"A super-cute Lolita look"

[IWouldNotCouldNotWithAGoat]

here

Am I being prudish? Wear sandals with socks for a super-cute Lolita look? This is aimed at teenage girls!! Am I over-reacting or is this just wrong?

It's a New Zealand shop, BTW.

It's interesting that when someone (usually a feminist) offers an alternative opinion to popular opinion it is assumed that she has misunderstood the text

but you aren't going to change your mind and neither am i.
hey ho.

popular opinion= patriarchal opinion

I have changed my mind. My opinion used to be yours

ordinarily, yes.
but that isn't my opinion.

of course the text has been significantly remodelled for/ by the patriarchy, hence the film/s and the dodgy lolita fashion ads.

i don't know which reviews of the original book you are talking about. i haven't read any recent critique tbh, but recall none congratulating nabokov on his ability to create nudge nudge wink wink underage porn.

i could be wrong though. have you got any links? i thought most of the trad lit crit went the other way.

"no text can dictate how society will alter and promote it."

I think the book is excellent, and I can't read it and see Nabokov's intent as being to give a wink to predatory child abusers. I doubt he wrote the book meaning to say much about paedophilia at all.

But its existence does seem to have helped shore up society's belief that girls are complicit in their own abuse and often instigate it. While the text can't do anything about that, Nabokov could have. But he didn't.

"The only people who can judge this book as good or bad are women who were themselves abused as children"

Does that mean that I can't judge whether a ghost story is a good book or a bad book because I don't have experience of ghosts?

What about a historical book? I wasn't alive in the period so I can't judge if the book is good or bad?

I think what is highly disturbing about this book is that Nabokov is using the subject of sexual abuse as a mechanism.

He is using it to create a complex and disturbing subject matter that will allow him to write the sort of book he wants - one with an unreliable anti-hero narrator that will make people feel uncomfortable.

I agree with Sakura, that in terms of how this book can be regarded in relation to the real life subject of sexual abuse (as opposed to the academic one), I think only victims of real abuse could give a reliable insight.

I find it very disturbing that Nabokov refers to 'nymphets' himself when being interviewed.

I have also read that middle aged men being attracted to pre-pubescent girls is a recurrent theme in Nabokov's writings - I haven't read any other writings of his though so cannot verify.

In some ways Lolita reminded me of 'Crime and Punishment' in which murder is used as a literary mechanism to evoke certain emotions and thought processes in the reader.

I think this book has bolstered an idea of ambiguity about sexual abuse - the idea that young girls are erotic. This may not have been Nabokov's intention but I think his stance of intellectual objectivity doesn't help.

I find myself questioning Nabokov's motives for writing this book.

I hate all the Lolita fashion bullshit.

"sakura you're getting to the point where it sounds like you're saying you're the only feminist on the planet"

SaF, when everyone is supporting the status quo opinion whereby popular opinion= patriarchal opinion and patriarchal opinion = popular opinion and the critics reviews reflect this, and your the only one offering an alternative opinion to the mainstream, it definitely feels.. how can I put it... lonely sometimes

precisely Beachcomber, it reminds me of Crime and Punishment. I'd like Crime & Punishment more if it wasn't for the fact the murdered person was a woman, but because she was his landlady, demanding rent, i feel she had some power in society as a person and therefore might have been murdered as a person not just as a woman.

, Nabokov has to be given credit for his window-dressing, that's for sure. But at the end of the day men getting rich off the concept of old men fucking children, resulting in adulation from other men (and women?) for his "work" ain't new, however well you dress it up.

PUt simply. Lolita, the book, is sexy. I remember Dworkin saying that all that matters in popular culture, if there is a female involved is: is it sexy

Women being raped is sexy, women being murdered is sexy, (corpses are sexed up in CSI) ; women are sometimes in prison, therefore the concept of women being in prison is sexy. This is all it boils down to> Was Humbert raping Lolita sexy? That's all that counts in patriarchal art when men's worlds interact with women's.

Crime and PUnishment is far superior to Lolita. At least Dostoyevski had a point because he was making a political comment on the dreadful suffering that went on as a result of dire poverty, and he was saying that we all do things we wouldn't normally, when we're driven to it. And that was how he managed to get us to identify and empathize with a murderer

WTF was Nabokov's overriding theme? Ooh, some men can't help themselves and oh, it could happen to any man, but never fear, sexual predators do have a complex inner world and sometimes even a conscience: they're not all bad.
Did Nabokov's work help women in any way? THe answer is No. At a stretch, you might be able to say it didn't harm them (though I question that, especially with the misogynistic depiction of the mother- that wasn't double irony. We really are supposed to believe a woman could be as disgusting as Lolita's mother).. So his book did nothing to alter or question the status quo, which is that every single day on this planet some little girl is being raped just like Lolita was, by someone exactly like HUmbert

It has been a while since I read C and P but IIRC he killed the moneylender in order to pay his rent and do good deeds with the rest of the money.

C and P is a much better read, in my opinion, than Lolita. It is multi-layered and remains amazingly readable and contemporary. (Although, I don't know how reliable the translation I read was, am not Russian scholar!)

I struggled through the second half of Lolita with its clever wordiness and convoluted use of language. I found C and P unputdownable and very structured.

Again am struggling to remember, but aren't there some interesting female characters in C and P plus exploration of prostitution/poverty and the patriarchal nature of marriage? Certainly the characterization is brilliant.

I think Nabokov wanted to push boundaries with his book and explore certain themes - he used the characterization of the sort of person who would rape a 12 year old to do this. I'm uncomfortable with that. I also agree that this book does not help women and it doesn't seem that that was in anyway Nabokov's intention.

He must have known that the subject matter was going to make the book controversial and notorious - that seems massively disrespectful to abuse victims.

If Dostoyevsky had used the murder of a child in order to write C and P, I doubt I would have liked it so much.

I haven't read either of these books since becoming educated about feminism - it would be interesting to re-read them using feminist analysis.

Also Dostoyevsky experienced what it feels like to know you are going to die - he thought he was going to be executed before he was exiled. I think they even had him in front of a firing squad.

Why would a literary novelist write a book to 'help women'? Or help men? Literary fiction is about exploring language and human nature. It's not self-help.

And the murder victim in Crime and Punishment is a woman. Albeit an old one and therefore less sympathetic than the murder of a child, perhaps. Doesn't make the murder any less horrific and wrong. Raskolnikov destroys his own humanity when he kills her.

Dittany, I am interested in why you think Amis, Mailer, Tolstoy etc. write books 'to help men'? I can see why you think they write male-orientated books (although I am a fan of the writing of both Amis and Tolstoy) but do you think they have specifically written their books with the aim of aiding men to do/be something specific?

dittany & sakura: have you read Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation? If not, I think you might find it interesting.

Also, I haven't seen it discussed here or on the boards elsewhere, but a memoir of sexual abuse published recently - Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger - has (very stupidly, depressingly, & revealingly, in my opinion) been widely discussed as a book from Lolita's point of view. Caused a lot of controversy.

Well, it's a long time since I read it, so I will no doubt do it an injustice now, but her argument in nuce is that, if we define pornography in terms of power relations of one kind or another, all representation (art of all kinds, etc) is effectively pornographic, in that its ideal producer/consumer is masculine/the male gaze, which objectifies and does violence to women, the ultimate object. So all art is irredeemable.

A total remaining of the representative sphere is necessary if these kinds of power/violence relations are to be avoided.

Re-imagining, not remaining (damn autocorrect).