KARA by  云开

With written permission to repost.

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.

Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.

Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.

Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”

TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:

You do not respect their rights as an individual.

You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.

You probably haven’t been listening to them.

and not only are these things totally badass and stylish

they have 16 colour cones in their vision

us humans only have 3

these things can literally see over 5 times as many colours as we can

literally they can look at what we would see as a completely black space and see thousands of colours we don’t even know exist

these little demon-spawn can punch so hard and so fast that

IT BREAKS WATER PHYSICS

their punches cause water to boil and create a bubble underwater, which kills its prey if it has contact with it, cooking them from the outside

BUT IT DOESN’T EVEN NEED TO MAKE CONTACT

the collapsing bubble sends out a shockwave strong enough to kill anything in a 10 cm diameter due to pure pressure 

If you think Lolita is romantic, you should read the book while consistently and purposely reminding yourself H.H. is a pedophile, and he’s manipulating you. Seriously, the whole thing with Lolita as a text is that the narrator is unreliable. Please also try to keep in mind that Lolita is 12 - 15 in the book, and that H.H. deliberately conceals his age from the reader by being vague and cryptic, but he’s roughly around 37 - 42 across the whole timeline of the story, if you do the maths he gives you. 

H.H. literally rapes Lolita every single fucking day for over two years. It isn’t romantic, that was never the point. H.H. is fully aware he’s a rapist, too, he describes it as rape offhandedly, but still as rape. 

What you should be doing when you read Lolita is looking at all the ways pedophilia, date rape, statutory rape, forcible rape, kidnapping, murder, assault, molestation, etc are played down and normalised through beautiful prose and slight of narrative hand. 

That’s why Lolita is a classic novel. Because it’s terrifying that we can so easily be made to side with a monster and blame the victim based on the lies the monster tells us, so long as he makes it sound pleasant. Lolita was never controversial or banned because it’s a story about a rapist and his victim, it was controversial because it forced the reader to sympathize with a child rapist.

It’s about manipulation and language and victim blaming even when the crime is completely black and white. That’s what Lolita is about. Lolita is not a love story, it is not romantic, and if you think it is then the book has defeated you. 

Lolita is not about a “young girl who seduces an older man,” nor is it a fashion statement, nor does it have anything to do with DD/lg or sexual kinks/fetishes, or love, or star-crossed lovers, or pastel coloured frocks, or suspenders, or choker necklaces and collars and pet tags, or consensual relationships between two heterosexual adults who happen to have a large age gap between them. It’s about a pedophile who falls in love with his landlady’s 12 year old daughter, marries said landlady so he can have full access to her daughter, kidnaps her daughter after she is hit by a car and killed, then travels across America for a year with the daughter while raping her everyday, gets a house far away from the girl’s only friends and family, continues to rape her everyday, takes to the road again still raping her everyday, until she runs away with another rapist because she’s so desperate to get away from him. That’s the bare bones of it. It’s not about sex or romance, there is never any kind of consensual sex between them, or arguably at all in the novel as a whole.

Go read the academic essays that take H.H.’s side when you’re done. There’s plenty of them, they aren’t hard to find. Look at what they call Dolores Haze. Read the abomination that is Lo’s Diary. Look at how they treat her, look at how they talk about how she’s the monster, the perpetrator, the devil child, the whore, the temptress, evil, plotting, violent, harpy, shrew. Even though she was 12. Then you’ll understand what Lolita’s about. 

Can I also just say while I’m here, that Lolita was an extremely important novel when it was published because very little had been done in the way of looking at how child sexual abuse affects children as they move toward and into adulthood, nor were there any hard statistics on child sexual abuse, and Lolita brought the subject into the public eye and caused actual interest in the subject that there hadn’t been before, inspiring research on the subject that was the foundation for what we know today. That wouldn’t have happened when it did if not for Lolita, and we may not be where we are today in terms of knowledge, awareness and resources. By no means the only thing, but it was really important toward it. A lot of people who read the book and see H.H. for what he is think the book is pointless and smut, but the book is so important in it’s historical context, just like any other banned and/or censored piece of fiction (see Ulysses for a start). 

And finally, here’s a quote from the novel quote that I feel like sums everything up: