"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 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."
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