Hair Bows and Bruises: The Coquette-fication of Grooming

Hair Bows and Bruises: The Coquette-fication of Grooming

Written by Madelyn mchoul

art by kat boskovic

With ribbons woven through her hair, heart-shaped sunglasses slipping down her nose, and a lollipop-stained tongue, the “coquette” girl flourishes. She is dainty, but her glamorous essence flaunts itself as she struts to unreleased Lana Del Rey tracks in her wired headphones. She portrays herself as the pure embodiment of femininity, garnished in pinks with the attitude of an angel; one would be shocked to hear a slick of profanity fall from her heavenly, lipstick-smeared mouth. 

She snaps photos of herself, reclined between floral sheets and bow-shaped pillows. An almost-empty can of Diet Coke rests between her hands. She’ll caption it later on, posting it to her Tumblr blog or a TikTok slideshow, writing “Dinner” with pink and red emojis to follow. 

Her favorite movie is the 1997 version of Lolita, and it plays in the background, increasing in volume as her stomach growls louder. Intricately, she inspects every inch of her skin in the photos, ensuring that no masculine elements are infiltrating her appearance. She compares herself to the adolescent girl on the screen, craving to be desired in the way Humbert Humbert craves the precious, young Lolita. 

A draft of her photos waits patiently on her phone as she opens Tumblr to curate a different post, one to fulfill this desire. “I just want what they have,” she writes, placing a GIF of Lolita and Humbert Humbert beneath her caption. She posts it almost immediately, leaving curated tags beneath the post like #Coquettegirl, #Lolitacore, #Iloveoldermen. She waits for her audience to roll into the comments. 

In the darkness of her bedroom, her phone glows and vibrates. Other young girls, so similar to her, reblog the post, all in agreement that they, too, want to be thirsted and hunted—to be used and torn apart in their short, gingham skirts. Their accounts are identical to hers, filled with moodboards of young women having their pigtails pulled by an older, masculine hand, and captions all hungry for the same desire to be groomed through their romanticized lens. 

These girls, all bonded by their love for the “coquette” aesthetic, have found one another, not just through their similar interests in film and fashion, but through this shared craving to be groomed. Some are lonely; they go through hours of school without once being acknowledged by a peer. Some are already dealing with the aftermath of being groomed at a young age, attempting to heal themselves through what they know best. Some are girls struggling with mental illness and using dark romanticization as a form of escapism. 

They cling to the “coquette” aesthetic, knowing that its softness and child like elements attract the men that will quench this thirst—this thirst that they believe could never be satisfied by someone their age. With only one click on their phones, these “coquette” girls are met with an overwhelming amount of messages and comments from predators. That’s when, through censored Tumblr tags and anonymous chat websites, the “coquette” girls meet their idealized match. Then, their “coquette” lifestyle transforms from a heavy romanticization of grooming to actually living through and experiencing the suffering it brings. 

Society has never had this much access to widespread communication or forms of media. It’s not hard to attract a pedophile. All you need to be, after all, is young. For centuries, young girls have suffered at the hands of older, predatory men. Yet, what happens when these same young girls, now wrongfully influenced by complex media in the rising digital age, believe that these predatory dynamics are what they need most? It is so easy for a young girl to stumble upon a movie like Lolita without fully understanding its nature and see it through a romantic lens. In a society where instant gratification is abused and everything has the potential to be glamorized, it’s so easy to fall down the wrong path and right into the hands of a pedophile. 

But the “coquette” girls believe that these hands will mold them into something beautiful, into the adored, feminine doll that they aspire to be. In the end, they’re shaped into something worse than the abused or lonely girl they had been before this lifestyle. They’re left with cracks in their skin, the trauma of this digital abuse seeping through, and a giant, glowing sign plastered over their head, reading: “Not a victim.” 

Because how could they be? Young girls have always suffered at the hands of the patriarchy. But after seeking out such an immoral passage of it, “coquette” girls are left with dark bruises and trauma from predatory relationships in their youth, and the guilt that they had thrown the very first punch. They will forever be left with a voice in their head, one curated by both themselves and society, saying that they were old enough to know better. 

But how can a girl, so easily influenced by the media around her, with an underdeveloped brain filled with immature impulses, truly have known better?