The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

give for remaining single are [that] they don’t feel a necessity to marry…. In
reality… they don’t want to lose their freedom and comfort. 157
Tamiko Maruyama writing in the same year also stated that a “few decades
ago young women thought they had to get married during ‘tekireiki’, the
Japanese marriage age, from 20 to 24”. 158 Now more young Japanese
women have begun to think that marriage is not “the only way of life”. 159
Incidentally this marriage age, or tekireiki, is a typical age bracket for
women to choose to participate in Gothloli culture, which again emphasises
a certain endeavour by young people to prolong a utopian childhood state
before accepting society’s traditional responsibilities.
In 2000, when the Lolita subculture was becoming increasingly
prominent, Elise Tipton was also noting that young Japanese women in
general were becoming “increasingly… reluctant to give up their
independence”. 160 As well they were proving to defy tradition in that even in
cases whereby marriage was still their primary goal they had become more
assertive in opting “toward a preference for ‘love marriages’… which was
not the custom in earlier times”. 161 I would say that this is another reason
why the Gothloli chooses, symbolically and often physically, to perpetuate
the phase of innocence. Rather than being forced into an arranged and
loveless marriage (especially to avoid being left “on the shelf”, or becoming
a stale “cake”), many young people in Japan are now choosing to wait for
the right time to grow up by remaining virgins until they find a love partner.
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