When Kubrick was making the film “Lolita” he was crabbed out that the prudey production code wouldn’t allow him to enfilthen 13-year-old actress Sue Lyon with all the dude-pleasin “eroticism” in Nabokov’s icky novel. He intimated that the godbag-enforced lack of explicit child porn is what caused the film’s initial lukewarm reception and prevented it from soaring on wings of dudely prurience to the pinnacle of cinematic greatness for which Kubrick yearned. Naturally, because — thanks, Internet! — modern audiences know exactly what to fill in the blanks with, the film eventually became the iconic classic of noble ephebophilia we know and love today!
That’s right, I said ephebophilia. You know how when a practice becomes widespread and established, one of the first things its aficionados do is codify it and quantify it and describe it and assign its variations to categories and invent endless sub-categories for the more subtle variations that increasingly are meaningful only to the experts? Like with wine. Most people can just have a glass of wine, but oenophiles are deeply sensitive to nuancy variables, like the varietal, the region, the chemical composition of the vineyard’s dirt, the amount of rainfall during the spring of its production year, the color, which of 12,687 potential aromas it expresses, and, of course, the vintage.
It’s the same thing with raping children. Because raping children is such an established and widespread practice, PsychiatryNation has devised handy categories describing the various spins its practitioners can put on their “sexual preference”.
When a preference is based on a specific child vintage, it is called a chronophilia. One such chronophilia is crowd favorite pedophilia — raping prepubescent children. Then there’s hebephilia, which is a preference for raping pubescents. Ephebophilia describes a preference for raping post-pubescents. Girls must be 14-16, but for boys it’s 14-19. Spinster HQ concludes that this age disparity obtains because after 16, girls age out into common slutdom (the default state for all women). Once they’re sluts, the desire to screw them is no longer considered a special psychiatric disorder, but rather a normal dudely activity consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women (see Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and one of humanity’s finest hours: when the entire dudernet participated in that pervy countdown to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday).
To explain male preoccupation with teen rape, I found this guy on the Internet. He is Frederick S. Berlin, M.D.,PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital; Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; and Consultant to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse. This eminent upholder of dudelionormativity notes that ephebophilia is the default dudelionormative state.
“Most men can find adolescents attractive sexually, although, of course, that doesn’t mean they’re going to act on it. Some men who become involved with teenagers may not have a particular disorder. Opportunity and other factors may have contributed to their behaving in the way they do.”
Opportunity and other factors? Opportunity, such as when adolescent girls are permitted out in public? Other factors? Such as that fucking Lolita narrative, which has seeped into patriarchal consciousness, been transformed into internet porn and Thylane Blondeau’s fashion spreads, and tells everyone that female children are sexual cyphers just waiting for men to use them as toilets?
Nabokov apologists, do your worst, but this novel isn’t some kind of veiled anti-perv cautionary tale about what can happen when a dude thinks with his dick, or the consequences of acting on desire. Nabokov was totally a perv or he couldn’t have written this huge and convincing paean to pervy desire. He would have made Lolita a person rather than a voiceless toilet, and he would have skipped the gratuitous erotica. The novel is merely an attempt to make art out of kiddie porn. The hero is himself a child molester and murderer who kidnaps, drugs, imprisons, and serially rapes a 12 year old child for chrissake, and then writes a dreamy, poetical memoir about it. Check this shit out (but do it on an empty stomach):
“Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”
The scepter of his passion? Gag-a-mag, it makes your boob scars shrivel.
Even though Humbert Humbert may be tormented and an unreliable narrator, and even if Nabokov was himself a paragon who completely pulled this Humbert character and his criminal obsession with “nymphets” from thin air (hah!), Lolita is just an articulate excuse to dudelionormatize the same infatuation with female children that our sexpert Dr Berlin, above, asserts is common to most men.
Is it art? Sure, why not? But it stinks.