“Can this hot goth mummy find herself the perfect good boy?” So begins a YouTube video, “Goth Girls Blind Date 7 Nice Guys, which recently went viral. The nine women featured all have a similar look: hourglass figures, skin-tight black clothing, long dark hair and pale skin – but seemingly none of the tattoos, piercings or DIY weirdness traditionally associated with the subculture. A few months later, in August, Drake went viral for picking one of the goth creators from the video, Pinkchyu, in a 20-v-1 dating livestream sponsored by gambling company Kalfie. A post afterwards celebrating the pairing reads: “Drake finally found his goth baddie.” Taken together, both incidents sparked a heated debate about whether the subculture has lost all meaning. Has “goth” really become an empty aesthetic signifier? Or are goth women being blamed for a fetishisation they didn’t create and can’t control?
The subculture first emerged in the United Kingdom during the late 70s and early 80s, amid Britain’s shift towards conservative politics, though it was not always an explicitly political movement. “Goth is usually argued to begin in the UK when we had a very right-wing government with Margaret Thatcher as the prime minister,” says Catherine Spooner, a literature and culture professor at Lancaster University. “Often [goths are] referred to as Thatcher’s children, who are articulating resistance against conservative culture without actually saying that they’re resistant.”
Goth culture is rooted in dark clothing, elements both romantic and macabre, and theatrical flair, but it is more than just an aesthetic. While the movement was never as directly political as punk, it was always countercultural, often pushing against nationalism, normative ideas around gender and other stifling social values. But beyond the politics and the aesthetic, the goth subculture was first and foremost about the music. British post-punk bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and Bauhaus helped define the sound as we know it today: dark, eerie soundscapes; androgynous, haunting vocals; and lyrics about mortality, isolation and passionate despair.
For Skyli Alvarez, a 24-year-old journalist living in New York City, music is by far the most important aspect of goth culture. During her sophomore year of high school, she fell in love with the genre after listening to “Burn” by The Cure and “Arabian Knights” by Siouxsie and the Banshees at the back of her maths class. Being a goth has defined her style, her ethos and the music she loves. As such, she takes a dim view of those she sees as having a more superficial relationship to the style. “If someone doesn’t listen to the music at all, is buying shit like pre-ripped tights from Shein, and is claiming to be gothic – obviously that’s not goth at all,” Alvarez says.
The pale elephant in the room is that the women in the video appear to be all white, or at least white-passing, reinforcing the persistent stereotype that goths are uniformly pale. Alvarez, who regularly attends goth nights in New York, says this doesn’t reflect the community she knows. People of colour have been part of goth since its inception, while the late-2010s “goths of colour” movement explicitly pushed back against the idea that the subculture has a single racial identity.
The political landscape of the US today in some ways echoes that of Britain in the 80s: a right-wing government championing traditional social values and attacking progressive ideas around gender and identity. There are parallels, too, between the Thatcher-era targeting of gay and lesbian people and the Trump administration's ongoing restrictions on transgender rights. Perhaps that’s why going up against the status quo and creating community feels important, especially now and especially for women, as reproductive rights are curtailed across the US and traditional ideas about women’s roles are forcefully reasserted. That countercultural history sits uneasily alongside the increasing fetishisation of goth women: what might have started as a rejection of dominant beauty standards is being folded into the demands of male desire, as women are reduced to the “Goth Dommy Mommy” archetype and other porn-brained stereotypes.
“If someone doesn’t listen to the music at all, is buying shit like pre-ripped tights from Shein, and is claiming to be gothic – obviously that’s not goth at all”
The figure of the “goth mommy”, in particular, has exploded in recent years. While outsiders have always sexualised goth women, that fetishisation has rarely felt so mainstream. Google searches for “goth mommy” have increased more than 5000 per cent since 2022. Searches in Australia for “gothic nympho” increased by 441 per cent according to Pornhub’s 2025 Year in Review, while searches for “trans goth” rose by 89 per cent. This may be a boom period for some sex workers, but the pornification of goth women can also carry consequences well beyond the screen.
What makes this all the more striking is that goth has traditionally offered women more room for sexual and gender experimentation than many comparable subcultures. Sociologist Amy C. Wilkins described the goth community as a “neofeminist space” in “So Full of Myself as a Chick”: Goth Women, Sexual Independence, and Gender Egalitarianism. The scene can celebrate an active sexuality that resists traditional notions of feminine passivity, especially when it comes to sexual autonomy. Many members are also LGBTQ+, polyamorous and explore diverse erotic practices like BDSM, writes Wilkins. While she frames these qualities as potentially liberatory, the irony is that some of the very things that challenged conventional femininity – sexual assertiveness, kink and other non-normative sexualities – are now being repackaged as objects of male desire. The “Goth Mommy” may ostensibly be in charge, but she is still constructed as a fantasy for someone else.
Alongside this growing sexualisation of goth women, there has been a corresponding rise in community gatekeeping. As is often the case, women bear the brunt of the backlash. “Internet gatekeeping often targets young women for being ‘inauthentic,’ which can act as a mask for misogyny rather than genuine cultural preservation,” Professor Spooner says. “It’s not the men who are enjoying that spectacle that are being called out for this, but the women themselves that are being called out for being inauthentic or exploiting goth style.” Whether or not these women are goth isn’t really the most interesting question; more revealing is why women themselves are being held responsible for goth’s perceived dilution in the first place.
The answer, of course, isn’t just about sex appeal. Some of the most influential designers of recent decades, including Rick Owens, Ann Demeulemeester and Alexander McQueen, have worked within a “haute goth” vocabulary, which has inevitably filtered down into the mainstream. Being so visually striking, goth style also lends itself particularly well to the attention economy. But even that may be ascribing too cynical a motive to the so-called “fake goths” – it’s not a crime to want to dress a certain way, even if you haven’t memorised the entire back catalogue of Sisters of Mercy.
“Internet gatekeeping often targets young women for being ‘inauthentic,’ which can act as a mask for misogyny rather than genuine cultural preservation”
The discomfort of the “hot goth” content online lies in who it so obviously panders to: men. Twitch streamers, OnlyFans creators, horny tweets and Instagram AI slop all participate in the objectification of goth women. A counterculture that gave women space to push against conventional femininity is now being repackaged for the male gaze. “[The video is the] dilution of what a subculture is into this palpable, almost pornographic version of itself, which is just very frustrating to see and to have so much momentum behind it,” says Lily Joyce, a 26-year-old goth and project manager based in New York City.
The mainstreaming and sexualisation of goth culture can have real-world consequences. Joyce says the pornification of goth women has led to increased harassment of her and other members of her community. She even recalls a Philadelphia-based goth festival having to limit ticket sales and increase security due to non-goth men harassing women in search of their own “goth dommy mommy”.
But while it’s understandably frustrating to see a beloved subculture lose its edge, the blame doesn’t lie at the door of “the Goth Mommy”, real or imagined. In 2026, we need all the counterculture we can get, but blaming women for the way they are objectified simply reproduces the misogyny that goth has long offered them space to push against.