Lolita was a sex worker

[SadlyMissTaken]

For those who haven't read it Lolita is a story of a child who is kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a paedophile. Now reinterpreted as a sex worker. No words for this.
aeon.co/amp/ideas/lolita-understood-that-some-sex-is-transactional-so-did-i?__twitter_impression=true

Disgusting. I can’t believe it’s got to this and that this shit is being marketed as feminism. They need to get a grip on themselves.

Sorry, I'm not even reading that, my monitor is quite new and I don't want to end up smashing it in rage.

It's an insult to Nabakov who wrote Humbert as a man who knows exactly what he's doing. He even muses that she has no other choice. There's a scene in which Lolita plays tennis. She's technically good but lacks the drive to win. Humbert muses that he is probably responsible for her damaged psyche. And carries on as before.

Child sexual abuse can be seen as sex work. Sex work is liberating and needs to be supported as a feminist choice.

It could never happen that anyone would try to combine those two concepts.

Lolita was a child, and she was exploited, but she was also conscious of the function of her body in a patriarchal economy. Philosophically speaking, most of us do indeed consent to our own exploitation.

Goddess fucking save me.

The true nature of their relationship is not remotely up for dispute, so the only reason a person would write such a thing is either they’re thick as pigshit or they’re being deliberately provocative in a very nasty way. I refuse to click on the link.

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

Well, yes...

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?

The piece is about mixed motives behind sex. It attempts to position Lolita as something other than a victim. And it explicitly sympathises with her abuser

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.

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

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 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.

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"

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...

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.

"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.

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.

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

How so? He wrote Humbert as a monster.

What point are you making Mockers? Not snarky

"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'.

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

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.

Humbert didn't marry her and it's clear in the book he knows what he's doing is wrong. He is constantly having to avoid prying questions and is always on the move. Child marriage has nothing at all to do with the situaion described in the book which is straightforward abuse and would have been recognised as such at the time. But sadly not now it seems...

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.