He used Instagram to lure the
teenage girl then threatened to
make nude images of her ‘go viral’
The Lure of Her Buttocks
He was the middle-aged paederast
who fantasised about defiling
12-year-old Dolores Haze aka Lolita
Lust and Longing
Lolita Hugs her Teddy
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 masterpiece Lolita
has only grown more infamous with age.
Dazzling as it may be, Lolita is an especially
hard sell in this age of trigger warnings
and the #MeToo movement.
After all, Humbert Humbert is not only the most
unreliable narrator ever to slither his way
through the pages of a novel, he’s also a
middle-aged paederast who’s fantasising about
defiling 12-year-old Dolores Haze, aka, Lolita
For those who admire Nabokov’s gifts, talking
about Lolita can feel like being on a perpetual
critical cartwheel of exaltation and apology:
celebrating the novel’s artistry while decrying
the corruption that artistry captures.
I Dream of Lolita
“How did they ever make a film of Lolita?” asked
the ads promoted the film’s release.
“They” inevitably came down to director
Stanley Kubrick who commissioned Lolita’s
author, Vladimir Nabokov, to write the screenplay.
The question, posed in the waning years of
old-school censorship, wondered how the story
of a middle-aged academic having his way sexually
with a 12-year old girl got the greenlight.
Even the novel was initially banned in the U.S.
before it became a runaway bestseller.
Playing Lolita
Lolita Tempts
Nabokov denied any moral purpose behind his story.
The abuse endured by girls like the nymphet in
his novel should be exceptionally disturbing in
any era but Lolita was often read voyeuristically.
It was celebrated by many in the 1960s as a facet
of the sexual revolution. The radical hippie movement
hailed the book as emancipatory. A long cry from
today’s hysterical response the paedophile bogeyman.
Paedophilia is a particular class of sex crime,
a particular species of sexual predator.
How is it that such crimes can become
spectacle, entertainment, even art?
These are hundreds of these stories every day on Google News. Search ‘lure sex’. Clearly, an awful lot of men [maybe women] read them. Does it turn them on?
