You’re the kinderwhore and I’m Miss World: Courtney we Love you

Picture this: it’s Wednesday evening and I’m standing in a rather empty Old Blue Last. A live band is playing shoegaze in the background, as I contemplate which Wikipedia hole to fall down next. How I love Hole. But I must admit, I hate saying ‘I love Hole’ in public – I’ve had a fair share of weird looks on the tube. As I glance down through my own hack-job bangs at my blue babydoll dress, sheer black patterned tights, and combat boots, I find my answer. For a change of pace, I am my own inspiration – which is quite generous, since by ‘me’ I mean my accidental Courtney Love cosplay on a random Wednesday.

I love me some Celebrity Skin, and all things considered, Courtney Love is a rather niche pick for a ‘90s fashion icon. Which is, of course, the whole point.
Credit for the “Kinderwhore” aesthetic tends to flip-flop between Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland, though naturally, if you ask either one, they’ll vehemently deny the other’s contribution. The girls are fighting. I wonder if either of them has ever heard that sharing is caring. And in a plot twist nobody saw coming – turns out they had, in fact, shared a room! Before finding success with Hole and Babes in Toyland respectively, they were roomies and co-founders of the band Pagan Babies, where they allegedly shared clothes. I can just see babydoll dresses, ripped tights, knee-high socks, and Peter Pan collars strewn across the floor, just waiting to be fought over.

“Kinderwhore” – as coined by journalist Everett True, because of course it was – suffers the regrettable fate of being a portmanteau of the German for children (not, tragically, the English for more kind) and the rather self-explanatory “whore.” My German GCSE, taken out of a stubborn refusal to learn French, is finally coming in clutch to save the day.

Madonna-whore complex, anyone? An odd fascination from old crusty men anyway, for women to either be a virgin or a vamp. Sigmund Freud has once again decided to ruin my perfectly mediocre day. Psychic impotence, as he called it, is the patriarchy’s hard-on. Wikipedia defines it as an inability to maintain sexual arousal within a committed and loving relationship. Not that I would ever use Wikipedia, of course. Don’t worry, it’s been confirmed with an article from a journal with an impact factor of 3.7, so the coast is clear. Women are given two options: the saintly gatekeeper who says no, or the harlot who says yes. And of course, because it’s Freud, it’s all somehow related back to the Oedipus complex – the reason behind this affliction is a cold, over-protective mother and insufficient emotional nurturing. Typical. Blame the woman.

But God forbid a woman have any desires of her own, and off she goes down the slippery slope, from Madonna back to whore. Why? Because she dared to break their rules, and that threatens men’s power. As ancient Rome taught us, power is king: it’s okay to be gay as long as you’re the top. So men get to keep having their cake and eating it too – they’re the pursuers, they chase the Whore and marry the Madonna, and they never have to confront the fact that they’re the ones who wrote the damn script.

Bizarre combination of words, Kinderwhore. If you ask me, the term says more about Everett True than the actual fashion. Funny, I seem to be seeing a massive red flag on the horizon. And it’s getting... closer? Must be a mirage. (I’m sure it’s nothing.) That a babydoll dress could be conflated with something on the sex offenders register is a uniquely male thought.

Kinderwhore itself is ingenious in its irony – it’s the fusion of these two disparate identities into a clever, if somewhat perverse, subversion of the classical ‘girl’ archetype. The look is reminiscent of battered Victorian dolls, with their vintage ripped dresses, occasionally purposefully miniaturised, smudged red lipstick and bottle-bleached blonde, yet there’s nothing docile or sweet in Courtney Love on stage belting ‘I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.’

By intentionally pushing the typical “good girl” aesthetic to the extreme, it is transformed into something unrecognisable – a sign of rebellion. Perhaps that’s the real commentary: “goodness” is less about the aesthetic itself than it is about moderation. How far is too far? The answer depends on the audience.

Take Wonyoungism – the coquettish, balletcore, hyper-feminine aesthetic inspired by IVE’s Jang Wonyoung (I feel like that Depop seller) that’s been doing the rounds on my reels page. The underlying philosophy might be self-improvement, but the aesthetic crux is intentional prettiness. It leans into the same “good girl” character; the focus on polish and composure keeps it firmly within social conventions. Soft. Non-confrontational. Aspirational. Wonyoungism is worshipped and pushed onto every unwilling girl on the internet (hello, unwilling girl number one, present and accounted for), whilst Olivia Rodrigo faces enormous backlash for wearing a babydoll dress on tour. One is safe, palatable, marketable even, whilst the other is steeped in a history of defiance. Yet which one infantilises the woman more?

Lolita – and that bizarre paparazzi shot of a 38-year-old Bradley Cooper reading it to a 21-year-old Suki Waterhouse – suggest the answer is less straightforward than it seems. Even the half your age plus seven rule can’t save you, Bradley. Dolores is the real girl; Lolita is the doll Humbert invented and dressed in his prose. A child forced into an aesthetic by a man who refuses to see her as a person. We still risk being seduced by Humbert’s language, and as we enjoy the prose, Dolores disappears behind it. We become silent spectators to her defilement. Nabokov resisted putting a girl on the cover for good reason: the moment you do, you reproduce Humbert’s logic – reducing her to an object of desire. The reader goes from critic to consumer of the very fantasy it condemns. And Kinderwhore, for all its irony, risks doing the same – a girl still ends up on the cover.

And that cover is a lid on the box. The girl is only a doll if that’s all you’re allowed to be. And the racket we lovingly call the beauty industry has made sure that being the doll is the only version of womanhood that gets to be aspirational. Subservience is the (not so) new main character.

Kinderwhore may have been created as a feminist statement by using costume to challenge the need for conventional beauty for success in a male-dominated industry, but it doesn’t come without baggage. In the attempt to criticise the sexualisation of girlhood through satire, you might end up following the very narrative you set out to rewrite, no matter how obvious you think you are. And in an age where likes, views and shares are the new gold, critical blindness is practically rewarded. It’s easier to choose ignorance when you’re spoon-fed video after video of the same story. Here comes the aeroplane ... and it’s the SparkNotes version of pop culture –but with even less analysis. No wonder media literacy’s spiralling. People won’t – or, worse, straight up can’t – read between the lines.

I feel none the wiser as to whether I’m a doll, hustler or “like a virgin”. Not to mention whatever codswallop Freud would like to assign to me. I’m not about to hinge my self-identity on a man who saw genitalia everywhere. But then hey, I didn’t dress for his gaze, I dressed for the shoegaze. My uncle once asked me: if I became, essentially, a pink Pilates princess, would I be able to live with myself? Maybe I could, but only ironically – and if Kinderwhore has taught me anything, it’s that irony is a gateway drug. The trick is being the doll and pulling the strings.

After all, I want to be “the girl with the most cake”.