their target dismantling his computer tower.
The feds couldn’t restore the thumb
drives, but they were able to locate an external hard drive containing two illegal
images of underage girls. The child porn
almost seemed like a footnote, considering
they also found nearly every other kind of
smut imaginable. There was an overwhelming amount of “child erotica” — images that
showed young kids posed in suggestive ways
that aren’t overtly sexual. Among them was a
cache of more than 2,015 Loli-chan images.
According to the FBI: “Loli-chan is the
name of a 13-year-old girl who posts pictures
of herself on imageboards and enjoys hearing
from her older male fans. In these images, Lolichan is, for example, licking a lollipop; in the
bathroom wearing a robe and making a kissing
expression; in a swimsuit at a pool; in a MiniMouse [sic] outfit; in a school uniform sitting
on the floor barefoot; and sitting clothed on
a toilet. In many of these images, the girl is
holding signs that say, ‘I’m thirteen,’ ‘Google
your own porn,’ ‘kock swerve is gay,’ [and
various other vulgar, nonsensical phrases.]”
Prosecutors said Vosburgh’s possession
of these images was proof he had a sexual
interest in young girls and that his clicking
the booby-trapped link wasn’t an accident.
A jury agreed, and Vosburgh was sentenced
to 15 months in federal prison and three
years of supervised release. He tried, unsuccessfully, to appeal in 2010.
>> p26
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Zach, the 38-year-old college student, also
insisted he wasn’t a pedophile when I spoke
with him by Skype on a recent Wednesday evening. He merely feels protective of
Loli, he says, and considers her a friend.
He first came across Loli-chan images while serving in the National Guard
as a chemical warfare defense instructor.
Immediately, he was captivated. Shortly
thereafter, someone posted a photo of the
then-13-year-old’s house with the threat,
“Here’s where I’m gonna kidnap her.”
So Zach started the site LoliChanArmy,
which gathered dozens of computer-savvy
fans who were dedicated to finding and erasing personal information about Loli’s reallife identity before predators could find it.
Now he regularly sends her books and
wishes she would put more “practical” items,
such as lock picks, on her Amazon Wishlist.
Most recently, he sent Loli an ax so she could
defend herself against stalkers. (“He thinks I’m
like a comic book character or something,” Loli
explains. “I’m like WTF do I need an ax for?”)
“I have an overwhelming urge to protect
her and make sure she’s OK so nobody harms
her,” he explains. “My instruction to her was to
put that ax into an attacker as fast as she can, as
many times as she can, and as hard as possible.”
Zach’s primary interests are collecting Nazi paraphernalia and talking to Loli
every day on Skype. When he has extra
cash, he pays her to read aloud from Carl
Sagan books and the Bible, $2.50 per page.
He’s doled out about a grand this
year to Loli and has no obsessive feelings toward any other Chan.
“[Cracky] posts all this info on a place
like 4chan trying to get popular and then
freaks out when she accomplishes that goal,”
he says. “At least [Loli] isn’t afraid to own
the consequences of her own actions.”
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oli lives with the consequences of
her youthful folly every day. When
most people see a small child with
an older man, they likely assume it’s a kid
hanging out with her grandfather. Not Loli
— she carries both pepper spray and pink
polymer knuckles on her key chain in case
such kids need a rescuer. She still cringes
when she remembers classmates in high
school who would confront her by saying,
“Hey, don’t I recognize you from online?”
Her paranoia peaked when she attended college in North Florida. She
began hearing voices that alternately
asked her to post more photos of herself and told her she was worthless.
Loli withdrew right before finals week of
her freshman year, moved back home, and
was involuntarily committed to Jackson
Memorial Hospital’s psych ward for nearly
a month. After racking up a $31,000 bill, she
was placed on a strict regimen of lithium,
which she now takes three times a day.
To pay off her huge hospital bill, Loli began
modeling on MyFreeCams from her messy
home. On her computer desk sits a webcam
and a letter opener inscribed with the saying,
“When you’re right, no one remembers, and
when you’re wrong, no one forgets.” She’s become a kind of internet welfare queen — subsisting on money and gifts sent by her former
fan base. “I didn’t think anybody would rec-
“I GUESS MY DAD IS RIGHT, AND
PEOPLE ONLY LIKED ME BECAUSE
I WAS A LITTLE KID AND THEY
WERE ALL PEDOPHILES.”
Pat Kinsella
ognize me on there, but within a day, people
were posting about it on 4chan,” she says.
There’s one fan who likes to tip her for
making her bed and another who pays to see
her unmake it. She doesn’t mind those requests, but she freaked out when one anonymous viewer asked if she would pretend to be
his 14-year-old daughter and cry. (She banked
about $1,500 in her first two days on MyFreeCams, but business has slowed, and overall
she has earned $4,000 in eight months.)
She also vacillates between fear and anger.
Two months ago, she posted her learner’s
permit with her home address on a message board as if to say, “All right, fuckers,
if you’re going to get me, do it already!”
Perhaps most telling: For the past
four years, she’s been dating Lucien,
who keeps a Glock in their bedroom and
hopes to become a cop by December.
Still, it’s difficult for Loli to accept her
descent into relative obscurity. She wishes
she could monetize her minor celebrity
and become self-sufficient. That aspiration
is complicated by the fact that her resumé
is basically empty, excepting a seasonal
job she held at a grocery store a couple of
years ago. But while Loli is sort of stuck
in a state of arrested development, other
camgirls have successfully moved on.
There’s Loli’s friend Niki, a former wannabe Chan, who is working on a series of
Cracky and Loli etchings as her art school
thesis. The project will tell the story of the
two camgirls’ rise to fame and the ways
technology can lead to psychological disorder. “I ultimately felt more comfortable
being recognized for works on paper rather
than photos featuring myself,” Niki says.
Allison Harvard, also known as Creepychan, posted photos that circulated in
2005 — the same time as Loli’s. In 2009,
she finished second in the 12th cycle of
America’s Next Top Model. The judges never
mentioned 4chan on the show, but they
made frequent references to the 25-yearold’s “massive social media following.”
Today there are also girls like Catie
Wayne, an Australian teen who became
widely known as Boxxy and received more
than 25 million hits on her YouTube channel
after her internet “career” launched on 4chan
in 2009. She, too, monetizes her personality, by selling ads on her personal website.
She even makes appearances at conventions and encourages interaction with fans,
which harks back to the earliest camgirls.
Is Loli jealous of the more successful
Chans? “I don’t really think I deserve to be
idolized, so I’m not mad or hurt that people
don’t like me anymore,” she says. “I guess my
dad is right, and people only liked me because
I was a little kid and they were all pedophiles.
So it’s something I should never have done.”
She recently contacted the administrators at ChanSluts and had them take down
most of her posts. She’s trying to erase her
internet presence and hopes to enroll at
Miami Dade College and study illustration.
Although the thing she likes best about herself is her physical beauty, she wants to be
known for something other than her looks.
“I’ve never really given myself a shot at life,” she says.
But if Loli stops posting, she will be missed.
As one anonymous poster recently lamented
on ChanSluts: “Poor loli. did it to herself by
being so loveable for all these years. take a
puff and chill out loli. im sure everything will
be fine. and if not. millions still love you.”
Allie.Conti@MiamiNewTimes.com

Lonely Lolita

Transcription

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