Lolita was a sex worker

That's bad, Lolita was only 12 when seduced by Humber - and he killed her mother who was his wife. He married her mother to gain access to Lolita.

What's more she was often in a state, she didn't like the situation. She cried and then crawled back to him because, he said, "She had nowhere else to go". That was dreadful, quite heartbreaking to read. The whole story is quite creepy, written as it was in the words of the abuser who was in no doubt about what he was doing, he was her stepfather for goodness sake and when they travelled around, everyone thought they were father and daughter.

Garfieldsarm Mon 11-Nov-19 10:13:07
Isn't the article more about how repeated abuse has led Lolita to see sex as transactional because she has never had a choice, because she has been so damaged?
.......
That's a good point and I know that happens in real life when a youngster has been sexually abused. However Lolita married somebody after leaving Humber Humbert. She did ask him for some financial help after she'd been married a while and had children but I never saw her as a person who believed sex was transactional.

I don't think it seems like a very good explanation of the text.

I do think human psychology is quite complicated and people can become invested in their own abuse in all kinds of ways. I can imagine someone in a similar situation to Lolita developing a transactional view of sex, it seems pretty likely really, and maybe an effective way to cope and survive in a situation which you couldn't change.

But I don't think it's clear that's really what happens in the novel. She seems to me to sort of wither away. Though I suppose we don't find out much about her adult relationships.

Humbert not only knew what he was doing was wrong, he was also an unreliable narrator who imposed his own interpretations on Lolita's actions to excuse his own whilst also skipping over the proof of her abuse.

This.

The general public have no confusion about this. If they catch a highly dodgy bloke behaving like this with a child they will not stand around intellectualising wankery about the functions of the child's body in a patriarchal etc etc. The ones with penises won't discuss it here or write outraged letters and try to change the system, or report it to social services either, particularly if the child is related to them or to someone they care about. They will produce a short, sharp solution that deals with actions, not words.

Sadly we allow child marriage in this country too.

Every state except Delaware and New Jersey allows underage marriage in exceptional circumstances if one or more of the following circumstances apply:

consent of a court clerk or judge (sometimes the consent of a superior court judge, rather than a local judge, is required) consent of the parents or legal guardians of the minor if one of the parties is pregnant
if the minor has given birth to a child
if the minor is emancipated.
So, as of May 2019, in the 34 states that have set a marriage age by statute, the lower minimum marriage age when all exceptions are taken into account, are:

14 in two states: Alaska and North Carolina.
15 in four states.
16 in twenty states.
17 in eight states.
From 2017[33][34] to 2019[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] several states changed their law to set a minimum age, or to raise their minimum age.

In Massachusetts the general marriage age is 18, but children may be married with judicial consent with no minimum age limit.[43] In the absence of any statutory minimum age, one opinion is that the minimum common law marriageable age of 12 for girls and 14 for boys may still apply.[44][45]

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States

While child marriage is not socially acceptable in most US cities it is legal as per the above the laws permit it (varies by state and territory) and occurs in rural areas as well as cities.

I didn't read the article referenced but based on the quotes provided the writer has extremely damaging perspectives/rationalizations on Lolita. Lolita is not a fucking love story or a young girl's journey into 'sex work' or about 'consenting to exploitation' it is about CSA and psychological torture.

The author of that piece appears to be all shades of messed up. She talks about becoming sexualised at a very young age and it sounds like her reaction was a way of trying to take control of a situation where she was powerless. I find that many sex workers will try to kid themselves how wonderful and empowering it is because admitting the truth is too painful. Ditto with many women in abusive relationships. Which is why we don’t listen to them protesting that their husband/boyfriend loves them really and that it’s not abusive. Why are we just taking the word of those in prostitution? They are just as likely to be brainwashed or in denial.

Humbert not only knew what he was doing was wrong, he was also an unreliable narrator who imposed his own interpretations on Lolita's actions to excuse his own whilst also skipping over the proof of her abuse.

He skims over, for example, how he refuses to let her eat until she allows him to rape her, as though it was a funny anecdote, he mentions how she learns to stop crying because he doesn't like it. But of course, choosing rape over literal starvation is obviously consenting to abuse.

The statement seems fairly self-evident to me. Naboov was an immigrant writing about a foreign land. Not so much has changed since his day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarriageageeintheeUnited_States

"A preoccupation with how women use their own bodies should not blind us to the ways that sex work is like other work"

If sex work were like other work it would be subject to health and safety regulations and prostitutes would be wearing hazmat suits.

What a load of old shite spouted in the name of 'feminism'.

What point are you making Mockers? Not snarky

If Nabakov was around today, he’d just be your bog-standard Twitter pedo/apologist

How so? He wrote Humbert as a monster.

Child marriage alive and kicking in many parts of the USA, the only country on Earth not to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

NB: Dolores Haze was a fictional character. She never existed.

"A preoccupation with how women use their own bodies should not blind us to the ways that sex work is like other work". But sex works isn't like any other work, nobody at the dole office is going to tell a man "well you could charge customers to sodomize you".
Sex work is also often not a simple transaction where both participants are there freely and with an equal balance of power between them.

As far as I can remember from the book (it's been a while since I read it), the sex wasn't transactional. he spotted her, wanted her, married her mother to get close to her and groom her and then abused her. He gave her small amounts of money but certainly didn't regard himself as paying for sex.

what's happening now is dangerous.

sex positive, porno positive
sex work positive, lowering consent age of medical gender treatment.
gender ideology in kindergarden, no safeguard, blurring ethics...

"now lolita is sex worker she knows what she did!
kid aren't innocent!
let them explore their sex life!"

scary world.

Grim reading indeed.

If you don’t know the story, google Florence Sally Horner, who was apparently the real life Lolita. Blackmailed at the age of 10, trafficked, raped, also victim shamed and dead by 15.

If Nabakov was around today, he’d just be your bog-standard Twitter pedo/apologist instead of ‘one of the greatest writers of all time’.

I sincerely hope that the Overlords of Twitter feel proud and fulfilled going to work every day...

From that article

In 2018, the US actress Ashley Judd, along with a number of wealthy celebrities, aligned herself with the movement to criminalise sex work. It’s an action that flouts the views of the overwhelming majority of current sex workers, Amnesty International and the World Health Organization. Judd made a statement on Facebook that is representative of a kind of feminism that generally excludes working-class women: ‘one cannot consent to one’s exploitation’. The statement equates consent with satisfaction, and exploitation with something like ‘less than I’m worth’. The reality, under capitalism, is that most of us consent to our own exploitation in order to survive. This is the nature of labour under capitalism. A preoccupation with how women use their own bodies should not blind us to the ways that sex work is like other work

A neat but wholly unconvincing reworking of the tired old tropes of calling an argument "middle class feminism" as a trump card to defeat it and "all paid work is exploitative"

Lolita was written at a time when it was considered socially acceptable for 12 and 13 year old girls to get married in Europe and the USA

It was written in 1955. Whilst there were parts of the US which permitted young brides that wasn't the case in Europe and certainly not the case in the UK.

Lolita was written at a time when it was considered socially acceptable for 12 and 13 year old girls to get married in Europe and the USA. It was a really good portrayal of just what it might have taken for a girl that age to consider marriage normal, and was groundbreaking because Humbert was definitely the bad guy.

Lolita isn't old enough to consent to sex, end of.

And Red Ridinghood was a pioneer for Pup Play until that bloody woodcutter got involved with his ageist kink shaming.

Yeah the motives are right there, loud and clear, dressed up in a lot of quasi intellectual wankery to give it a veneer of appropriacy.

Isn't the article more about how repeated abuse has led Lolita to see sex as transactional because she has never had a choice, because she has been so damaged?

Lolita is a story of a child who is kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a paedophile. Now reinterpreted as a sex worker.

Well, yes...