The Lolita Syndrome
This is a photograph of a child, obviously a female child. She is only nine years of age, a beautiful child to be sure. This child is lovely to look upon; one can imagine what the adult version of the child will look like. Clearly her genes have favoured her very well. To look at this child, this nine-year-old, as a sexual object would be nothing less than obscene. Could anyone, any reasonable individual disagree with that statement? I think not. Yet there are among us people who suffer from a grievous pathology, people whose objects of desire are children. These people are pariahs among us, these sexual psychopaths, yet at times their orientation and behaviour appear to be forgiven, in the name of art.There's been an unfortunate renaissance, a kind of literary reminiscence, of the work of Vladimir Nabokov lately, and more specifically his best-known novel, "Lolita". At the time of its publication, this novel engendered much controversy among those who believed it to be a piece of genteel pornography, as opposed to those many others who hailed it as a breakthrough in reality fiction. I read the book shortly after its publication. The reason, primarily, was that at the time I was a devotee of Russian literature. As a young woman I had read Gorky, Checkov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and enjoyed them all, considering their outpute a high form of the literarature, a novelistic taste of real life. Although I found Nabokov's novel well written, amusing and interesting, I found it also rather deplorable. As a young woman whose memory of her girlhood was not that far behind me, I thought the focus of the novel to be lamentable, if not downright criminal. That put me squarely in the pornographic camp, those who considered anyone who thought it a legitimate literary device to have an older man have sex with a girlchild with the time-worn lament/excuse that he was seduced by her, to be a sad and sorry excuse for a human being.
I have the greatest respect for the keen scientific mind of our youngest child who also conveys the indelible conviction of the socially-conscious adult, yet even he, several years back, casually mentioned that he had recently read the novel and thought it to be an excellent work. I sputtered my annoyance with his take on the book and explained why. This conversation took place long distance over a telephone call and we never did explore it again. I know, knowing my son, that he likely considered Nabokov to have been "misunderstood", the victim of a tyrannical literary establishment, aided and abetted by shrill old biddies. On the one hand I was delighted that my son had turned to 'classic' literature as a break from the scientific papers he usually confines himself to; on the other hand I felt real distress that this young man who truly is a well balanced individual, totally committed to the understanding of equality between the geners might consider the thesis underlying the book to be a legitimate one. It is not.
Children, emerging adults, are sexual creatures. To be so is in our nature, written into our genetic structure. Nature has so designed us, for future procreation. And to ensure that procreation will occur she has created within us an indelible sense of curiosity as well as physical pleasure. Young girls, even before the kind of hormonal insanity that disrupts normal behaviours and expectations, are curious about things that, within most societies, including ours, remain verbotten topics.
Yet there are some societies, rare though they are, that could conceivably teach us something about preparing young people for adult status as regards sexuality. The late anthropologist, Margaret Mead, published a study which shed light on an enlightened social practise which became the norm in a country, Samoa, which most people might feel was a primitive one. This was a society, nonetheless, which recognized that an emerging consciousness about one's body and its hormonal-altering imperatives must be met with sensitive instruction to ensure a healthy metamorphosis among young boys and girls into responsible adulthood.
Unfortunately, we live in a society which prefers to keep information about sexuality under tight wraps. So children are left to wonder, to speculate and to experiment. Young girls, just as young boys do, create imaginary scenarios in which everyone is a happy, innocent participant, and by the process of fulfilling some kind of physical act of which they're not totally aware, everyone's curiosity is satisfied. I'm not certain myself that I would advocate for a system anything like that which Samoa employed in educating their young about sexuality, but we haven't done a very good job of it to date.
That's still not the point at hand. What is more to the point is that children are curious, they want to know about everything, their imperative is to explore, to discover, regardless of the topic at hand, regardless often, of the outcome. They cannot really visualize the outcome of an action they take if they haven't had any experience, if their knowledge about what they're about to undertake is rudimentary at best, absent in the worse-case scenario. When I was fourteen, I wasn't quite certain just how close you had to come to full intercourse to become pregnant. When I was six or seven years old, a single middle-aged male who lived in a room on the floor of the flat my parents rented did his utmost to interest me in his genitalia. When I was eight, the teen-age boyfriends of the two older boys who lived in the bottom flat sometimes trapped me in the shared bathroom and attempted to encourage me to view their, as well.
As a child, playing with my girlfriends, we would speak in hushed tones about "strange old men" who did odd things, and went looking for little girls. This, despite the fact that we had no idea what strange old men did, and why they looked for little girls. But the horror of the possibilities inherent in those thoughts both thrilled us and frightened us. I wasn't too much older than that when my mother's sister's husband spoke encouragingly to me about doing certain things with him (oblique references which I did not comprehend), and he would give me a purse, just like the one he'd given his daughter, my cousin, several years older than me.
This happens to girl children. I'd like to think that many men may think about such socially-verbotten things, but are never serious about acting them out. I'd like to believe, hell I do believe that most men would no sooner behave in this manner than they'd fly off rooftops, that to do so would be of utmost repugnance to them. To claim, as some men will do, who are convicted psychopathic child-abusers, that a young girl or a young boy led them on is beyond the pale. An adult should know about restraint, not propriety, should respect the integrity of a child's being, not believe that no harm will be done.
Vladimir Nabokov obviously thought otherwise. He was wrong.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, September 28, 2005
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