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Pedophiliac rape fantasies are the sign of a cultivated mind

I was feeling a little low, like the level of wingnuttery I’ve been reading lately isn’t entertaining enough to mock. The Disco Ball must have heard my cries of woe because an angel sent to me in the form of Jill alerted me to the fact that John Derbyshire has a review of Lolita up at National Review.  Yes, that John Derbyshire. It is possibly the most defensive book review ever written.

I’ll skip all the pretentious blather the Derb uses to set up the scene for his first reading of the novel when he was 16, but suffice it to say, you get the strong impression that the Derb thinks he went to an English boarding school in the 40s,* though he admits it was actually an American high school. But do read it, because it’s so damn pretentious that if I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was a fictional pretentious twit invented by a writer who could squeeze maximum comic value out of such a character. A writer like Nabokov, for instance. Well, except I can’t imagine Nabokov writing this:



Still Nabokov’s prose was at some level beyond that. I sucked it in, reading and re-reading, of course not getting a tenth of the allusions and effects, but knowing that there was something there to be got. I even started to talk like Humbert Humbert, the book’s first-person narrator, dropping words like “callypygean” and “phocine” into my conversation, to much derision from my peers. To this day I can recall the expression on the face of one of my schoolmasters—a rugged old RAF veteran with a clipped George Orwell mustache, who had slaughtered thousands in the great bombing raids on German cities—when I slipped the term “soi-disant“ into an otherwise humdrum sentence.


I just can’t imagine Nabokov starting off a comic piece about a character who is seeking self-justification for being amongst other things, a pretentious ass and an unsubtle pervert with such an obvious joke, no matter how funny it is.



Later, in the 1970s, I got a copy of Alfred Appel Jr.’s The Annotated Lolita, and filled myself in on all the dismayingly many allusions I still had not got. I lost that book in my travels, and bought another, and lost that, and bought another. The Annotated Lolita in front of me now is my fourth or fifth.


My two major guesses for why he kept “losing” it were that it are a) his wife kept throwing it out or b) he had to replace it every time his current copy gets crusty.



Lolita was subsequently much written about, with critics lining up pro and con. Some thought it was a dirty book; some thought it nihilistic; some, to (Nabokov said) the author’s great pain, thought it anti-American.


The Derb would have you believe that Nabokov was prone to slapping crying bald eagles on his window, but I imagine that mostly Nabokov was upset that people missed his major theme of anti-"pretentious assholes who need to hang around with 12-year-olds or Jonah Goldberg to feel smart” theme.



Which brings us to the content of Lolita, the actual story. Humbert Humbert, born 1910, grew up on the French Riviera. In the spring of 1947 he rents a room in the house of Mrs. Haze, in “green-and-pink Ramsdale,” a sleepy New England town. Mrs. Haze has a daughter, Lolita, born January 1, 1935. Humbert is in love with Lolita. Mrs. Haze falls in love with Humbert. Humbert marries her to be close to the girl. The mother dies in an accident. Humbert has a sex affair with Lolita. The affair ends when she deserts him for a famous, but mediocre and decadent, playwright. After three years Humbert locates Lolita. Then he tracks down the playwright and murders him.


At this point, the ambiguity sets in for the reader of this article written by a “John Derbyshire”. Is he purposefully a bit obtuse about the plot lines implied in Lolita in order to uphold his illusion that admiring Humbert Humbert is a good thing? Or is he so blinded by admiration of Humbert that he actually believes the self-serving lies about this “sex affair” that is conducted like most “sex affairs” are, with kidnapping, murder and rape?



It is of course a dreadful story, of awful crimes narrated by the criminal. Like all criminals, Humbert is a solipsist, a person who does not really believe in the existence of anything outside himself.


I have to wonder sometimes if Nabokov made Humbert commit multiple crimes so that pro-pedophile reviewers ever after could be deliberately vague about which of his crimes they disapprove of.



Also like all criminals, he is full of self-justification.


Is he saying all NRO writers are criminals, perhaps even pedophiles?



There is really nothing to like about Humbert Humbert. The more you get to know him, in fact, the more unpleasant things you uncover.


True as this is, Humbert does tell you the worst parts of his character up front--that he’s a murderer, that he gets off on fucking young girls, and his delusional view of himself as a cultivated man is evident if not bluntly stated. If Nabokov wrote it now, though, he’s probably just make Humbert a blogger for The Corner and the rest of those things would be implied.



Discussing the book with a woman friend the other day, she pointed out a thing I hadn’t really noticed: Humbert is probably a lousy lover. Once you have been told this, it’s obvious. Why would a solipsist give any thought to another person’s gratification?


I love it--most of us would assume someone who humps a 12-year-old like he’s a dog going after your leg is the dictionary definition of a “lousy lover”, but Derbyshire had to have someone point it out to him.



And yet, by the magic of his art, Nabokov manages to bring us, at least grudgingly and partially, round to Humbert’s side—to be of Humbert’s party, as Milton made us of Satan’s. In an interview, Nabokov said that he thought Humbert should be given one day’s vacation from hell every year, to stroll a green country lane in the sunlight. That is the position the author wants his reader to arrive at; that is the position we do arrive at, if ignorance or prejudice do not get in our way.


For the first and possibly last time ever, an NRO writer comes out against ignorance and prejudice. And it’s on behalf of a pedophile, albeit a fictional one.



Ah, the realities of life! Was there ever a civilization more uncomfortable with them than ours is today? Humbert Humbert is a monster and a sociopath. He was a human monster, though, and a human sociopath. His monstrousnesses are hypertrophied growths of our own flaws; and his sociopathy consists in breaking rules for which, if there were not some fairly widespread propensity to break them, there would be no need.


If I were writing a review of Lolita in Humbert’s voice, that paragraph is pretty much how it would turn out, I think.



Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.


That makes perfect sense if you assume that most men’s reaction to finding a woman attractive is to seek out a chance to violently assault her. It’s true of course. The most common pick-up line you hear in bars is, “You would look hoooot cut into pieces and tossed in a plastic garbage bag after I have my way with you.” Works every time.



He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14… which is precisely the age Lolita was at the time of her affair with Humbert Humbert. As Razib noted, my own “15-20” estimate was slightly off. An upper limit of 24 would be more reasonable. The lower limit really doesn’t bear thinking about.


The reason it doesn’t bear thinking about is presumably because it completely tanks his argument that the most reliable measure of a woman’s “peak attractiveness age” is how likely she is to be raped. If you take the Derb’s assertion and apply it to the very statistics he shows here, then in fact you can easily argue that women are far sexier at age 5 than 25. But the Derb pretends it’s not that his argument doesn’t hold together even if you share his assumptions. The reason he wants to write off the age group that accounts for 29% of rapes is this:



(I have a 13-year-old daughter.)


And that doesn’t even fly, because again by his very own statistics, his daughter is prime age for being raped, since 13-year-olds are so outrageously seductive than no man can pass them up.



Behind such sad numbers, and in the works of literary geniuses like Vladimir Nabokov, does the reality of human nature lie.


And now the Derb puts Humbert’s self-delusions to shame, because even Humbert admits that he’s a pervert and doesn’t try to argue that he’s got a normal man’s sexual urges.



It is all too much for our prim, sissified, feminized, swooning, emoting, mealy mouthed, litigation-whipped, “diversity”-terrorized, race-and-“gender”-panicked society. We shudder and turn away, or write an angry email.


Fuck that. I’m such a mealy-mouthed pussy that I want to actually toss men who rape young girls in jail. That’s just how we mealy-mouthed liberals are. Too weak to roll over and let child rapists run around hurting children.



The America of 1958, with all its shortcomings, was saltier, wiser, closer to the flesh and the bone and the wet earth, less fearful of itself. (It was also, according to at least one scholarly study, happier.)


Less fearful of itself but if you were a teenage girl in this fantasy version of 1958, you presumably had lots of reasons to be fearful of Daddy.

This next part is fucking great, he openly envies Jerry Lee Lewis, and not for his massive skill on the piano.



One of the first media sensations ever to impinge upon my consciousness was the visit to Britain by rock star Jerry Lee Lewis in May 1958, four months before Lolita’s American debut. This was supposed to be a concert tour, but 22-year-old Jerry had brought his wife Myra along, and the British press got wind of the fact that Myra was only 13. This wasn’t an unusual thing in the south of that time; Jerry himself had first been wed at 15 (when he already had a drinking problem). Myra was his third wife, and also his second cousin once removed. Back then country people grew up fast and close to their kin. Neither Jerry nor Myra could understand what the fuss was about. He: “I plumb married the girl, didn’t I?” She: “Back home you can marry at 10, if you can find a husband.” (This was not true, even in the south, though Myra likely believed it. She also, according to the British press, believed in Santa Claus.)


Upon thinking about sex with someone who still believes in Santa Claus, I can’t resist wondering if the Derb had a Humbert-like moment of inappropriate semen placement. This in and of itself should not be considered evidence of being a bad lover, of course.



How long ago it seems! Nowadays our kids are financially dependent on us into their mid-twenties, and can’t afford to leave home till they are 35.


For the record, that’s having your kids at home, especially your daughters, 15 whole years after they’ve passed the age where they are proper fantasy fodder.



Marriage at 13? Good grief! And so, while Lolita met with a fair share of disapproval in 1958, and was denounced from many pulpits, I believe its reception would have been much more hostile if it appeared now. It would also have been differently politicized. Back then the complaints came mostly from social conservatives, who I imagine would disapprove of Lolita just as strongly today. The Left, however, almost unanimously championed the book. Would they still do so? A woman! Who was also a child! Exploited by a man! And both of them from stifled, self-denying bourgeois backgrounds! Oh, that evil Patriarchy!


Unlikely.  I know The Left and I think if he hasn’t already read Lolita, if he did, he’d probably like it. But then again, he’s a bit quicker on the uptake than the Derb and would realize that it’s a novel and not really an endorsement of lusting after 12-year-olds. He would notice also that in the 1950s America portrayed in the book, just like the one that really existed, was hardly tolerant of pedophiliac “sex affairs”, and not the patriachal utopia that the Derb seems to think it was.



Here you see one of the paradoxes of our strange times.


That a man can claim to have read the Annotated Lolita a number of times through and yet doesn’t show much evidence of grasping the basic themes and characters?



Our women dress like sluts; our kids are taught about buggery in elementary school;


NAMBLA would be a perfectly acceptable organization but for that damn buggery.



“wardrobe malfunctions” expose to prime-time TV viewers body parts customarily covered in public since “the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C."(Humbert);


Subjecting poor Derb to the unsightly view of a breast on a woman over the age of consent. Next time the NFL needs to take pity on him and strip the shirt off a teeny-bopper.



our colleges have coed bathrooms; songs about pimps rise to the top of the pop music charts; yet so far as anything to do with the actual reality of actual human nature is concerned, we are as prim and shockable as a bunch of Quaker schoolmarms.


Hear hear! Bring back the time they had the Negroes and women under control and if a man damn well wanted to fuck a 12-year-old, no one was going to stop him, by god. The only question this really brings to my mind is, “Why doesn’t the Derb suck it up and join a fringe Mormon church?”



What would Vladimir Nabokov say if he could view our present scene? I think he would weep. Political Correctness was only embryonic in the mid-1950s, and Nabokov poked some gentle fun at it in Lolita:

…according to the rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one—only one, but as cute as they make them—chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row.


Whoops, Derb got a little excited there and forgot something important--that it’s written in the first person and anything in the entire book can’t be treated as Nabokov’s opinion but the opinions and views of a fictional character called John Derbyshire Humbert Humbert. Not that Nabokov did or didn’t agree with this sentiment, but it does well to remember everything the character says is colored by the fact that he’s an immoral rat and a delusional misanthrope to boot.



He would have been horrified to see how this how these silly but harmless and well-intentioned courtesies have swollen into a monstrous dreary tyranny, shutting off whole territories of speech and thought, acting as a sheet anchor to hold back our commercial and intellectual progress, corrupting our constitutional jurisprudence, turning unscrupulous mountebank attorneys into billionaires, and making art like Nabokov’s incomprehensible to millions who, had they been born a few decades earlier, would have gotten from it such unexpected, unimagined delight as I got among the birdsong and bowlines in the Sea Cadets’ hut at Northampton School for Boys 44 years ago.


My pet theory about Humbert’s perverse desires, at least today, is that avoiding contact with adults and conducting a fantasy relationship with a 12-year-old is the only way he can preserve his delusions of intellectual superiority to others. For some reason, this seemed a good time to bring that up. I will say that my appreciation for Nabokov’s characterization is deepening rapidly.



That we are stupider, coarser, duller, lazier, narrower of mind, more fearful of strangeness, more abject, and more craven than the Americans of 1958 is bad enough.


Nothing bespeaks of a country’s slip from intellectual greatness like the loss of a steady supply of sex partners that still believe in Santa Claus.



What really shows that our civilization is, and richly deserves to be, on its way out, is that we are less able to savor and love a surpassingly beautiful work of art like Lolita.


I wonder if the Derb would be shocked to find out it’s my favorite novel even though I thoroughly and completely condemn eroticizing 12-year-old girls. Surely you can’t appreciate a novel where the main character is an asshole through and through as well as a pedophile and not think there’s some kind of endorsement of his sexual desires lingering behind all that. Only simple-minded people can grasp that being pulled into Humbert’s world shows that Nabokov is a great writer, not that Humbert’s world has an inherent appeal to it. In fact, simple and stupid and modern reader that I am, I might even be simple enough to notice the grand joke about the book is that Humbert is prone to rhapsodizing and romanticizing endlessly in an attempt to distract from the fact that he’s screwing a child in seedy hotel after seedy hotel.

*I misread that. The Derb went to an English school. That just makes his persona as a pseudo-intellectual Europeanized jackass snarling and snapping at tawdry American culture even funnier.


Posted by on 05/19 at 07:29 AM

  1. Amanda,

    Atrios rightly says the Derb is creepy in his discussion of Lolita, and I agree.  But isn’t the book itself--and the film with James Mason as Humbert--also creepy?

    I personally don’t want to be pulled into a world where I understand Humbert, and for that reason, haven’t read more than the first few pages of the book.  To the extent I once tried to watch snippets of the film on TCM, trying to understand why this is supposed to be worthwhile, I found the film very creepy. If that’s the point, maybe that’s why I also don’t watch violent films nor do I think much of Quentin Tarantino.

    Posted by Mitchell Freedman  on  05/19  at  10:56 AM

  2. Check this out:

    http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com/2006/04/gop-gods-own-pedophiles.html

    Posted by Sadie Baker  on  05/19  at  02:47 PM

  3. I would have thought that Derb might have illuminated his rant with some history of the films, but alas he chose to avoid that topic.  That avoidance seems to negate his concluding premise: That we are stupider, coarser, duller, lazier, narrower of mind, more fearful of strangeness, more abject, and more craven than the Americans of 1958 is bad enough...

    I lived near to, and attended public middle and high school with, Sue Lyon in the late 50’s and early 60’s when her family moved to SoCal.  During the making of Lolita in 1961-’62, Sue was away from school and the community.  She returned for a while, until the film debuted.  Then she was taken out completely.  It was thought at that time that she would be a powerful negative influence on her peers (us, those crazed adolescent boys).  Her siblings, of course, stayed around and were part of our daily lives.  We would see Sue occassionally but there really was a concerted effort to keep her far away.  It was two more years before she was allowed to see the film even. 

    Contrast that with the remake in 1996 (’97 release) in which Dominque Swain played the role.  She has gone on to star in a number of films in which she has been portrayed nude, semi-clothed, as a Naval officer, etc.  She was not ostracized from her school, she was not sheltered from her performance.  Derb’s rant seems to propose that this somehow represents the demise of our culture.  Notwithstanding the lack of critique of the rape stats he chose to use (date rape reporting {that precious 15-24 demographic} is more reliable and frequent than it was during the 50’s and 60’s but no more common per capita), Derb’s feigned outrage blows volumes of smoke on all manner of valuable and important social and culture improvements since then. 

    Sure the book and original film were creepy, but certainly no more, nor less, creepy than our 21st century commercials and those classic 1950’s cheap B movies about women in prison.

    Posted by  on  05/19  at  02:59 PM

  4. Let’s face it: there is nothing as all-American as pedophilia. That was Nabokov’s point.

    Posted by Hattie  on  05/19  at  03:45 PM

  5. Great comment, Spyder.  I do think the usual “conservative” lament about the 50s (and anything in the past) being “better” than now is itself a canard.  I often say my children are less exposed to the viler side of life than I was growing up in the 60s. 

    As for the second film version of “Lolita,” it failed miserably at the box office and was little discussed in a mass media, which gives such flops a very short shelf life for discussion.  Therefore the comparative analysis of the fate of the two young actresses may not hold.

    Hattie is too often correct about sexual abuse against children.  However, again, I see no reason to want to read “Lolita"--at least in the US.  Reading Lolita in Teheran, to pardon the literary pun, may form a context where discussing it helps expose religious hypocrisy and sexual violence against or abuse of young girls. 

    In the US, there was something perhaps courageous in Nabokov’s book being released in the sexually repressed atmosphere of the late 1950s. Now, however, in our contemporary and relatively more open society, I am more struck by the creepiness of the book than anything else.

    Isn’t this really a solid example of a text “reading” differently in different societies or different times within the history of a society?

    Posted by Mitchell Freedman  on  05/19  at  08:36 PM

  6. However, again, I see no reason to want to read “Lolita"--at least in the US.

    You’re mistaking it (understandably, given its notoriety) for a novel “about” pedophilia as a moral issue or social practice or something straightforward like that.  That’s only true in the way that Moby Dick is about hunting whales or Hamlet is about hating your stepdad.

    The book is an absolute masterpiece.  It’s one of the greatest American novels of all time.  Don’t read it if you don’t want to, but don’t dismiss it as a period piece either.

    Here’s what it’s really about, in the author’s own words (from the Afterword): “As far as I recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

    Posted by  on  05/20  at  01:38 AM

  7. John Derbyshire surely deserves all the scorn that can be mustered in the blogosphere, even more for his unthinking and ridiculous automatic assumption that the “likelyhood of being raped” can be offered as an objective measure of female attractiveness (and what are the statistics for male rape?  Surely we can use those to objectively compute male attractiveness!), then he does for his now-infamous statement that female attractiveness peaks between the ages of 15 and 20.  He has now generously raised the end of a woman’s salad days to the age of 24.

    However, both Amanda Marcotte (with repeated references to Derbyshire’s presumably semen-encrusted copy of the novel) and the two of the commenters perpetuate an understanding of the novel which is radically mistaken.  We should be especially cautious here, because it’s a misunderstanding perpetuated equally by the political left and the political right: that Lolita is the kind of novel that one might masturbate to, that it is erotic fiction, that it permits the reader to vicariously live out the fantasy of child molestation, even the elementary idea that is “about” pedophilia, as Ian Munro nicely points out.

    As Eric Naiman has been pointing out, Nabokov was in fact a “dirty writer,” but not in the way he is normally taken to be.  Instead, his work was profoundly informed by Shakespearean bawdy, and his sense of language was intimately connected to eros (Nabokov would never forget that the word “language” comes from “tongue").  But anyone who has read the astonishing scene where Humpert finally succeeds in having his way with Dolores “Lolita” Haze--a tragicomedy of errors in which, among other things, Humpert learns that Lolita is more sexually experienced than he is--can’t possibly think that this is a book someone would find erotically stimulating. 

    That Lolita has become confused in John Derbyshire’s already confused mind with his bizarre notions of female attractiveness and political correctness (a phrase evidently invented by Nabokov, by the way) is only a sad confirmation of his inability to think straight.  But he should be admired (perhaps the only thing he should be admired for, but still) for having gone through six copies of it and for recognizing that Humpert is fundamentally, like almost all of Nabokov’s protagonists from Pnin to Kinbote, a solipsist ("I had successfully solipsized Lolita,” Humpert announces to the horrified reader after one particularly pathetic encounter).  I must disagree when Derbyshire says we are “brought around to Humpert’s side,” but I think it’s equally mistaken and reductive to say that Humpert is “an asshole,” or that the language of the book, its palpable tissue, is simply a screen to hide his molestation.  (That Nabokov would condemn grown men sleeping with 12 year olds is clear; that he thought this had anything whatsoever to do with the novel is less so.) Like a lot of the best modernist novels (see also Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo), what gives Lolita its painful pathos are the moments when the narrator’s self-created pseduo-artistic world comes perilously close to dissolving, not because these are the moments in which “the ugly reality of his molestation threatens to break through,” but because there doesn’t seem to be anything else to take its place.

    Posted by  on  05/20  at  11:42 AM

  8. Rob, I suspect Dolores’ sexual experimenting with boys her own age is only in the book because Nabokov knows all too well that rapists always blame their victims.

    Posted by Amanda Marcotte  on  05/20  at  01:48 PM

  9. First i apologize for the long post.  It is an interesting view of Derb’s discussion.

    Ephebophilia and Evolving Morality
    by Jonathan Rowe

    Some people distinguish between pedophilia — the attraction to and/or behavior with prepubescent children, and ephebophilia — which involves post-pubescent but underaged actors. Personally, I’m of the mind that both activities are wrong for the same reason: They harm, or have the potential to greatly harm, the underaged actor involved. And that the younger the actor, the wronger it gets (and vice versa) and that our laws and social mores should reflect this.

    On the issues of history and morality. My own understanding of the facts are (and please correct me if I am wrong), throughout most cultures including the West, and up until recently, no distinction was made between ephebophilia and pedophilia. Cultures followed the line nature draws between adult and child, which is puberty. After puberty, you are an adult ready for sex (provided it takes place within whatever social arrangements the society deems necessary for sex to occur, i.e., a marriage). The Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvahs clearly remind us of this.

    Yet, in our evolutionary state and for most of recorded history, people tended to die much younger and enter their vocational life much earlier. Back then, you really could be a young adult in your early teens and middle aged by your twenties.

    Now people are living longer and longer; we don’t graduate high school until we are 18 and most of us don’t really start our adult lives, with all of its inherent responsibilities, until we are in our twenties.

    Those are the historical facts; now onto the moral issues. Some argue that there are absolute transcendent moral facts, applicable to all times, everywhere (morality doesn’t evolve). Others argue that morality is entirely determined by history (morality evolves). And there are variations in between. To crudely characterize these moral views in political terms, the transcendent moral order theory is more associated with social conservatism; morality is historically determined, more with social liberalism. Although, the reverse can be true; there are social conservatives who do believe that morality is entirely historically determined and thus evolves (many are Burkean traditionalists who want it to evolve as slowly as possible). And there are social liberals who believe their morality — gay rights, equal treatment of women, etc. — is objectively true, and applicable to all times, everywhere. (I know leftist who make the theoretical case for this are probably rare; but certainly many social liberals act as though their morality is part of a transcendent moral order. And they love to judge past illiberal Western times by these present day moral standards.)

    Social conservatives who believe in a transcendent moral order may complain that present conventional morality, especially sexual morality, seems to be evolving in the socially liberal direction and these changes have been, by in large, malign. Indeed, previously things like fornication, missing the Sabbath, homosexuality, contraception, miscegenation all violated conventional morality, (which was supposed to be based on transcendent moral truths); but now they don’t.

    What’s interesting about ephebophilia is that, even though generally sexual morality, over the past 50 years or so (especially since the sexual revolution) has evolved in a more socially liberal direction, with ephebophlia, sexual morality is evolving in a more socially conservative direction.

    Again, correct me if I am wrong, but there is a marked upward drift in age of consent laws, which demonstrates that having consensual sex with underaged but post-pubescent teens is becoming less acceptable in our present, post-60s modern times. Anti-ephebophilia is truly novel and hence a “chic” notion.

    And I personally support this change. As mentioned in the facts above, we are in a historically unique period of time where people are living and we are delaying childhood for much longer periods. Plus, recent studies I think have confirmed that brains continue to mature well after teen years and on into early twenties such that an adolescent seems to be a strange product of nature: fully biologically adult and yet still mentally and emotionally “kids.”

    As I’ve mentioned before, even though I don’t approve of adults having sex with anyone under 18, I find it quite disturbing, Orwellian even, that we would call a consensual sex act between an adult and a post-pubescent mid or late teen “child rape” (which term connotes horrible evil). In a factual sense, this is not child rape; regardless of what “statutory rape” laws say, you cannot enact 2+2 = 5 into law. If we rather called adult/underaged teen sex, “improper sexual conduct with a minor,” I think we would more soberly react to the crimes, and not become hysterical about it when we think it may be occuring.

    Posted by  on  05/20  at  03:55 PM

  10. spyder-- The points in the essay you quote are interesting, and further develop Derb’s point about Jerry Lee amd Myra Lewis, but ignore the fact that we do not in fact invariably characterize sex with under-18’s as child rape. Two 16-year-olds in love having sex is very commonplace, and accepted as normal in many circles (even, or actually especially, by Quaker schoolmarms - Derb DOES NOT know Quakers!). Unlike in the 50’s, we just don’t let them get married these days. The shocking thing to social conservatives is not the 16-year-old sex, but the decoupling, as it were, of sex from marriage.

    On the other hand, a 40 year old man having sex with a 14 or even 16 year old girl is not widely accepted, not primarily because teen sex is verboten, but because of the inherently exploitive nature of that relationship. Goes back the point that feminists keep having to make about rape: it’s not about sex, it’s about the exercise of power in a way that negates the personal autonomy of one party in the transaction.

    And what’s up with this?

    “Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent).”

    Women? Under the age of 11? Great way to obscure the objectionable aspects of a man forcing sex on a little GIRL!

    Posted by  on  05/21  at  12:44 PM

  11. mamayaga--i completely agree.  The intentional choice of Derb to ignore rape as a violent expression of dominating power leaped out at me when i read his post.  And your point about his identifying female children under eleven as women rather than girls, further evidences his inherent twisted sense of reality. 

    I must quibble a bit with your suggestion; we do not in fact invariably characterize sex with under-18’s as child rape.  We do indeed criminalize it in legal terms as statutory rape (not accepting Rowe’s libertarian slant on it), and depending upon varying attitudes of DA’s constituencies (although for some reason the DA’s all have come to an agreement on this), an age difference of four years seems to represent the point at which charges are filed.  Thus a 20 year old with a fifteen year old is likely to be charged whereas a 20 year old with a seventeen year old is not.  Likewise as regards underage sexual activity between apparently consenting minors these are still crimes in nearly every jurisdiction, though rarely filed.  If the behavior is so “out of control” between two high school-aged classmates that parents demand satisfaction (now that we don’t duel anymore) DA’s will charge near in age minors with minimal fornication charges.  That magic four year difference will trigger a statutory rape charge.  Unfortunately this applies equally to even younger children, thus if a 13 year old boy has sex with an eleven year old girl, again consensually, you might get some lesser juvenile/family court charge, whereas if it was 13 on 9 then you get the statutory one.  How they inconsistently frame that difference is really beyond me? 

    Two of the problems we are appearing to have culturally today are precocious puberty among under age 10 females, and the massive selling of sexuality to children to increase the sale of consumer products.  In this regard, neither Rowe nor Derb have addressed the core issues with which we are confronted today.  Rape (not statutory) is a violent crime of power, and as such it needs to be consistently dealt with in the criminal justice system (which it is not).  Consenting sexual activity between minors 14 and over, seems to be an area of controversy handled by states and other jurisdictions differently depending on all manner of history and religious zealotry (this applies to homosexuality as well).  Consenting sexual activity between an adult and a teen is yet another area of controversy in the legal realms, depending more upon public sentiment and voting constituencies than on reality i fear.  I cannot in anyway accept that there is any possible consenting sexual activity between a post pubescent person and a child.

    Posted by  on  05/21  at  02:04 PM

  12. Didn’t Lionel Trilling argue somewhere that Lolita was Nabokov’s proof that even in 1955 it was still possible to write a romance?

    Posted by  on  05/22  at  12:08 AM

  13. Oops.  Sorry; I see someone else recalled that review, as well.

    Posted by  on  05/22  at  12:15 AM

  14. The phrase for this is “too-real -that’s the scandal.”

    You’ll be glad to hear that Mark Greif’s essay, “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” appearing in the latest issue of n+1 efficiently queries and resolves all these issues.

    “We live in the afternoon of the sex children; Nabokov just saw the dawn.”

    As for Derbyshire...what a prig.  Boringly predictable, stupid opportunist prig.

    Posted by EmilieR  on  05/22  at  01:55 AM

  15. The English major in me just remembered that HH is an unreliable narrator. That’s what’s so insidious about *Lolita.* And what makes it so hard to take.

    Posted by Hattie  on  05/22  at  04:05 AM

  16. To me, there’s a hint in the title: the text is about Lolita, and her abduction, rape, and abuse, told by the man who did all those things to her. Reading this from Lolita’s viewpoint is not even reading against the text, but with the subtext. HH is, indeed, an unreliable narrator, and through his attempts to hide Lolita’s unhappiness and vulnerability, they show through, and remind us that he is the predator and she is the prey.

    Posted by lalouve  on  05/23  at  11:35 AM

  17. Derbyshire’s review reads like one I might have written when I was 15. And writing on the bus on the way to school real quick.

    Posted by Wendy Blackheart  on  12/04  at  08:47 PM

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