Not to be fair to yud, but so much fiction (written by men) sexualizes ~14 year old girls and it gets really weird when you start to notice it. This includes beloved science fiction like Snow Crash for example. Im starting to get why so many of us misinterpreted Lolita, and why a lot of women/girls are a bit annoyed with the sexism at times.
There are probably a lot of geeks who have bitter memories of being ostracised misfits in high school while all the jocks and popular kids were partying and presumably having all the sex, for whom the idea of teenage sex is like catnip. Hence the voyeuristic underage sex in geek-adjacent literature, the “actually, the term is ephebophilia” fedora bros and far worse things. (By some accounts, after Amazon engineers gentrified Seattle, the teenage prostitution rate there went up, due to cashed-up nerds “making up for lost time”.)
Dolores in Lolita was like twelve though, at least in the book.
edit: also I don’t think Yud recommending The Softcore Adventures Of A Six-year-old In A Thirteen-year-old’s Body as a Very Normal Book to his considerable audience fits this particular discourse.
It certainly shouldn’t, but i was talking about the men who misinterpret the book a bit into some sort of love story, and not a creepy unreliable narrator who is trying to convince you he is really the victim here.
E: And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ‘young person discovers their sexuality and comes to grips with it’ is something that should be banned from books or something, it is just annoying to me that so many books have the ~14 year old girls, written by a man, girl gets heavily sexualized by older men (or worse goes for much older man, bonus points if the guy is actually a writer (this is uncommon of course as that is quite specific)), pattern. It feels a bit like creepy wish fulfillment. At my book club we had a period where we noticed that every book we read for a while had the sexualized ~14 year old problem.
Not to be fair to yud, but so much fiction (written by men) sexualizes ~14 year old girls and it gets really weird when you start to notice it. This includes beloved science fiction like Snow Crash for example. Im starting to get why so many of us misinterpreted Lolita, and why a lot of women/girls are a bit annoyed with the sexism at times.
There are probably a lot of geeks who have bitter memories of being ostracised misfits in high school while all the jocks and popular kids were partying and presumably having all the sex, for whom the idea of teenage sex is like catnip. Hence the voyeuristic underage sex in geek-adjacent literature, the “actually, the term is ephebophilia” fedora bros and far worse things. (By some accounts, after Amazon engineers gentrified Seattle, the teenage prostitution rate there went up, due to cashed-up nerds “making up for lost time”.)
Dolores in Lolita was like twelve though, at least in the book.
edit: also I don’t think Yud recommending The Softcore Adventures Of A Six-year-old In A Thirteen-year-old’s Body as a Very Normal Book to his considerable audience fits this particular discourse.
Not the point? The point is that it was common enough for men in literature to creep on children that the obvious criticism was missed.
Nabokov’s Lolita really shouldn’t be pigeonholed as merely that, but I guess the movies are another story.
It certainly shouldn’t, but i was talking about the men who misinterpret the book a bit into some sort of love story, and not a creepy unreliable narrator who is trying to convince you he is really the victim here.
E: And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ‘young person discovers their sexuality and comes to grips with it’ is something that should be banned from books or something, it is just annoying to me that so many books have the ~14 year old girls, written by a man, girl gets heavily sexualized by older men (or worse goes for much older man, bonus points if the guy is actually a writer (this is uncommon of course as that is quite specific)), pattern. It feels a bit like creepy wish fulfillment. At my book club we had a period where we noticed that every book we read for a while had the sexualized ~14 year old problem.