Lolita, the book, is not about kidnapping of a girl or any kind of perversity. It is about futility and pains of worshipping a fleeting beauty, which is a temporary state of approaching perfection (beauty is youth + health. Proximity of a local optimum). If there is something to worship at all, it is beauty, not idols.
The book is about ugliness and mediocrity of so called modern society with its rigid set of dogmas and set in stone prejudices. It is about suffering. About inability in principle to catch that fleeting beauty, a spark of perfection. The moment you approach it you have already ruined it. Observer ruins the observation, or rather realizes the painful dissonance between his assumptions and actuality, but continued his futile attempts to catch it, because everything else is not worth of even a second look.
Dear gentlewomen of the jury. Do not attempt to judge things you probably never even understood.
It's written in a very Humbertian style (and you can't read "Dear gentlewomen of the jury. Do not attempt to judge things you probably never even understood." and not think of Humbert's own self-defense). So I like to believe dschiptsov's point is not so straightforward as it seems...
I hope so, but it would not take me long to go to a meetup that has a similar demographic profile to HN and find no shortage of people who sincerely agree with it.
The most interesting aspect to me was that the story didn't make the New York Times. Today the story would be international news and would probably take up 48-72 hours of continuous coverage on CNN.
I'm not sure that it would. At least, this story is not unusual. It's horrific, but not unusual to anyone working in social work or health care.
This girl was certainly very young, younger than the norm, but girls of 13-14 marrying older men happened more often in the 50s than we like to admit. The lines between 'running off' and 'abduction' aren't clear today and certainly were not clear then. States like New Mexico still allow marriages at such ages in cases of pregnancy ... a shocking twist in the law. Marilyn Monroe famously married at 15 in 1944. That wasn't considered odd. Had this man been single and convinced the girl to go through with a marriage ceremony prior to her escape, or had they not crossed state lines, the entire case might have never have risen to any public attention. The girl would have been returned, the marriage annulled, and the entire affair quieted.
Note how she was rescued. Her rescuer did not go immediately to the police but instead contrived a scheme to move the pair out of their local support network. The rescuer wasn't taken aback in horror by the situation. She recognized what was happening and knew to take certain steps. Her getting them to cross state lines is either lucky coincidence or legal genius as she did not know of the pair's travel history. She was not surprised to the point of immediately marching down to the police station. She was aware of the difficulties because this was not something totally new in her experience.
That's not all that's changed. Today he likely wouldn't even have had the opportunity as he would have been in prison already:
On September 4, 1942, Frank La Salle was indicted in Camden County Criminal Court for the statutory rape of five girls between the ages of 12 and 14. He wasn’t arrested until February 2, 1943, though, and pleaded not guilty to the charges in court the following week. A little over a month later, on March 22, La Salle changed his plea to “non vult,” or no contest, and received a sentence of two and a half to five years in Trenton State Prison. Fourteen months later, on June 18, 1944, La Salle was paroled.
14 months in prison for the statutory rape of 5 12-14 year old girls by a 45-year old man. It's truly unbelievable how such an offence could be treated so lightly at the time.
I remember reading a longitudinal study that was conducted to see if people could accurately recall the beliefs of their younger self. Essentially, every few years, they'd ask the same group of people to rate their stance on certain issues, and then guess how their younger self would've rated.
Interestingly, what people rated of their younger self was actually much closer to their current self than the actual ratings conducted by their younger self.
Myself, I think I probably had a lot more trepidation about say, Gay Marriage back in the 90s than I do today. But I only believe that because I'm aware my current self might be creating bias to my perspective of what actually happened.
"But is Britain unusual in maintaining the age of consent at 16, and how does we compare to the rest of the world?
In Europe, countries who have the age of consent set at 16 include Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland.
Spain did have one of the lowest ages of consent on the continent at just 13, but recently agreed to raise this to 16.
For Austria, Germany, Portugal and Italy it is 14, and in France, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Greece it is 15.
In China, the age of consent is 14, in Iraq it is 18, while in Japan it is five years lower at 13.
The likes of Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador and Colombia all have it set at 14.
I know this is the popular case to flog your morals over right now but the relationship to this story seems pretty threadbare. What connection do you see outside of the sex crime angle?
While that case is terrible, I think most people will find a difference between one incident of rape between two people in their 20s and the statutory rape of 5 adolescent girls by a 45-year-old man. To me at least, there seems to be very little comparison.
In brief, raping someone who is unconscious fits neatly into the 'Power-Reassurance' category of rapist. On the other hand the guy himself appears (although we'll see as he gets older) to be more of a 'Power-Assertive' type. In either case the major factor is the perception of the victim as vulnerable, which can come in the form of "drunk and unconscious", but just as often comes in the form of, "Elderly or disabled".
Rapists tend to be highly preferential in their modus, but across typologies the victim profiles are insanely varied... except that the rapist feels they can dominate/control them.
Out after 14 months wouldn't be unusual today. Assuming he didn't use any form of physical violence or threat thereof, some states take a very lax approach. Colorado's 2-6 years is not odd. This is one of those areas where the states differ greatly in both how they define and punish this crime. These are also very old laws, that some states have not officially revisited for generations.
Statutory rape can be both very easy and very difficult to prove. DNA/blood tests are powerful, but limited by time. Unless the guy was caught in the act and evidence collected relatively quickly, prosecution will rely on the girl's testimony. That's a tricky case. Given that prosecutors are loath to put such girls on the stand, it will plead out at a much reduced sentence. What is different today is the sex offender registry.
I've always chosen to think of Lolita in terms of allegory -- old Europe's perverse fascination with pubescent America -- so I was surprised to read that Nabokov had make a first stab at it as a story set in Europe.
I still think the allegory holds true and might be why Lolita finally worked with a U.S. setting. In any case can you really imagine Humbert Humbert as an erudite American? So much would be lost.
They are probably thinking of Beauvoir and Sartre in particular. Good luck finding a scholarly source on the issue though, unless you're quite happy with citing A Voice For Men or random angry blogs.
No need for it, they published an (two actually) open letter defending sex with children as young as 6:
"the children have not been victims of the slightest violence, but have to the contrary testified before the examining magistrates that they consented"
Neither Sartre nor de Beauvoir where postmodernists (or "pot-modernists"). Poster maybe means some radical left anarchists – also not postmodernists – from the late 70s/early 80s, who had some outlandish (and completely self-serving) ideas about child sexuality.
The book is about ugliness and mediocrity of so called modern society with its rigid set of dogmas and set in stone prejudices. It is about suffering. About inability in principle to catch that fleeting beauty, a spark of perfection. The moment you approach it you have already ruined it. Observer ruins the observation, or rather realizes the painful dissonance between his assumptions and actuality, but continued his futile attempts to catch it, because everything else is not worth of even a second look.
Dear gentlewomen of the jury. Do not attempt to judge things you probably never even understood.