The modern narrative surrounding Lolita

[mrlolicon93]

This is kinda tied to one of my old post here.

https://forum.map-union.org/viewtopic.php?p=2873#p2873

Recently i just finished reading the lolita novel and i really enjoyed it and all of it's nuance.

Humbert and Lolita are both awful people but Nabokov does a great job with his style of writing making you sympathize with them and it truly is a great tragic love story.

However what i have seen on social media is that in recent years the modern narrative being pushed is that the book is about child sexual abuse and that it is a warning to let people know about predators or how Nabokov wanted to expose pedo Hollywood and was a champion of CSA victims' rights and a strict opponent of sexualizing children and how HH is a unreliable narrator.

In reality none of this is true and if you actually read the book it isn't as black and white as people on social media are making it out to be.

Humbert is a narcissistic asshole who sees himself as better than everyone else and does awful things like repeatedly touch Lolita when she does not want it or lie to her about her mother being sick and doesn't tell her about her mother's death right away.

However at the same time he also does good things like try to be a good father he takes her to movies and out to lunch he buys her a bike for her birthday and lets her hangout with friends.

Lolita obviously loved him at first but fell out of love with him once she hit her teenage years and went from being a typical tomboy kid to a bitchy teenage girl who seduces Humbert to get money from him like in the 90s film.

Also, while Lolita to a certain extent is a victim there were parts where she clearly was the initiator and wanted it as well such as the scene where they have sex in the hotel room and she tells Humbert about a sexual experience she had at camp.

At the end of the book Humbert kills Quilty and is arrested and at the very end apologizes for his actions and says he does not care if he is found guilty or not nor what people think of him all he ask is for people to try and understand him.

Nabokov is on record calling it a love story saying my book is about love not sex and that Lolita has no moral message i think antis on social media wanna like Lolita so bad because of how well it is written but they can't seem to engage with anything beyond a surface acceptable position and looking at something old with a 2024 PC lens.

What do you guys think?

[Artaxerxes II]

As someone who read the story halfway through, I largely agree with your take. Just a little nitpick though: Nabokov wrote the story by intentionally turning Humbert into an unreliable narrator. So how you perceive Humbert's actions heavily depends on how much you trust him. Is he telling the truth, or is he embellishing his reputation to you, the reader? After all, some see the death of Dolores' mother via a car accident as being committed by HH, others see it as a genuine incident.

That point is salient and really drives home the best quality of that book: Namely, its ambiguity which leaves with many speculations, making the kind of work that will be discussed for ages as readers try to determine a "truth" which may not exist. Kind of like how people (even academic scholars) will interpret Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree in contrasting ways.

As for antis and their interpretation of Lolita, I don't think their assessment is accurate as they ignore Nabokov's other works and their opinions are tinted with contemporary prejudices which may not reflect social attitudes when the book was first published.

One thing that may suprise you is how often does attraction to pubescent women often crops up in his works, some of which are entires on this list: https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Minor_attr ... Literature

[mrlolicon93]

As someone who read the story halfway through, I largely agree with your take. Just a little nitpick though: Nabokov wrote the story by intentionally turning Humbert into an unreliable narrator. So how you perceive Humbert's actions heavily depends on how much you trust him. Is he telling the truth, or is he embellishing his reputation to you, the reader? After all, some see the death of Dolores' mother via a car accident as being committed by HH, others see it as a genuine incident.

That point is salient and really drives home the best quality of that book: Namely, its ambiguity which leaves with many speculations, making the kind of work that will be discussed for ages as readers try to determine a "truth" which may not exist. Kind of like how people (even academic scholars) will interpret Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree in contrasting ways.

As for antis and their interpretation of Lolita, I don't think their assessment is accurate as they ignore Nabokov's other works and their opinions are tinted with contemporary prejudices which may not reflect social attitudes when the book was first published.

One thing that may suprise you is how often does attraction to pubescent women often crops up in his works, some of which are entires on this list: https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Minor_attr ... Literature

Ah good point.

Yeah when reading i like how Charlotte's death was written in a vague way making it ambiguous and up for interpretation as opposed to the movies where we know what's shown on screen is what actually happened.

Still though i don't really buy into the modern narrative that HH is unreliable 100% of the time i think antis on social media just don't wanna sympathize with a flawed complex character that just so happens to be a map.

A lot of people seem to take John Rey Jr PHD at face value and believe what he is saying in the forward section when in reality that's just Nabokov mocking moralfags and people who overanalyze literature.

What i got from reading it is that it is a repent criminal's apology/auto biography and HH isn't really manipulating the reader but is manipulating the other characters in the story.

While there are parts where he may come off as unreliable i feel for the most part he is being genuine because i don't think unreliable narrators tell on themselves and go out of their way to incriminate themselves even more which is something Humbert does regularly.

I think he even mentions that he had multiple underage girlfriends before Lolita came into his life.

[mrlolicon93]

Coming back to this thread i found an interesting comment in a Reddit thread about Lolita that was posted a few days ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/com ... ?rdt=52807

it's annoying and kind of sad at the same time to see that most commenters buy into the bullshit modern narrative being pushed that the book is about abuse however one comment stood out and that was this one which says the following.

(Quote) America has been in the grips of child molestation mania for the last 30 years. Republicans and Evangelicals manufacture hardcore violent CSI: Special Victims-type urban fantasies on a daily basis. Why? Nobody likes positive young lust stories—that’s sick. Any story that portrays teen sex in a positive light condones child abuse. But if the story is portrayed as violent sex crime—well, that’s the very essence of CSI: Special Victims and the trash talk shows where Sally Jesse Raphael asks for more details. When it’s in the context of violence, trauma, horror, and darkness, everyone wants more details. Not because they enjoy thinking about these things, but because they’re amateur researchers in criminal psychology and want to help stop all the Satanic-Jewish-Illuminati paedophile rings and child sex traffickers. Totally different motivation.

But while horrific paedophile underground fantasies may be a Republican-Evangelical cottage industry, all of us are affected by it because the stories shift the baseline. All teen sex is rape, and decent people will adjust their memories about their teenage years accordingly, for fear of standing out as being pro-sex and thus pro-baby rape.

There is nothing more harmful than teen sex. As some of the redditors said above, “teen” and “sex” simply cannot be combined. We cannot say, “Jack and Jill had sex.” Doing so sexualizes children and condones baby rape. The proper phrasing is, “Jack and Jill are both child molesters. And they are also both victims of child sexual assault.”

This is now legal reality—In over 20 states, if two 14 year-olds have sex, both are arrested and placed on the sex offender registry for child molestation. Both also go to therapy for being victims of the most traumatic thing anyone can endure.

Another side effect of the new gothic-horror mold: If child is raped, that’s bad. But if a child initiates sex and enjoys it, that’s worse than bad. It means that the initiator has gone completely crazy. Healthy people cannot feel lust or enjoy sex before age 18, 17, 16, 15, or 14 (depending on the state). Ergo girls who initiate sex with full intelligence and awareness and past experience are not sexually active teens, they are Stockholm syndrome zombies acting out past trauma.

(An analog just occurred to me: Being killed by Big Brother is scary. But being alive and saying, “I love Big Brother” is absolutely terrifying. Because then we know: the insides have been corrupted.)

Things have changed a lot since the days when (according to American folk discernment) teen sex was sex rather than self-rape. These days, only doctors, psychologists, and literature profs (see below) see teen sex as healthy. (Disclaimer: I’m a lit prof.) In the current folk metaphysics, teen sex isn’t just bad, it’s worse than murder.

To save the metaphysics, we must be consistent with the punishment. The result? America now has over 250,000 kids as young as seven on the sex offender registry—just to hammer the point home. Sex is always harmful because it is essentially and intrinsically exploitative and abusive on a level completely inaccessible to empirical observation.

Anyway, to understand this shift from Weird Science, Private Lessons, and Little Darlings to Jewish liberals raping babies underneath pizzerias and Hillary Clinton bathing in child blood, I strongly recommend Erotic Innocence by James Kincaid. He is the only historian (English dept., believe it or not) who has really nailed how it is that we got to a place where arresting toddlers for playing doctor is normal, and every sexual tendency is a symptom of past abuse.(Unquote)

Any thoughts on this?

[PorcelainLark]

Any thoughts on this?

I don't know, I think there are a lot of morbidly curious asexuals out there. It's kind of like when gay men side with women about issues in heterosexual dating, there's nothing directly at stake for them. I think there's a kind of synergy on the internet between morbid curiosity, low libido/asexuality, and sadism/revenge fantasies.
The satisfaction of seeing a "sexual abuser" mobbed, comes at the price of the suffering of children. The more vile the crimes, the more merciless the sadist can be in their revenge fantasy.
I think it's also a big problem for sexuality more generally. If you have people who are trying shape norms surrounding sexuality that are only interested in sexuality as an excuse to indulge in cruelty against others, then the norms will be intended to make people fail. There are a lot of sexless sadists out there, whose opinions are unassailable because they have no stake in sexuality.

[mrlolicon93]

Here are some recent 4chan threads about Lolita with people arguing over the point of the story as well as the topic of minor attraction.

https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/20 ... #205667455
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/20 ... #200558369

Here is also what one anonymous poster had to say.

https://vocaroo.com/13NxiLckfZm8

An old post from years ago turned into a piece of audio but still funny as hell and true none the less.

[Peter Caldwell]

Coming back to this thread i found an interesting comment in a Reddit thread about Lolita that was posted a few days ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/com ... ?rdt=52807

it's annoying and kind of sad at the same time to see that most commenters buy into the bullshit modern narrative being pushed that the book is about abuse however one comment stood out and that was this one which says the following.

(Quote) America has been in the grips of child molestation mania for the last 30 years. Republicans and Evangelicals manufacture hardcore violent CSI: Special Victims-type urban fantasies on a daily basis. Why? Nobody likes positive young lust stories—that’s sick. Any story that portrays teen sex in a positive light condones child abuse. But if the story is portrayed as violent sex crime—well, that’s the very essence of CSI: Special Victims and the trash talk shows where Sally Jesse Raphael asks for more details. When it’s in the context of violence, trauma, horror, and darkness, everyone wants more details. Not because they enjoy thinking about these things, but because they’re amateur researchers in criminal psychology and want to help stop all the Satanic-Jewish-Illuminati paedophile rings and child sex traffickers. Totally different motivation.

But while horrific paedophile underground fantasies may be a Republican-Evangelical cottage industry, all of us are affected by it because the stories shift the baseline. All teen sex is rape, and decent people will adjust their memories about their teenage years accordingly, for fear of standing out as being pro-sex and thus pro-baby rape.

There is nothing more harmful than teen sex. As some of the redditors said above, “teen” and “sex” simply cannot be combined. We cannot say, “Jack and Jill had sex.” Doing so sexualizes children and condones baby rape. The proper phrasing is, “Jack and Jill are both child molesters. And they are also both victims of child sexual assault.”

This is now legal reality—In over 20 states, if two 14 year-olds have sex, both are arrested and placed on the sex offender registry for child molestation. Both also go to therapy for being victims of the most traumatic thing anyone can endure.

Another side effect of the new gothic-horror mold: If child is raped, that’s bad. But if a child initiates sex and enjoys it, that’s worse than bad. It means that the initiator has gone completely crazy. Healthy people cannot feel lust or enjoy sex before age 18, 17, 16, 15, or 14 (depending on the state). Ergo girls who initiate sex with full intelligence and awareness and past experience are not sexually active teens, they are Stockholm syndrome zombies acting out past trauma.

(An analog just occurred to me: Being killed by Big Brother is scary. But being alive and saying, “I love Big Brother” is absolutely terrifying. Because then we know: the insides have been corrupted.)

Things have changed a lot since the days when (according to American folk discernment) teen sex was sex rather than self-rape. These days, only doctors, psychologists, and literature profs (see below) see teen sex as healthy. (Disclaimer: I’m a lit prof.) In the current folk metaphysics, teen sex isn’t just bad, it’s worse than murder.

To save the metaphysics, we must be consistent with the punishment. The result? America now has over 250,000 kids as young as seven on the sex offender registry—just to hammer the point home. Sex is always harmful because it is essentially and intrinsically exploitative and abusive on a level completely inaccessible to empirical observation.

Anyway, to understand this shift from Weird Science, Private Lessons, and Little Darlings to Jewish liberals raping babies underneath pizzerias and Hillary Clinton bathing in child blood, I strongly recommend Erotic Innocence by James Kincaid. He is the only historian (English dept., believe it or not) who has really nailed how it is that we got to a place where arresting toddlers for playing doctor is normal, and every sexual tendency is a symptom of past abuse.(Unquote)

Any thoughts on this?

Based AF. This was masterfully written.

Some other things about recent shifts in attitudes and whatnot:

Janice Fiamengo had a video about college students having relationships with their professors. Nowadays, it's portrayed as this all-powerful master who grooms and enslaves innocent and naive college children, and that is why it's frowned upon, but back when she was in college, it was understood that a woman sleeping with her professor gives her an unfair advantage over the other students.

One huge shift I've seen in my lifetime (I'm a millennial):

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered jailbait websites. I was thrilled to find out that I wasn't the only one who thought young teens were hot AF. We would all share and rate pictures of hot chicks from facebook. Some girls were even quasi-celebrities in the community. Lulilove and Sayora come to mind. Also, I remember one girl I knew posted a naked picture of her ass on FB (no one made a big deal out of it, either). The jailbait community exploded with dozens of sites popping up. r/Jailbait was one of the most popular subreddits in the world. In fact, it was SO popular that it made national headline news, which unfortunately led to all the jailbait communities being shut down.
Over the course of barely over a decade, things went from guys everywhere being like, "middle/high school chicks are fucking HOT!!!!!" to guys everywhere being like, "any dude even remotely attracted to anyone under 18 should be castrated and tortured to death."
Jailbait used to be a household word and universally agreed-upon concept. There's nothing to be ashamed of; these chicks are totally bangable but are unfortunately off-limits. Nowadays, men are so ashamed of themselves that they go to ludicrous lengths to prove how unattracted they are to minors that they only date women older than themselves.

[mrlolicon93]

Based AF. This was masterfully written.

Some other things about recent shifts in attitudes and whatnot:

Janice Fiamengo had a video about college students having relationships with their professors. Nowadays, it's portrayed as this all-powerful master who grooms and enslaves innocent and naive college children, and that is why it's frowned upon, but back when she was in college, it was understood that a woman sleeping with her professor gives her an unfair advantage over the other students.

One huge shift I've seen in my lifetime (I'm a millennial):

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered jailbait websites. I was thrilled to find out that I wasn't the only one who thought young teens were hot AF. We would all share and rate pictures of hot chicks from facebook. Some girls were even quasi-celebrities in the community. Lulilove and Sayora come to mind. Also, I remember one girl I knew posted a naked picture of her ass on FB (no one made a big deal out of it, either). The jailbait community exploded with dozens of sites popping up. r/Jailbait was one of the most popular subreddits in the world. In fact, it was SO popular that it made national headline news, which unfortunately led to all the jailbait communities being shut down.
Over the course of barely over a decade, things went from guys everywhere being like, "middle/high school chicks are fucking HOT!!!!!" to guys everywhere being like, "any dude even remotely attracted to anyone under 18 should be castrated and tortured to death."
Jailbait used to be a household word and universally agreed-upon concept. There's nothing to be ashamed of; these chicks are totally bangable but are unfortunately off-limits. Nowadays, men are so ashamed of themselves that they go to ludicrous lengths to prove how unattracted they are to minors that they only date women older than themselves.

These are the consequences of the modern woke pc culture that has been the norm since Obama.

I am around the same age as you and i too remember when older guys being attracted to or even dating pre adolescent and adolescent girls was tolerated and not as stigmatizing as it is today.

In the old days especially during the 70s-90s many rock stars dated had sex with or even married 10-17 year old girls a few names that come to mind Mötley Crüe Aerosmith Elvis jerry lee Lewis GG Allin ect.

In the early days of the pedo panic the main concern was children walking outside and being kidnaped by a stranger they don't know but over time we went from we need to keep children safe so they don't go missing to all men are creepy and evil and anyone who dares to interact with a minor who isn't family or some kind of authority figure should be killed and anyone under 18 having sex is bad.

I think Chris Hansen and the whole scare around children's internet safety during the mid/late 2000s was the beginning of when people started to think adolescent girls aren't sexual since Chris and the media at the time were really trying to shame men for being attracted to pubescent physically mature girls heck most of the guys caught on Tcap weren't even real maps to begin with.

With all this context in mind perhaps our modern #MeToo pc society is being a little hard on Humbert Humbert.

Yes he is a narcissist and a pompous ass so i completely understand why someone may hate his character however to say he is the villain of the story or that he is pure evil is removing him of all his nuance and complexity.

He is actually an anti-hero whereas Clare Quilty is the villain.

He is meant to be a tragic character you are supposed to judge for yourself.

Another reason that probably makes the book controversial nowadays. We usually expect victims to be blameless and innocent and children to be asexual. Its hard for people to accept that abuse isn't some night stalker jumping out of the bush or some horrible ordeal that the victim always hates and victims too can sometimes have hand in their own molestation.

[MAP romance God]

I read "Lolita" when I was like 19, so it's been more than 10 years. It did hold my interest enough for me to finish it, but I remember not liking it that much, especially the tragic ending.

A while ago I was reminded of that novel and contrasting it with the much more optimistic, idealized and generally lighthearted loli romance mangas I've been reading and grown very fond of, I must admit I even started disliking it. I started seeing how antis could use it as a timeless classic that warns us that adult-minor relationships can only result in tragedy, trauma, etc - although I fully concede that you're right when you say antis are projecting their current western values onto a novel that was written long ago by a Russian to reach the conclusion that it is a downright anti-pedophilia work.

Your description did remind me of some saving graces of the book though. Just the fact that it tackled an adult-minor relationship in a multidimensional, human way, without making the "pedophile" into a mustache-twirling caricature who only has bad sides to him and the minor as some pure, perfect, flawless, victimized angel is already something we can only dream to see in any modern western media.

But it was too dark and gloomy for my tastes anyway. I'd rather read some loli yuri from Itou Hachi (:

Too bad those are always so short ;_;

[mrlolicon93]

I read "Lolita" when I was like 19, so it's been more than 10 years. It did hold my interest enough for me to finish it, but I remember not liking it that much, especially the tragic ending.

A while ago I was reminded of that novel and contrasting it with the much more optimistic, idealized and generally lighthearted loli romance mangas I've been reading and grown very fond of, I must admit I even started disliking it. I started seeing how antis could use it as a timeless classic that warns us that adult-minor relationships can only result in tragedy, trauma, etc - although I fully concede that you're right when you say antis are projecting their current western values onto a novel that was written long ago by a Russian to reach the conclusion that it is a downright anti-pedophilia work.

Your description did remind me of some saving graces of the book though. Just the fact that it tackled an adult-minor relationship in a multidimensional, human way, without making the "pedophile" into a mustache-twirling caricature who only has bad sides to him and the minor as some pure, perfect, flawless, victimized angel is already something we can only dream to see in any modern western media.

But it was too dark and gloomy for my tastes anyway. I'd rather read some loli yuri from Itou Hachi (:

Too bad those are always so short ;_;

I'm curious as to what you think of the movie adaptations?

I saw the Jeremy irons one first and i do love that version but antis and normies seem to really hate it and claim that Adrian Lyne was romanticizing the relationship between Humbert and Dolores when in reality they missed the point Lyne wasn't romanticizing their relationship he was humanizing Humbert which imo he did a great job at and Irons gave a great performance.

Kubrick's version has a place in pop culture map culture and the history of cinema but it is kind of a bad movie and just isn't very good imo despite a few good things it has going for it like Sue Lyon playing Dolores or the soundtrack.

Also, yeah Lolita is one of those books where there are no good people in the book and the fact that everyone including Lolita herself are all dead at the end you kinda get the sense that Nabokov really hated all the characters in the story.

It is ironic too because if Nabokov were still alive he would hate all the people who are trying to be all morally preachy and say that his work had a moral message or was a moral test when in reality Nabokov didn't give a shit about morality and just wanted to tell stories LOL.

I finished rereading the book yesterday and pretty much still have a lot of the same view points however i will say what makes Humbert an unreliable narrator is his moments of narcissism and some parts in the book where he admits to not being able to remember certain events correctly it isn't because he is a pedophile and therefore shouldn't be trusted in any way like a lot of antis who push the modern pc narratives surrounding the book do.

However it is also, important to point out that the unreliable narrator narrative surrounding the book didn't become a thing until after Nabokov died so make of that what you will.

I also, love how the far left attacked JK Rowling for calling Lolita a great and tragic love story back in the year 2000 when in context she was clearly talking about Nabokov's style of writing not the HH and Dolores relationship.