10: Poems That Take 1000 Years to Die

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. I read a book
last week. It was Crime and Punishment. I'm kidding, it
was The Care and Keeping of You. You know. It
was Lolita by Vladimir Nabukov. Jesus Christ relaxed. I haven't

(00:21):
read this book in full in a couple of months
at this point, in spite of the fact that I've
been thinking about some version of it every single waking hour,
and this read was different. The more I read this book,
the more I realized that how it's framed to you,
truly is everything. Humbert Humbert, the unrepentant child sex abuser

(00:41):
who tries to win over the reader's favor by occasionally
demonstrating self awareness and remorse. Although the sincerity of that
remorse is very much up for debate. There's some indication
of this on every single page Humbert. Humbert is a
man who is not just an abuser of children and
not just an asshole academic like. He is obsessed with

(01:01):
control in ways that jumped out to me more than
ever before. And I don't just mean this in regard
to his abuse of dolorous Hayes. It's a need to
control virtually everyone around him, but it shows up more
dangerously when dealing with women and girls. I'll just list
them off here. When describing his habit of aging young
girls at the park as a young adult, sometimes brushing

(01:23):
up against them or saying suggestive things, he expresses anxiety
that he is traumatizing or harming them. Early in the book,
he meets with a French sex worker named Monique, who
says that she is of age, but Humbert thinks she
looks younger. After their first night together, Humbert pays her
a bonus. Monique is thrilled, and when he asks her
to come back the next day, Monique arrives looking more confident.

(01:45):
Humbert remarks that she looks much older now and loses interest.
When his first wife, Valeria, who he hates, tells him
that she's leaving him for another man, Humbert admits he's
mainly furious that she decided to leave him again, always control.
His criticisms for Charlotte Hayes are harsh and petty. He
hates her for being in a book club, He hates

(02:06):
her for doing her hair. He hates her for having
tourist art at her house, and he wants you to
hate her for the same reasons. He mentions that at
more than one point he is considered raping a young
girl then shooting himself in the head. Before he meets Dolores,
he I will remind you was held in mental health
facilities several times before meeting Dolores Hayes, and brags about

(02:27):
learning how to control the mental health professionals treating him
so that he can leave sooner without any consequences. Humbert's
short marriage to Charlotte Hayes includes constant strategy on his part.
He makes sure that there's some misinformation about him in
their wedding announcement, and he tells neighbors that he's Dolores's
biological father so that they won't check in on him

(02:48):
after he's skipped town. Same for what Humbert chooses to
include about his and Charlotte's conversations when allegedly recalling her
love letter to him with one accuracy, He skips over
part to that detail Charlotte's personal trauma and focuses on
passages that make her sound desperate and silly when she
finds out that he's planning to rape and abduct her daughter.

(03:09):
He quickly tells the reader that he didn't need to
include what he said to her in the moments before
she died, so canonically we have no idea what happened
in the last conversation Charlotte had in her life before
she was mysteriously and conveniently run over by a car.
Humbert is constantly doing the math on how long he
thinks he'll be attracted to Dolorous, or to any child,

(03:29):
detailing at length when they go into puberty, what their
bodies look like, what their measurements are, how to corner
them without consequences. He mentions at one point that if
Lolita is adapted into a movie, here's where a fate
should go in the movie. He lies to hotels, He
lies to neighbors. As they move from place to place.
He changes his and Dolorous his names and forces her

(03:49):
to play along as he lies to her teachers. He
controls who Dolorus is allowed to see on the road,
and when she is allowed to see others. He is
always supervising or leering from a distance, then often punishing
her for relating with her peers. In a way he
doesn't understand. This was always a major part of the book,
but the strategy and the constantness that he controls do
Laura sexually never stops being horrifying. Starting from very early on,

(04:14):
he begins to deny her motel breakfasts the summer she's
twelve years old before she has sex with him. And
of course, the most significant way that Humbert Humbert asserts
his control over this narrative is how he's attempting to
control you and me, the gentlewomen of the jury. As
he puts it, that's the game of the book. Can
he convince you he is pitiable enough to be redeemed

(04:37):
on this reading. Something that stuck out to me is
Humbert's habit for stalling a page or two before describing
the abuse of Dolores. He will sometimes emphasize his restraint
before saying something horrible. Look how long he went before
acting on his abuse of impulses. He'll sometimes pause to
implicate do Laura's before we even know what's happened? Quote
first she woul attempt me, then thwart me unquote. He

(05:00):
landes to us at one point, all in an attempt
to set up the abusive scene as something she was
somehow inviting. Memorably sandwiched between sections detailing abuse, Humbert assures
us that he is not a rapist or an abuser.
And here's why. Quote we did not rape as good
soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild dog year gentlemen, sufficiently

(05:21):
well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults,
but ready to give years and years of life for
one chance to touch an infant. Emphatically, no killers are
we poets never kill unquote, And again, before he admits
to raping Dolores at the enchanted Hunter's hotel, before she
knows her mother has been killed, Humbert says flat out

(05:42):
it was she who seduced me. The same goes for
whenever he talks about only giving Dolores her allowance when
she fulfills her quote unquote basic obligations, as if being
raped is a thirteen year old obligation. This is, of
course the job of an unreliable narrator, but it was
interesting to this strategy make an appeal to the jury's
emotions immediately before admitting to the crime, implicate the victim

(06:06):
immediately before admitting to the crime, see how many points
that wins you. And as you know, this strategy of Humbert,
Humberts has worked on many readers over the years. And
then there's how he treats Rita. Do you remember Rita?
No one remembers Rita. I remembered Rita this time for
a writer who's not known for his female characters, I
noticed the women who exist on the fringes of Humbert

(06:29):
Humbert's skewed narrative more clearly when going through in the
bulk Offs prose. Rita stuck out to me a lot
this time. And if you don't remember her, it's because
she does not appear in any major adaptation. But she's
Humbert's companion after Dolores runs away for about two years,
before Dolores reaches out again when she's pregnant and seventeen
and hoping to borrow some money from him. As usual,

(06:51):
Humbert writes about Rita pretty condescendingly, but these details jumped out.
Rita is an alcoholic whose brother is a politician that
gives her a stipend to stay away from him. She
is arrested at one point for stealing from a man
at a bar, Humbert doesn't care to find out where
she is for a couple of days, and then it's
revealed that she didn't steal from anyone. The man at
the bar just said she did so it didn't look
like he was cheating on his wife. When Humbert gets

(07:13):
a job at a university for a year, he doesn't
let Read to live with him. Instead, he gets her
a trailer and a trailer park nearby because he thinks
that she'll embarrass him around his academic colleagues. He mocks
Rita's mother for thinking that he would ever marry her.
When Rita is sober, she reveals that she is terrified
of being abandoned. You get an added bonus if you
know who she is at the start of the book,

(07:34):
because fictional forward writer doctor John Ray tells us that
she's still alive and that she's married a hotel owner
in Florida. Kind of a weird full circle moment because
Humbert Humbert's father was a hotel owner. What we don't
know is whether she's sober or happy, or what she
thinks about her life, or what she thinks about Humbert Humbert,
because Humbert just didn't care. But Nabukov, even writing through

(07:57):
the careless lens of Humbert, still manages to tell us
a fair amount about the character, even though most readers
tend not to pick up on her. I found similar
details sticking out with Charlotte Hayes in the two references
to what appears to be the greatest trauma of Charlotte's life,
the loss of her baby son and becoming a single

(08:17):
mother in the nineteen forties after her husband Harold dies.
Humbert offhandedly mentions that Charlotte speaks of this lost son
often a boy who died at age two when Dolores
was a little older, which means that Dolores knew and
remembered this brother. When Charlotte admits her love for Humbert
in a letter, Humbert alludes to their being entire pages

(08:38):
about this lost son that he just flushes down the toilet.
He quite literally flushes these pages down the toilet. For
someone who claims to have a photographic memory for detail,
Humbert only seems to be able to clearly recall information
that make people he feels are in his way look bad,
and he forgets or glazes over anything that might endear

(09:00):
a reader to them. Think about how we may see
Charlotte a little differently if she were presented to us
as a woman who is struggling under the weight of
losing a child while having to raise a daughter on
her own. Now, I won't argue against the notion that
Charlotte seems to be a very flawed parent. She is impatient, unkind,
and yells at Dolores constantly and needlessly. But this behavior

(09:24):
is presented by Humbert mainly in a vacuum. Charlotte and
Dolores have suffered the loss of half of their family together,
and that reality is referenced only twice in the entire book.
How does Dolores feel about this? If she ever brings
it up to Humbert, which by his account, she wouldn't
have because she didn't trust him with anything personal, then
we never hear about it, which brings me back, as

(09:45):
it always does to Dolora's Hayes. Well, we're not reminded
of it very often. By age twelve, Dolora's Hayes has
lost her entire family. A common criticism of Lolita and
why it is yielded such garbage adaptations as as Dolores
is barely in the book. Humbrid is the protagonist, but
the continued fixation on who Dolores is in fan communities

(10:07):
in academics indicates to me that there is not an
insignificant look into who she is in the book's pages.
The problem is that these details are embedded in and
presented by the villain, who is offering up fifty times
more information about himself. There is at least enough for
her to be a character that hundreds of thousands have

(10:28):
attempted to reclaim in the past sixty five years. And
as painful and tragic as some of these details are,
after all we've talked about in this series, I did
find some comfort in finding details that we do have
about the few years of Dolores Hayes's life leading up
to her death, which took place less than a week
short of her becoming a legal adult. She's born on

(10:49):
January one and dies on Christmas Day in ninety two,
not quite getting to eighteen. Everything with her is cut
too short, but here are some details that stuck out
to meet this time around another list, if you'll indulge me,
Dolores doesn't like to be looked at when she's been crying.
She prefers privacy. She is naturally intelligent, and her ability

(11:11):
at school and when playing tennis and in the drama
club are complemented frequently by her teachers. Her school work
only really begins to suffer when her at home sexual
abuse becomes intolerable. When she's with the Humbred in public,
Dolores quickly develops a habit of, as Humbreed puts it, quote,
drawing in as many potential witnesses into her orbit as

(11:31):
she could unquote. I never noticed this before, but Dolores
is frequently trying to point out that something isn't right here.
They read to me now as early attempts to get
others around her to ask her if she's okay or
what's going on. She tries to convince Humbert to go
to movies with other families. She points out her license
plate to strangers to point out how far away she

(11:52):
is from home. When she's fourteen, Dolores learns how to
pretend to laugh at boys jokes at schools very relatable.
There's a scene where she throws a party, then when
it doesn't go as well as she wants it to,
she calls everyone who went a loser. She says, Oh,
those are the worst boys I've ever met, And for
a second it's like, oh, yeah, she's a fourteen year
old who's insecure that her party was kind of weird.

(12:14):
A moment that really stuck out to the point that
I can't believe I never noticed it before. Now, Humbert
cites one of Dolores's several friends at Beardsley, a girl
named Eva Rosen as a nymphant. It sounds like Dolores
and Eva spent quite a bit of time together, something
that Humbert would have been pervertedly obvious about enjoying, saying

(12:36):
many times in text that anyone he deemed to be
an infant in or out of Dolores's orbit he considered
to be ripe for objectification and harassment. Dolores, as Humbert
off handedly puts it, quote, dropped Eva for some reason,
before I had had any time to enjoy, in my

(12:56):
modest way, her fragrant presence in the open house. Unquote.
How I see this outcome now is Dolores knowing how
Humbert looks at and behaves towards potential prey, and she
protected her friend by getting rid of her. She makes
close friendships with girls her own age throughout the story,

(13:17):
and it's with them that we see she holds the
most trust. She loves movies. She goes through a phase
of bullying other students and teachers who get to go
on dates with other people, and again the school fails
her by going to her abuser for help. Dolores is
extremely active in her escape from Humbert. When Humbert realizes
that they're being followed, she erases the license plate number

(13:39):
that he writes down in secret. She tries to drive
their car away at one point to distract him. She
stays calm and determined to escape, as the rapist she
is traveling with is growing dangerously paranoid. She tells him
repeatedly she knows what is happening to her. To some extent,
she calls the enchanted hunters that hotel where you raped me.
She tells him she thinks that he old Charlotte and

(14:01):
wants to get away from him. She knows what's going on,
and in the end, Dolores escapes not because she's this
criminal genius, as some adaptations seem to imply. She escapes
because Humbert is not only not doing well. He doesn't
know that much about her, and by his admittance, he
finds her braddy and uninteresting and not that smart when
she isn't behaving under his control. Even Humbert admits this

(14:24):
by the end quote, I knew nothing about my darling's
mind unquote, because he didn't care to ask, and she
didn't trust him with anything personal. The final thing that
stood out to me is about Dolores and tennis. This
is brought up towards the end of the book. Even
though Dolores is the best tennis player at her school,
she never joins the team, partially because she's more interested

(14:47):
in drama club. But a teacher mentions that Dolores has
this habit of playing an amazing tennis game and then
letting someone else win at the last second. Why the
heck is she so polite? The coach asks, humbred, and
as usual, we don't learn why from Dolores. But it's
a small moment that just kicked me in the gut
this time. Tennis was something that Humbert had made her

(15:08):
take lessons in early on into her abduction, because he
wanted her to, she resisted. It ended up being pretty good,
but isn't comfortable or confident enough to squarely win the game,
even though she easily could even if she didn't want
to be a tennis player. This small moment says so much.
Her potential is unquestionably held back at this point in

(15:29):
her life by Humbert's control and presence. I wish we
knew more about her, but let's go over what we've got.
This is Lolita Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the final

(16:11):
episode of Lolita Podcast. My name's Jamie Loftus, and today
I want to talk about the future of Dolores Hayes's legacy,
and I want to do so through revisiting interviews I've
done with a wide array of people. For this series,
I'll also be speaking to two filmmakers and cis a
survivors whose work I love, Eva Vivas and Jess Merwin,

(16:32):
and a cis a survivor and sex educator Zoe Ligan,
about what basics in sex education we are missing in
what we include in modern media. But before we get there,
I wanted to say one last thing on our boy,
nobukof this came up at length in our episode about
his life and his biography, but I still find myself

(16:54):
receiving a pretty large volume of questions about it, that
being why did Vladimir Nabokov Lolita? I Mean, the answer,
first of all is like, how the funk should I know?
But let's go with this. Nabokov was a flawed person,
which I tried to unpack in depth in our episode
on him, and he lived at the center of some
of the most traumatic events of the twenty century. And

(17:17):
nobody knows exactly why he wrote Lolita, but I do
think that the perspective that it was just to be
edgy or take a literary risk is a little bit
reductive based on his track record. That's likely a part
of the reason. But the reason that I'm always able
to think of Lolita the book as truly anti child
sex abuse is first because you're told that the narrator

(17:40):
is an irredeemable villain on nearly every single page, And
second because Vladimir Nabokov was subjected to sexual abuse as
a child, and while he never discussed it publicly at length,
it appears in his work constantly. Obviously, Nabokov doesn't strictly
write what he knows all the time, of course not
but Nabokov's primary biographer, Brian Boyd, mentions explicitly that Nabokov

(18:04):
was a victim of abuse from his uncle and his
two volume biography of the author. He also confirmed this
to me in an interview, and Nabokov mentions it himself
in his memoir Speak Memory. He would invariably take me
upon his knee after lunch, and while two young footmen
were clearing the table in the empty dining room, fondle
me with crooning sounds and fancy endearments. Readers of Lolita

(18:27):
will note that this exact scenario appears in the book's pages.
Humbert Humbert bounces twelve year old Dolores on his lap
the summer. He moves in with her and her mother
and ejaculates. Then tells the reader he's certain that she
hasn't noticed and there was no harm done. But listen
to how Humbert describes Dolores's behavior afterward. Quote immediately afterward,

(18:48):
as if we had been struggling, and now my grip
had eased, She rolled off the sofa and jumped to
her feet. To her foot rather in order to attend
to the formidably loud telephone that may have been ringing
for ages, as far as I was concerned. There she
stood and blinked, cheeks of flame, hair or wry, her
eyes passing over me lightly as they did over the furniture,

(19:11):
And as she listened or spoke, she kept tapping the
edge of the table with the slipper she held in
her hand. Blessed be the Lord, she had noticed nothing unquote.
That doesn't sound to me like a twelve year old
who has no idea what's going on. She's frazzled, nervous,
eager to get away from him while trying to remain calm,
and the fact that she knows what's happening is confirmed

(19:32):
two years later in the book, when Humbert and Dolores
argue before leaving Beardsley. She says explicitly in this scene
that Humbert has been molesting her since that summer. She
did know what was going on there, and in this scenario,
it seems pretty likely that Nabokov is seeing his own
experience in Dolores's not Humbert's. Themes of child sex abuse

(19:55):
appear in his work a staggering amount. We've recapped it
in the past. There's the Enchanter, the novella that was
a precursor to Lolita. There's odda a post Lolita work
that features a young girl being sexually abused by her
family members in nineteen sixty nine. The examples go on
and on, and while I think the misread of these
themes can be extremely harmful, the information we have about

(20:17):
Nabokov is more suggestive that he is working through experiences
where he was a victim. There's no example or implication
in anything I've ever read about him of his being abusive,
particularly towards children. I've received similar lines of questioning about
Nabokov's participation in the nineteen sixty two Stanley Kubrick adaptation.
Nabokov is credited as the writer of the screenplay and

(20:40):
was even nominated for an Oscar for it. Kubrick's Lolita
pretty squarely misses the point, as we've discussed in the
third episode of this show, but to assume that Nabokov's
script was the one that made it to the screen
would be to fundamentally misunderstand how these kinds of big
budget projects are produced. Nabokov wrote a number of drafts
of the screenplay. He wrote a squarely rejected four hour

(21:03):
draft of the Lowlida script in the sixties that was
understandably turned down than a two hour draft that he
was less enthusiastic about that still includes the John Ray Jr.
Unreliable narrator framing, and does portray Humbert as a villain,
not quite as explicitly as it does in the book,
but it's still clear he's an abuser. Neither of these
drafts appear on screen in really any way. Nabokoff is

(21:26):
credited for contract reasons and because Stanley Kubrick and producer
slash rapist James Harris were smart enough to know that
having the author's name on the script increased the legitimacy
of their project. But it's pretty well documented that the
shooting script was written by Stanley Kubrick and James Harris,
not in a book off. Of course, that doesn't mean
that Nabulkoff didn't eventually capitulate to what had clearly become

(21:49):
the dominant cultural narrative surrounding Lolita. Here's an interview from
the Paris Review in nine seven Humbert. Humbert is a
vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching that epithet,
and it's true tear iridis sense can only apply to
my poor girl. No ambiguity there. Same goes with how
he displayed his anger about Humbert's word nymphete was translated

(22:13):
in the dictionary. I think the harmful drudges who defined
today in popular dictionaries the word nymphete as a very
young but sexually attractive girl without any additional comment or reference,
should have their knuckles wrapped. But as time goes on,
it appears that Nabokov becomes a little more resigned to
and at times even somewhat permissive of how Dolores hayes

(22:35):
his character and meshes into the cultural consciousness. Towards the
end of his life, there are some examples of him
starting to refer to Dolores in the same flowery, nymph
like language that Humbert does. No, I shall never regret Lolita.
She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle, its
composition and its solution at the same time, since one

(22:56):
is a mirror view of the other, depending on the
way you look of core. She completely eclipsed my other works,
at least those I wrote in English. The real life
of Sebastian Night, Ben Sinister, my short stories, my book
of recollections. But I cannot grudge her this. There is
a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphete. He also
ends up easing up on his adamants that no young

(23:18):
girls appear on the cover of his most famous work.
We can speculate on why this was. He never gives
a reason. It just sort of happens over time. The
Book of is a person who can really slip through
your fingers once you think you understand him. Often within
the same interview, he'll defend Dolores one moment, then say
his work is completely a political and he doesn't feel

(23:40):
one way or the other the next. Here's another quote
from the nine seven Paris Review interview, when he was
asked about his quote unquote sense of immorality about the
relationship between Lolita and Humbert. No, it is not my
sense of the immorality of the Humbered Humbled Lolita relationship
that is strong. It is Humbert, since he cares, I

(24:02):
do not I do not give a damn for public
morals in America or elsewhere. Nabokov will usually distance himself
from his work morally and personally. But it's undoubtedly true
that some of the themes of his work overlap with
his lived experience. How you can claim to write about
child sex abuse a politically is kind of beyond me.

(24:25):
But my point is Nabokov's attitudes towards his own work
and his most famous character fluctuated. But what is unfortunately
true is that defending Dolores Hayes is a full time job.
I can attest to that, and it would have been
a difficult task to hold up while continuing to write
other books. On top of that. The cultural Lolita figure

(24:47):
is part of what made Nabokov rich and able to
retire from teaching to write in a European hotel until
his death. Of course, much of this should be attributed
to his also being a brilliant writer, but he'd been
a brilliant writer for decades, and it wasn't until this controversy,
this cultural sensation, the movie adaptations, and the mass misunderstanding

(25:07):
of who Dolores Hayes and Humbert Humbert are that he
was suddenly set for life. I mean, it's it's a
little depressing if the general public understood Humbert Humbert to
be an unrepentant abuser instead of a potentially redeemable tragic hero,
and Dolores Hayes was an abused child instead of this
mastermind seductress. Who knows how that would have affected the
story's ability to generate money. Back in the nineteen fifties

(25:30):
and sixties, in the Book of Loved Chess, he dabbled
in composing new chess problems throughout his life, and in
one of his early novels that Lose in Defense, the
ark of the story essentially becomes the novelization of a
chess problem. That's not true of Lolita. But there's no
doubt that Humbert Humbert is playing a game with the reader,

(25:50):
and he's employing quite a bit of strategy and how
he's playing it. His goal isn't to win it chess.
It's I think, to get you to empathize with him
enough to believe that he genuine when the loved Dolores Hayes,
and that abuse was an unfortunate part of that tragic love.
His goal, his game is to win you over. And
the first time I read Lolita, I lost that game.

(26:12):
I was twelve, and on top of obviously not being
a very sophisticated reader, I was surrounded by pop culture
and people that were not really challenging of the power
dynamics between Dolores and Humbert. The only reactions I got
to having the book at that age were either oh
my God, don't read that, or it's not that big
a deal. Just read it. No one knew how to
or wanted to talk to me about it. In school,

(26:33):
we got warned about the bodily threat of strangers, but
certainly not the bodily threat of people. We knew the
first time I read this book, I just didn't have
the tools to recognize what was wrong with this power dynamic.
I read love story on the cover, I read Lemony
Snicket loves this book, and I went from there. And
this mass misunderstanding is no one individual's fault. It's not

(26:55):
Nabokov's fault. It's not Lemony Snake It's fault. It's not
Lana del Rey's fault. It's not my parents, it's not
my teacher. It's a lot of systems and individuals within
those systems that had to be disinterested enough or too
uncomfortable to talk to a kid about this sort of
abuse in order for me to take Humbert at his
word for years. So if you misread Lolita on the

(27:16):
first try, particularly if you were doing so as a
young person connecting with Dolores, it's okay to forgive yourself
for being ill equipped and to move forward. That's what
I'm going to do. So is it worthwhile to attempt
to adapt this story again to arrive at an answer?
I went back through the interviews I've done for this show,

(27:38):
and I wanted to share a couple of insights that
stuck out to me. First, here's been du Bonsana, author
of the essay how Lolita Freed Me from my own Humbert.
I mean, I think it's definitely relevant to public discussion now. Unfortunately,
as long as these kinds of things exist, I think
it always will be. Um and sorry of the first

(28:01):
part of your question about adaptations, it would um. Yeah.
I mean I think that a lot of the new
literature around it is kind of in a way adapting
it but telling it from the pov of woman, whether
it's nonfiction and it's someone who identified with the text,
or I feel like it's very common. I see it

(28:22):
where the abuser gives um a woman, a young woman
this book because they think it's romantic um and normalizes. Yeah,
because they're doing they give it as it like, you know,
to normalize and kind of um, I don't know, make
their you know, their gross actions seem kind of like
forbidden and whatever. So yeah, Um, So I think that,

(28:47):
you know, there's ways to responsibly adapt it, and I
feel like those would be not only still relevant, helpful, um,
because I feel like there's a lot of course correction
that needs to be done a round around the novel
and its legacy. Here's a little bit of a conversation
I had with Dr Lucia Williams, founder of LAPREV, the

(29:09):
Laboratory for Violent Analysis and Prevention in Brazil, about what
a new adaptation would need to course correct in order
to succeed, because I think that people don't understand about
child sexual abuse enough. For example, they think that it's rare,
they think that it's hardly ever happens, and it's very

(29:33):
very very common. Right. Of course, there's different degrees. You know,
it could be something very mild, it could be something
that was very intense and lasted for years like in
her case, So and that they don't understand the complexity
the dynamics, how hard it is for the child to speak,

(29:55):
you know, how hard it is for the judicial system
to deal with a crime like that. That you have
the witness who is a little child and uh and
you have an adult who is very powerful. We've come
a long way having protocols, you know, to to talk
to to interview kids so that we don't contaminate the

(30:16):
data and all that, but it's not something that you know,
everybody knows. Here is Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita,
who has also reported on Sue Lyon's abuse at the
hands of James Harris. The adaptation of Lolita that I
have been able to source has ever been spearheaded by

(30:36):
a woman. It's all been the province of men. And
so if it was entirely female driven, what kind of
Lolita adaptation would result? So that's what I would want
to see. I think it's possible. Just like when there
have been sort of book rewrites or homages to Lolita,

(30:59):
the one that have worked the best are written by women,
and Alison would, author of the memoir being Lolita, I
believe that an adaptation Lolita would need to be met
with a critical eye, a feminist point of view, and
an understanding of the cultural context of Lolita and what

(31:22):
it means today. So I wonder if maybe an adaptation
of Lolita is really more so like maybe a story
like mine MHM, which is sort of the real story
and acknowledging the danger that it has while also trying
to respect and admire the work of art that it

(31:45):
stems from. I don't know if if adapting Lolita by
Daddy lad is a worthy cause anymore, but if if
some badass feminists wanted to do it, I'd be here
for it. Not everyone's going to agree on this, and

(32:08):
I certainly understand the counter argument, but I do think
that it's possible to make a good adaptation of Lolita,
But to do it right, and to do it ethically,
and to get the financial support needed for an adaptation
to make the same level of impact that a Kubrick
or a Line adaptation did would be an absolute hell

(32:29):
of an uphill battle in order to ensure that Dolores's
reality is presented to an audience. I'm very on board
with what Bin do, Sarah and Alison describe. You need
to build a team like this carefully include survivors and
specialized therapists, and not prioritize making Humbered likable and marketable
above making it clear that he's a child sex abuser.

(32:52):
I also feel that given the experiences that girls and
women have had playing Lolita or comparable roles where they
are abused, pose is a gigantic risk in live action,
a risk I think is too great to chance. So
the way I see this working is as an animated movie,
and in terms of telling the viewer who the unreliable

(33:12):
narrator is, I think animation honestly works better. It's all
easier said than done, because that's not even talking about
getting it released, but I do think it's possible and
that it could be worthwhile. So I wanted to talk
to people who could speak on how to move forward
in this arena, whether it's with adapting Lolita or just

(33:45):
taking steps to course correct the cognitive dissonance that exists
around addressing child sex abuse in media. To talk a
little bit about her experience with Lolita and what she
feels needs to change about sex education in order to
prevent stories like Lolita from being received for anything less
than what they are. I spoke to my friend Zoe Ligan.

(34:07):
Let's take a listen. Hello, I'm Zoe Ligan, and I
am a sex educator, a journalist, an author. I recently
published Carnal Knowledge, sex Education you didn't get in school
with my friend Elizabeth Renstrom. And I also sell sex
toys for a living. I've had my own sex toy

(34:28):
company for five years now. Um, but a lot of
what I do is really kind of like entertainment combined
with education, So I've been calling myself a sex edutaine
or lately. I believe I stumbled upon the nineties film
version the Adrian Lion rendition of Lolita in a similar

(34:51):
fashion to you. I believe I was, you know, also
watching the multipart YouTube thing in my um my bedroom,
you know, like checking the door to make sure nobody
came in. Um. I definitely remember being aware of how
taboo it was, but also thinking, wow, this is so hot,

(35:14):
And what's so weird about it is that I don't
even remember whether I've read the book or not. I
feel as though I was already aware of the differences
between the book and the movie, so for that reason,
I think I may have read it at some point,
But um, one thing that childhood trauma does to you

(35:36):
is completely wipes out your memory of some things. So
I don't know how much of it is just that
UM and I guess I should say I didn't think
it was hot. But I was also a young uh
I was. I was fourteen when I started dating an
eighteen year old and obviously, you know four years is

(35:56):
not as much of an age difference as Lolita and Humbert. However,
at those very formative years, it was like I was
in a relationship with an adult um and I really
it was in a lot of relationships with older men
where I had no concept of how the age difference

(36:17):
alone is just a prime environment for abuse when someone
has power over you. And regardless of how mature I felt,
it's like there is no way to have a equal
relationship when there is a huge power imbalance, and in
most cases there is. It's so hard to leave the

(36:39):
cycle of abuse, especially when you're just so much looking
forward to that like green zone or safe zone of like, oh,
I'm being adored and showered with love and gifts, And
this can happen in any relationship. We're not just talking
about once with a huge age disparity or you know,
inappropriate relationship chips. But uh, you're always going to be

(37:02):
going back to the the yellow zone where you're like
walking on eggshells, knowing something bad is going to happen,
and then of course like the red zone where the
actual abuse is going down, and then you go back
to the green zone. Apologies, I'm so sorry, I'm never
going to do this again. And when you're just really

(37:23):
programmed into that pattern, you get used to that roller
coaster ride. But even in consensual adult relationships, this is
a thing. So then when you put that huge age
disparity into it, it's so hard to leave. For me, Uh,
entering a relationship at the age of fourteen with someone
much older than me was a way I could say

(37:45):
to my father, who was my abuser, like I am
somebody else's sexual property, so you can't look at me
the same way you used to. Um. Not being sexualized
by my father was very important to me, So I
would always be, you know, just hiding my body, just
trying to avoid anything that made me seem adult in

(38:07):
any way. UM, and then that energy was all refocused
onto my abusive teenage relationship. It's not as simple as
you know, comprehensive sex education. I had comprehensive sex education,
didn't talk about you know, boundaries or a pleasure. But um,
you know, to my school district, you know, we talked

(38:29):
about anatomy and stuff, and I still, you know, fell
into very abusive dynamics. Um, it's really difficult to create
any change when you know, even if you have a
parent who's supporting you with all the information you need,
or school is supporting you, doesn't matter if the media

(38:49):
around you is sending you the polar opposite messages. And
I personally think that we often use porn as a
scapegoat in media for all of the harmful messages we
have about sex. Absolutely, there is a lot of porn
that depicts abuse and rape, and it's all over the internet,

(39:11):
given our free streaming access to porn, although that is
changing due to Sesta FOSTA other legislation that is far
more recent than that. Total side note, porn is a
medium is not to blame for all the messed up
messages we have about sex. It is the individual directors,
producers and you know, white men at the top of

(39:35):
the food chain, at least up until recently, when we
have a more performer centric model of porn with things
like only fans, many bids, etcetera. I think what makes
me feel so sad about the sex education I didn't
receive is how I missed all of the messaging around
UM bodily autonomy. I knew about the function of sex

(39:58):
and pregnancy when it came to like knowing that my
body is my body and you know, I don't have
to hug uncle so and so if I don't want to.
And we see this all the time with kids, where
there's this assumption like, oh, your family like you can

(40:19):
sit on their lap, you can, you can do all
these things or it's like even things like tickling for
me was a big one where tickling was used in
a very inappropriate way to touch me in very inappropriate
places that I had no understanding that that was that
was a boundary I was allowed to set with my body,
even with my own family members. So sex education can

(40:45):
really start from, you know, the beginning of life, because
sex education isn't literally about sex. It's about UH protecting
your body, bodily autonomy and UM feeling comfortable in it.
And I m I'm a person who still dissociates from
their body To this day, it's it's so hard to

(41:05):
feel comfortable in your own skin when it's been violated,
even even if it wasn't in a sexual way, if
your body was violated at a young age, it is
so hard to know how to set those boundaries, how
to notice say this makes me feel icky or uncomfortable.
And furthermore, using the actual names for body parts when
you're teaching children about their bodies, you don't it doesn't

(41:28):
have to be an inappropriate thing to just tell your
kid this is your penis, this is your vulva, instead
of using words like huha or thingy, because then if
something does happen, your child does have the vocabulary to say,
this is what happened to me, and it's not going
to be enshrouded in shame that they've picked up on

(41:51):
from you as a parent or guardian. And so much
of that also has to do with like the gender
roles we project onto our kids. And you know, like
saying to a kid like, oh, he's gonna be a
real heartbreaker when he grows up is so creepy, but
it's not seen as creepy because you know, it's like
it's just a joke. But you are still projecting adult

(42:15):
sexuality onto a child when you make remarks about that.
And again, I would never shame an individual parent for
making a remark like that. I think it's really, um
a common thing to make you know, like silly little
like oh they're flirting, or you know, like, oh, is
that your girlfriend from elementary school? Like that is so common,

(42:37):
and it's like saying this in this context, it's obviously
so creepy, but I don't think anybody is even cognizant
of the messages that that sends children and um. And
when it comes to gender roles, also like teaching your kid,
you know, no matter how your kid identifies, like if

(42:57):
you are a boy and you know you want to
go cry, you want to play with dolls, Like I'm
not going to tell you what you can play with
or how you can behave based on your gender identity
or the gender you are assigned at birth. UM. And
conversely like letting your girls, letting your non binary children

(43:18):
just do whatever the heck they want and express themselves
however they want, you know, again within reasonable boundaries. UM. However,
we do have to keep this in mind that we
are talking about like a cyclical issue that happens throughout
generations and um, you know even with alcoholism and an

(43:40):
abuse and and that genetically carrying through generations. But on
top of that, just like the way we choose to
to heal from our abuse, we can really send such
a strong message to kids that empower them. And again,
it doesn't have to be a long talk. They're gonna
learn so much more from watching you confidently set your

(44:03):
own boundaries. You know, like oh God, like sex is
a big deal, and like we have to like sit
aside at time to talk about It's like no, it's
it's so baked into our society that it has to
be baked into parenting as well. If we're going to
provide context to understand, you know, the book covered to Lolita.

(44:26):
I think there's a huge difference between you know, being
able to identify those things on your own, or you're
me and you're seeing that and romanticizing it because you
don't have any other context, right, And I know there's
a lot of people who share that that feeling when
they first saw any version of Lolita that wasn't the
original book. I don't think I could have read the book.

(44:48):
I don't know that I would have, even with the
nuanced contextual clues, picked up on the reality of it,
because I was so used to defending my own abusers
talking about child to sexual abuse as being something that
can happen to any kid, not just little girls, not
just little white girls, and furthermore that it can be
from any gender of adult. I have been asking everybody,

(45:12):
do you think it is possible to adapt Lolita into
something that is culturally useful as opposed to kind of
what we've seen so far. I'm sure that there has
been attempts made at this, you know, nothing that's made
it um to the big screen, so to speak. But
it's one and you know, it's been like twenty five

(45:35):
years since the last film rendition of this. Is it
possible to revive the narrative in a way that is
true to the text? I I would like to think so.
I think the question is will society be ready to
receive it, because, as we know, and you mentioned before,

(45:57):
the male directors clearly read the book and we're completely
lost to the subtext. So yeah, I'm sure the same
could be true for the movie. But I think it's possible.
I would love to watch a movie like that, and
I also just want to see more movies that are addressing, um,
you know, adolescent sexuality in a healthy, non exploitative way.

(46:19):
Thanks again to Zoe for her time. You can find
her at Thongaria on all platforms and check out her
store Spectrum Boutique. There have been attempts to reconcile not
just with the legacy of Lolita, but challenging romanticizing abuse
narratives in a number of mediums over the years. In fact,
there's two novels written by women that attempt to tell

(46:42):
the events of Lolita from Dolores's perspective. There is novel
Lowe's Diary by Italian writer Pia Para, who portrays Dolores
as a sadist and manipulator that implies that not only
was Humbert Humbert not too bad of a guy, but
he was also taking it easy on how my she
demonized Dolores in the original book. Dmitrina Buko, Vladimir's son,

(47:04):
sued for copyright infringement to No avail. Miss Lola, who
I've spoken with on the show before, has an excellent
analysis of this really wildly misguided book that I will
link in the description don't recommend. There's also Roger fish Bite,
written by Emily Praeger as a full on parody of

(47:24):
the original novel. She updates the story, taking it out
of the forties. She calls Lolita Lucky and Humbert fish Bite,
and the story is narrated by Lucky. I haven't read
this book and so I can't speak to it, but
it didn't make much of a wave in its time
and definitely wasn't considered the feminist reimagining of Lolita that
it seemed to be trying for both of these works,

(47:47):
though it sounds like Roger fish Bite is a more
satirical version, marketed themselves on the basis of being an
inverted Lolita and updated Lolita, and on and on, because
all of them assume that the resolution to a story
narrated by a child sex abuser is for the abuse
to actually be not that bad. That the way to

(48:11):
create an active and identifiable protagonist in Dolores is to
make her the bad guy. This is beyond misguided. It
makes the abuse from Humbert have little to no impact,
It increases our sympathy for the abuser, and it telegraphs
that young people being abused had better become a wise,

(48:32):
beyond their years, hypercriminal mastermind in order to survive. Oh
and it will also mean that you were the villain.
This mentality has been presented as reclaiming over and over,
and it can be really campy and a cathartic idea
to reimagine your abuse where you had more agency, more
power than you actually may have. But as it pertains

(48:56):
to Lolita in particular, it reads far more like get
translation of how the general public thought of Dolores already.
In general, I think that audiences are so upset to
see the reality of abused children in any media format
that it's an easier sell to somehow implicate the child

(49:17):
in the crime. Dmitri Nabulkov was messy in many ways,
but opposing Lowe's diary was a really smart hill to
die on. One notable exception from this era there's Paula
Vogel's Pulitzer winning play How I Learned to Drive From
It's been recommended to me extensively, and I finally gotten

(49:39):
a chance to read it last week. This play is
the most successful, moving and complicated depiction of grooming, incest, shame,
and failure to intervene from those trusted adults that I've
ever read in a dramatic format. The lead of the show,
little Bits as she's called, tells us the story of

(50:00):
her being groomed by her uncle, who was a child
sex abuser and child pornographer who was also suffering from
PTSD from his service in World War two. Little Bits
feels deeply ashamed of being abused confused about her feelings
towards her uncle while coming of age in the nineties seventies.
I don't want to spoil too much about the show,

(50:21):
but it's a really moving piece that allows its protagonist
to process abuse over time and then at the end
to survive the experience. Recommended reading. Also. Mary Louise Parker
was in the most famous production of this play, and
she is my crush. But those are books from the nineties.

(50:42):
More recently, I've read two fiction books from the past
ten years that seek to challenge the romance that the
reception of Lolita normalized. Both of these books deal with
a teacher grooming and underage student, and they do so
through the eyes of female characters. One narrator is a predator,

(51:02):
the other is a survivor. The first is Tampa by
Elissa Nutting, who full disclosure, is my friend and former boss.
I love her a lot. She writes essentially a female Humbert,
an unrepentant child sex abuser, teaching eighth grade English and
assaulting her young student. This protagonist, Celeste, narrates the book

(51:22):
similar to how Humbert does regularly steamrolling over her victim's trauma,
amongst other similarities that I don't want to give full
spoilers for. It is a tough read, and it's supposed
to be, but I thought that the execution was really effective.
It's the first time I experienced a narrative where a
female child sex abuser is presented as just that. Celeste

(51:46):
is knowingly benefiting from the quote unquote too pretty for
prison complex, which was a term famously applied to deborall
of faith an attractive, white, twenty four year old teacher
who assaulted a fourteen year old male student. Tampa explores
the ways that society treats an adult woman assaulting an
underage boy very differently than the reverse, as well as

(52:07):
the vast privilege that celest benefits from strictly by being white, attractive,
and married to a cop. Nothing did a talk with
Roxanne Gay When the book was first released in and
it generated quite a bit of controversy At the time.
Game mentioned that the writing style kind of evoked Lolita
for her, and nothing replied with this. This type of

(52:29):
story is so often fetishized in the popular media, and
that got me thinking about the lack of novels whose
protagonists are female predators, particularly sexual predators. There's a void there,
and it's a conversation I felt compelled to start. I
committed to the explicitness before I even began writing the book.

(52:50):
In my mind, there was never a question of whether
or not it was essential. If I was going to
portray a dangerous character, I had to invest the text
with the full amount of that danger, or it wouldn't
be a just representation to be successful. I knew that
the book had to make readers feel exceptionally uncomfortable, otherwise
I'd be whitewashing the topic. I'd actually go so far

(53:13):
as to say our culture has a really hard time
casting females as sexual predators of male victims, even when
the male is under age. If a thirteen fourteen year
old boy sleeps with an adult female, there can be
this narrative surrounding the act of it being a positive
learning experience for him. That sort of attitude would never

(53:34):
be applied toward a thirteen or fourteen year old girl.
The other book is My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell,
published in Russell's text interacts with Lolita throughout the entire story.
It is another story of grooming by a teacher, this
time a male teacher, narrated by his teenage student Vanessa,

(53:54):
who is assaulted by him over a course of years.
The book jumps in timeline from his initial aiding the
relationship into thousand, all the way through when an adult
Vanessa is still struggling to see herself as a victim
at the dawn of the Me Too movement. In Vanessa,
we have a different kind of unreliable narrator. She's a
person who has experienced child sex abuse but is still

(54:17):
in contact with her abuser years later. She is someone
who is still processing a lot of trauma and figuring
out how to navigate it. I won't give any more spoilers,
but I found the book to be incredibly moving, and
as Dolorus is often presented to us as an imperfect victim,
I really appreciate that Vanessa doesn't fit cleanly into the
triumphant me two headlines, and that she struggles when interacting

(54:40):
with other survivors of assault, as well as the limitations
of that movement. Kate Elizabeth Russell's use of Lalita an
attachment to Dolorous Hayes echoes the sentiments of a lot
of people I've spoken to, as well as myself. Here's
what she said about Dolores in an interview to promote
the book in I saw a lot of similarities between

(55:03):
her and me. Some of them were superficial, like we're
both from New England. But also she's lazy and moody,
and she has a good sense of humor. You can
find snippets of her real personality if you read the
novel closely, and I did because I was always looking
for her. The other thing that really stuck out to
me about My Dark Vanessa is that Lolita by Nabokov

(55:25):
is used as a grooming tool by the predatory teacher,
who presents Nabokov's work to the fifteen year old Vanessa
as a love story, and she reads it that way
like most of us did. This fictional account reflects the
experience of many people who have reached out to me,
including Alison Wood, who wrote about being groomed by an
abusive teacher using Lolita in her memoir Being Lolita. And

(55:49):
it's here where I get to the absolute edge of
wishing the book didn't exist. The fact that abusers can
and have used the book to groom and harm people
is fucking terrifying. And in the fictional world of My
Dark Vanessa and in Woods's real life story in Being Lolita,
the teenagers being abused only realized that Lolita has been

(56:11):
framed to them in the most disingenuous, harmful way possible
once they are out of their abusers clutches. I would
also recommend memoirs about CISA in general to better understand
why Lolita's false legacy is so harmful. In addition to
Being Lolita, I really connected with Wendy c ortiz is Excavation,

(56:32):
which also engages directly with Lolita as a real life
grooming tool, or other memoirs about CISA and adult life,
including Elizabeth Smarts My Story or I Know Why the
Cage Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. And even so, every
book and play I just described explores a very narrow
perspective in the grand scheme of things, They're all about

(56:53):
the abuse of able bodied SIS, white teenagers, just as
Lolita is. These narratives are important, and they're being effectively told.
Absolutely moves things forward, but it always bears repeating that
there is an urgent need to expand the scope of
stories that are given focus as it pertains to child
sex abuse, whether that means in publishing or movies or

(57:14):
plays or the fucking news. What always needs to enter
this conversation is the absolute necessity for making room for
all kinds of survivors of abuse. We've discussed this in
pieces across this series. There is still a dearth of media,
both in reporting and in narrative projects, reflecting these stories,
of displaying equally if not more common examples of abuse. Narratives.

(57:36):
Even now cis A narratives are more likely to address
the abuse of c S white characters. Even now cis
A narratives almost never address the sexual abuse of boys,
or when they do, it's framed as a conquest or
a joke instead of serious abuse. Even now cis A
narratives most often exclude stories of gay teens, trans teens,

(57:58):
non binary teens. The landscape of these movies is extremely straight,
or if there is a queer character, they are often
framed as the predator. Even now, C s A narratives
are less likely to reflect the abuse of black girls
or include black directors, even though black girls and women
are far more likely to be sexually abused. Even now,

(58:22):
C s A narratives in popular media don't make space
for abuse experienced by Asian girls or address the cultural
trends in some anime and certainly in LOLLYCN content to
hyper sexualize and fetishize their bodies. There's an amazing video
by video essayist Mina Lee about how the Japanese schoolgirl
aesthetic was taken from teenagers and flipped to a very

(58:44):
lowly to end. Actually, these male lead narratives said, teenagers
are just dressing up to seduce older men, and that's feminist.
When it's like, no, teenage girls were just trying to
wear clothes. Why is that so difficult? Even now, C
s A narratives rarely addres us the abuse of Indigenous
girls and women, even though one in two experienced sexual

(59:05):
violence at some point in their lives, according to a
UN report from so even in a world where we
get low lad A right in adaptation, that's only a start.
The inability or unwillingness to have a discussion on this
topic in our culture have scores that reach out in
every direction. So much of the most common types of
c s A are not reflected at all in media,

(59:26):
and when they are, it's far less likely that they're
going to receive the same amount of support in marketing
and distribution. A lot of why these conversations are prevented
from being started or considered is because they don't line
up with the goals of capitalism. To do so, Feminism
has historically centered assist white women overwhelmingly, often at the
expense and oppression of everyone else, and that applies to

(59:50):
cs A survivors as well. My next interview is with
my friend and a brilliant artist and teacher, Jess Merwin.
Jess is a non binary, mixed in digit queer. They're Micma, Scottish,
Irish and Welsh and a filmmaker, educator and curator based
in Montreal. They also have a background in film programming

(01:00:10):
and have seen a lot of movies that attempted to
explore abuse with mixed results. I was really excited to
hear their insights and to share some of our interview here.
You know, you talked about like coming in contact with like, uh,
Lolita is like, you know, a twelve year old, Like
you know, I was reading uh, you know, Alice in
Wonderland and like all that sort of stuff. So, um,

(01:00:34):
I kind of like went into reading the book. I think,
maybe not as naive as somebody who was like picking
it up for like the first time, who might have
been younger, right, Um, Like I very intentionally sort of
sought it out because it was I had studied literature,
and you know, it was like this great work of

(01:00:54):
um even though like I had experienced child had sexual abuse,
My personal story is so different to that of Lolita,
so I didn't I think I didn't really form like
a strong attachment to Dolores or to to the story
of Lolita. Kind of for that reason. It was like

(01:01:15):
it was kind of like this weird thing where like
I was very dissociated when I read the book, and
like dissociated not necessarily just because of the subject matter,
but like I looked at it as like being like
an academic experience. And I kind of regret that now
because like you know, from from even just like listening
to you talk about it and interview people about it,

(01:01:36):
like there is so much more richness to the book,
and I just sort of looked at it very coldly,
as like a thing that I had to check off
a list. I was helping administer this training program for
emerging filmmakers where um, you know, filmmakers was sort of
like picture an idea and then we'd end up making
like four short films with four different ideas, and one

(01:01:57):
of the ideas that was pitched was like, um again
this sort of like coming of age like sexual like
maturing like teen girls story. And it was like very even,
just like on the producer sort of side of it,
like it was really difficult to try and justify one
why we were making this film, especially because it was

(01:02:19):
like essentially a training project, and it was like, so,
why are we tackling the subject matter and to like, um,
you know, the director wanted to use like especially like
non actors and like very young non actors, and I
was like again, like why why, why why does that

(01:02:43):
have to be the decision like creatively you know, um,
because I don't think it's ethical, Like we didn't just
like emerge one day in you know, and have this
idea of like predatory men plaring on young girls, because
I think this is a case where it's appropriate to

(01:03:05):
speak about girls as opposed to women. Um. You know,
like this narrative has been present in in Western culture
for a really really long time. You know. One of
the sort of examples that like I thought of was, um,
the rape of Persephone um or Persephone in Greek mythology perceptony,

(01:03:25):
the goddess of Spring comes of age, so she's like
gets her periods. So we can assume she's like twelve
thirteen maybe and is kidnapped by Hades, who is at
that point in time, I mean her uncle but also
a like perceived as being like a much older man,

(01:03:47):
and Hadie sort of tricks her and gets her to
eat some pomegranate seeds, so she has to Persephone has
to end up returning to the underworld. Um and where
Haydes ends up marrying her. Um yeah a real chill time,
real real cool chill time. Yeah. The Greeks man, Yeah, yeah,

(01:04:13):
since there's times where are like Jesus and this is
what Western culture is built upon. Koko ko ko cool,
you know, so like, so there's like a very like
early conversation about like or like early sort of example
of this idea of I mean and like don't even
get me started on zeus um and and like his

(01:04:35):
multiple sexual assaults and rapes. But yeah, so there's this
example of like Haydies and Persephone, and yet the story
of Hades and Persephoni is often, um, in a modern lens,
at least perceived as being very romantic. I think that
we have to actually be like very critical of like
the underlying culture that exists, and like you know, it's like, well,

(01:04:58):
why why do we feel compelled romanticize the story? Um?
You know, like one of my big pet feeds is
actually um a lot of like white conspiracy culture, um,
because it so frustrates me that people will go a
whole hog on something like Q and on or you know,

(01:05:20):
even um, you know like the Satanic panic. You know, um,
people will go like full bor on that or even
just like some of the like anti gay conspiracy stuff
that was going on to around, like the AIDS pandemic,
Like these are the things that I was growing up around.
People will go whole hog on that. But like, yeah,

(01:05:40):
when you sort of say, like, um, systemic racism is
a thing, and uh, you know, Indigenous women are eight
times more likely to be sexually assaulted than white women,
even though they represent like less than six percent of
the population. You know, when you talk about you know,

(01:06:03):
missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two spirit people, Um,
you know that number in the thousands and thousands and thousands,
and like that's something we have proof for. And you know,
people want to spend more time talking about like some
supposed pedophile ring that meets in like a pizza hut.
It's like, okay. As a programmer too, like I um

(01:06:24):
up until very recently, actually, I would say, although it
still happens a little bit. Um like the amount of
like films and like students, so you're like not even
dealing with like people who are like and you're dealing
with like some like shif heead part of my language,
but like some shifhead at some film school who's like,

(01:06:45):
I'm gonna make this real edgy film. It's about rape
or it's about pedophilia. It's about this, or it's about that,
and it's like, you know, so when I was programming
for festivals, I would end up watching you know, like um,
not insignificant amount of short films that were like all
about ripe um And that's kind of cooled off a

(01:07:06):
little bit recently, and I think it is due to
things like the Me Too movement becoming a little bit
more visible. But like young male filmmakers for some reason,
it's like the only thing that they could like like, oh, well,
how do I develop a woman? Well, I guess she
could be sexually assaulted and you're like Jesus Christ, like

(01:07:26):
you know, and and like part of that is like
what you see in media elsewhere, right, Like people just
kind of reproduce like things that they're shown, And the
other side of that is just that like um that
like that also that like I think there was so
little resistance to it for so long, you know. I

(01:07:46):
think that like for for so long, you know, like
it was saying you know, there was and still like
still there's like this championing of like you know, these
narratives but excuse me, brutalization. I feel like almost like
the way to adapt Lolita is um and taking a
page out of documentaries like Surviving R. Kelly and actually, um,

(01:08:14):
you know, take it into this whole other sort of um,
you know, realm of cinematic language, where it would be
like interviewing low Low, I guess interviewing Dolores and and
sort of like presenting her side of the story, um
from sort of like the position of somebody who survived

(01:08:37):
this really horrendous experience, not only with like humbered Humbert,
but with Quilty too. But then it's like, does that
step too far away from the book? Offs like initial text, like,
I just I'm not sure we can keep Humbert. Yeah,
I don't know. I'm just I'm very ja at this
point of keeping humber in frame at all. I know

(01:09:02):
again like as a survivor of of you know, childhood
sexual abuse. But it's so much more nuance than that.
And that's what I want fundamentally through Dolors, because I think, like,
you know, not only just like the fan communities for
the book, but also just for like the people who
find the book as and like use it as a
way of being able to understand their own context, you know,

(01:09:25):
um and like use it as like a way of
being able to start to find the words to talk
about their own situation. I think is really powerful and
and and is a reason for which I argue that
we do need a good adaptation of Lolita because like
the survivors deserved that. Like I think that, you know,
like I think that, like you know, a lot of

(01:09:49):
times when I when I look at things like representation, Um,
you know, I don't think that we I think when
we sort of think about representation, it's it's like it's
in this very limited scope of sort of being like
um uh you know, oh, well, we need to like
have women being things. You know, when when we do

(01:10:11):
include trans people in stories, when we do include women
in stories, when I do include bipop folks and stories,
it allows people to see themselves in futures perhaps they
couldn't have imagined or in like in ways perhaps they
didn't imagine themselves, and that can be a really powerful thing.
And like, and I think that if we had like

(01:10:32):
a really good adaptation of the Leda or just even
like like you're saying, you know, like other stories about
childhood sexual abuse and being a survivor, Like, I think
that that could be so life affirming for so many
people because like sexual childhood sexual abuses so ubiquitous. Unfortunately,

(01:10:54):
you know, Um, I remember in living having amate in
my mid twenties say to me, um that she was
lucky because she had never been raped. I've had so
many I like, so many people, and so many friends,
and so many family members and so many like you know,

(01:11:16):
and and so much of that Like trauma, you know,
you end up just like carrying it and passing it
down and carrying it and passing it down and like, um,
and it just like affects everything. Like I think that
we think of trauma sometimes as being like you know,
sort of like they do in Blackbird, where it just
like shuts your whole life down, and it's like, well, no,
it's actually much more common that people sort of continue

(01:11:38):
to look on doing you know, surviving because we're in
genious animals in terms of survival. Um. But that doesn't
mean that it isn't like ravaging parts of our life.
There's you know, you can't always control what happens to
the thing that you create once you put it out

(01:11:58):
into the world, even if like you know, um, And
we talked about this a little bit, Um, I'm bechtelcast
when we talked about like Rhymestreng goals, Like there's so
many amazing things about that film, and it's so important
to see and yet you know, fifteen people including myself
sot in theaters and nobody like no nobody else did
um you know, and so like there's there's a certain

(01:12:20):
amount of like, you know, even if you sort of
got to the point where you could make a film
adaptation of Uita, you could get it distributed, umber would
be you know, seeing for what he is. It's still
like would people would people see that? Like would would
you know? Would people be interested enough in that, like

(01:12:42):
paradigm shift to engage with it? Like well we've seen
even just like and this isn't like the most like
salient example, but like how people react to like a
Black Stormtrooper, you know, or like an all female Ghostbusters
like are people ready for? And and like an ethical
adaptation of Lolita? I don't know. I think if anything,

(01:13:04):
there is so much mysterial like here, Jamie, that you
could do like a whole season two just about like
things that get compared to Aldo. Thank you again to
the amazing Jess Merwin, and you can check out more
of their work at Jess Merwin dot com. In preparing
for this episode, I've watched quite a few movies from
the last fifteen years that attempt to address child sex

(01:13:26):
abuse and the pressures that are put on kids at
an increasingly young age to sexualize themselves. The trends that
just describes manifest pretty cleanly here. Even though there's several
of the movies I'm about to mention that I generally
like and think accomplished net good. I don't have time
to get into any of them in depth, but I
want to give you an idea of what sorts of
stories have been brought to the forefront since Adrian lines Lolita,

(01:13:51):
and I want to note that most of the movies
I'm going to describe here do show abuse of a
child in one way or another on screen. There's stories
about child sex abuse survivors who come to terms with
their abuse or begin to process it while they're still
in the midst of their abuser. There's Precious, based on
the novel Push by Sapphire, a story of a black

(01:14:13):
teenage survivor navigating sexual abuse, poverty, and racism, a movie
that was pretty controversial when it first came out. There's
also Tim Roth's directorial debut, The War Room. Tim Roth,
I learned was a survivor of child sexual abuse himself,
and In the movie, a son slowly realizes that his
father is sexually abusing his sister while other members of

(01:14:35):
the family remain complicit out of fear. There's Rhymes for
Young Ghouls, the movie Jess and I were discussing in
the interview, a Jeff Barnaby movie about a Canadian Indigenous
teenager and survivor of abuse in the seventies, living on
a reservation and traversing the abusive racist reservation school system.
In another category, we have the slew of movies about

(01:14:57):
people who are processing their trauma as adults, Movies that
examine the ways in which the lingering effects of child
sex abuse can follow a person through their lives. There's
the Tale, written and directed and pulling from the real
life experiences of Jennifer Fox, about Laura Dern's character revisiting abuse,
only to realize that upon seeing photos of herself from

(01:15:19):
the time, that she was much younger than she remembers.
There's Una, a movie starring Rudy Mara adapted from the
play Blackbird, in which a twenty eight year old woman
finds and confronts a man who sexually abused and attempted
to abduct her when she was thirteen. Her abuser served
his time in prison four years, not enough, but upon
confronting him, she finds that he hasn't really internalized what

(01:15:42):
he had done during his time in the car stural system.
There's the adult survivors of abuse of priests in Spotlight,
the only movie on this list that doesn't show child
abuse on screen. There's movies that attempt to show the
pressures put on young people coming of age. Cutie's a
highly controversial French movie by Maimuna Ducore from explores a

(01:16:05):
French Black Muslim adolescent's attempt to reconcile her life at
home with a religious upbringing, with the demand to sexualize oneself,
with navigating her own sexuality and identity. The discussion around
this movie has been fraught and controversial, which I don't
have the time to get into here in full, but
there's a lot of valid conversation that cuts has generated.

(01:16:28):
The cinematography in this movie is for my money, uh what,
and my general feeling is that it's an interesting story
told in a deeply exploitative and irresponsible way toward its
underage stars. But the kickoff for the backlash in the
US was the movie's marketing. The movie was released on
Netflix in the US, and they released a promotional poster

(01:16:51):
of the Cuts dance team posed provocatively to sell the
movie in spite of the fact that the core message
of the movie seems to want us to challenge that
to extent. Ye then there's the category of movies about revenge.

(01:17:18):
I saw Emerald Fennel's Promising Young Woman last week, and
it embodied me emotionally. It's about the friend of a
sexually abused college student who is avenging her death from
the men who sexually abused her, but not just her abusers,
also bystanders, enablers, and authority figures who knew and did nothing,
either because it was easier or because they stood to

(01:17:38):
make some money out of it. There's also revenge tales
that end a little more cathartically. One that I remember
seeing early on was Hard Candy, in which a young
Elliott Page plays a preteen who deliberately entraps an adult
child sex abuser and murderer played by Patrick Wilson. The
thirteen year old threatened to castrate him and forces him
to confront and admit to the crimes he's committed while

(01:18:00):
being humiliated and there's more. There's bad education, and the
handmaiden and a teacher, and I didn't even touch TV.
The list goes on, and there's definitely a pattern I've
noticed in movies that address child sex abuse that are
very successful and those that aren't. It's not quite as
simple as they were directed by a well regarded white

(01:18:21):
male directors and therefore are inherently taken more seriously because
we live in a society. Although uh, that is often true.
But what really struck me in watching these movies is
that the movies that tend to get more praise are
not just more often men directing movies about the abuse
of young girls. It also appears that movies about child

(01:18:43):
sex abuse that show you that child sex abuse are
more likely to be praised and awarded things. And the
artist who really clarified that for me is my friend
Eva Vives, who I was thrilled the interview for this
final episode. I was lucky enough to work with Eva
on her feature debut All about Nina. Back in we

(01:19:05):
met because she had asked a mutual friend if he
knew of any female stand ups who had experienced sexual abuse,
and guess who came up my phone? Started a ring
in and Eva has very graciously since become an amazing
friend and mentor to me. Eva was raised in Catalonia
and then moved to the US to become a filmmaker.

(01:19:27):
She is an incredible writer director who had previously co
written Raising Victor Vargas, and she since directed episodes of
The Affair, Party of five and is currently working on
a new feature. All About Nina is about a stand
up comic played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who is in
and out of an abusive relationship while navigating her burgeon
in comedy career, then meeting a person who she may

(01:19:49):
actually be able to love and have a healthy relationship with.
Spoiler alert if you haven't seen it, fast forward fifteen seconds.
But the climax of the movie is Nina having a
breakdown on stage revealing that she was sexually abused as
a child by her father. It's an approach to discussing
child sex abuse that's pretty unusual in a way that
I found and still find unique. We meet and get

(01:20:11):
to know Nina without knowing the worst thing that's ever
happened to her, like you would ordinarily meet any person.
You see her relationships and her choices and you form
your opinions throughout the movie. Then boom, Nina tells the
world what she hasn't yet been able to confront, and
it changes your perspective on what she's been doing the
whole time. I think it's really effective, and it hits

(01:20:32):
both on how common this kind of abuse can be
and how it manifests over time in ways that many
might not guess. So I got to catch up with
Eva to get her insights on Lolita, her experiences tackling
issues of sexual abuse and cs A, specifically in her
art as a survivor herself. So let's check out that interview.

(01:20:53):
I don't know should be I mean, I think so
much of what is important to me about this stuff,
and I think maybe what you're talking about, Like I
was gonna say, what are those movies and are they
told by survivors? Because I think it's the perspective of
it that's so important, you know, and that and that
matters so much, Like why why did Nabokov tell this

(01:21:14):
story and for whom did he tell it? I don't
remember how I first heard about it, but but I
do remember um consciously going to my school library in
high school and ask him for it because I couldn't
see it on the shelf. And I remember that the
that the librarian who was an older or she seemed
older to me. She probably wasn't, but you know, when

(01:21:36):
you're young, everybody seems old. Who was an American woman
who kind of looked like big bird a little bit
like you know, sort of that kind of curly hair
and stuff, sort of frowned and was like, Lolita, you
want to read Lolita? And I was in, you know,
I was in sort of defense mode, like yeah, because
I knew what it was about. You know, I think
they might have ordered it and so that I could

(01:21:58):
read it. One of the reasons why I think it's significant,
and I say this is also and talk about my
own um sort of defensiveness about it, is because you know,
I was being raped at home by my father, which
is something that lasted eight years, and I think it
was the first instance that I had ever heard of
anything a book or a movie that in any way

(01:22:19):
um showed that kind of relationship. And I think that's
why I wanted to read it, But I was um
sort of defiant about it because and I do think
it's important to say that often survivors, especially when it's happening,
are It's something I try to show Nina, right, Like,
one of the ways that you get through that kind
of abuse is to um pretend even to yourself that

(01:22:41):
it's okay and in fact that it's great. I mean,
if not great, but that like, you know, I bought
into the ship my father told me, which was you
know that we were ahead of others, and um, you
know that the sort of compromised you know, like old
school morality, didn't understand what we were doing, like that
kind of thing. I mean, I think I knew dig down.

(01:23:02):
I was like, really, but you know, when you're when
you're thirteen or fourteen and you're under that kind of abuse,
I don't think I was in any shape to really
like go question it at the time. And again, it
at least feels good to tell yourself that that might
be the case. And hey, here's a book that everybody
has been talking about for years, that's considered a classic

(01:23:24):
that's about this very topic. So I went, you know,
I read it and I kind of couldn't believe it.
I was like, holy sh it, this is it was
as close as it got to my father and I
as anything else I've ever read, even though you know
I knew that that. Um obviously Humberd is not her
her biological dad in the book, but the thing that

(01:23:44):
that really likes sort of um, you know, it's and
again I've not read it probably since then, so you know,
I and I in fact, I think whatever book or
copy I had of it, I threw it away. I
really have no love for the book or him. Um
you might as you might imagine, and so but but
again I'm glad that we're talking about it from this perspective. Um.

(01:24:08):
So yeah, I think it was that whole middle part
of them going away, Um, you know, where he kidnaps
her and they travel all over the place and they
go into you know, motel after mattel and he rapes her.
Basically I can't remember how long it is. It goes
on for it goes on for a year. Yeah, I
mean just you know, it's I think an astounded and

(01:24:28):
remarkable uh you know, portrait of an abuser. Um. I
think the fact that he called it Lolita is you know,
so um disingenuous. It's just a disingenuous book from from
front to bottom. And so is the you know the
everything he said about it. You know, the book is
about him and his perspective and how he feels about Lilita.

(01:24:52):
It's not about her in anyway, nor does it intend
to be. The Other thing that really got to me
and that I felt very sort of put put upon,
because of course identified with her was the ending that
and I seem to remember that he goes back to
see her years later when she's pregnant and I think
maybe living in a she's like seventeen, maybe yeah, And

(01:25:12):
she opened the door and she's got the big belly
and he kind of like my impression at the time,
and again I've not read it, was that he sort
of almost looks down on her, like like she used
to be so beautiful and so meaningful, and now look
at her kind of thing. Um, So the impression I
took from it was that you know, once you grew up,
you were no longer good or useful. That ending, or

(01:25:36):
the idea that again, um, one of them would ask
for forgiveness. If that's what the nineties movie does, I
think it's also sort of for fosters and dangerous because
again there's this idea that like, just because you asked
for forgiveness means that you should be forgiven. I think
it puts an incredible amount of stress on Yeah, I
think you and I have talked about this. I don't
believe that forgiveness is necessary, but I think there is

(01:25:59):
a real push towards um forgiveness as a solution. And
I think it really hurts a lot of survivors because
it focuses on that instead of getting the rage out
and getting all the stuff that you were not allowed
to say or do or defend yourself at the time
out of your system, hopefully in therapy and with friends

(01:26:21):
who believe you and who um you know, validate you.
I think one thing, you know, I remember years ago
seeing a movie which I shall not name, but it
was about I think I think it involved rape more
than anything. And and one of the characters in the
movie was a chef. And in the credits, which I
was looking after, it said chef chef consultant, And I thought,

(01:26:44):
and where's the rape consultant. I will educate pretty much
at any you know, at any given moment, but because
I think it's where we are now, and I do
see it as part of my duty. But um, but
I just want to say, you know, have to talk
about it just because it happened to you if you
don't want to. And plenty of survivors don't. You know,

(01:27:06):
survivors can survive and have healthy relationships and lives um
with the right health and support. I think that's really
really important to know because a few instances I ever
saw of this stuff, and certainly in movies, um, we're
always tragic. This is the examples I always had when
any of this came up, including rape for a long

(01:27:27):
time in movies, was that you would end up as
an you know, an addict in the gutter or sex
worker or whatever. And again I don't mean that in
any way as a as a shame full or insulting
thing to anybody who does go who does do that
or goes through it. And there are very real reasons
why somebody you know might end up doing something like that.

(01:27:48):
I'm just saying that the perspective has always been like,
if this happens to you, your life is destroyed, which
a book like Lolita also puts forward right like it's
only important to the author insomuch as how he experienced her.
I am really a strong believer in not showing sexual violence,
UM on screen. I don't think that you have to

(01:28:10):
show a child being sexualized in order for us to
understand that it's a terrible thing that a child is
being sexualized, Do you know what I mean? I think
I think that we all by now understand that rape,
sexual abuse, etcetera. Are horrendous crimes, and I don't want
to see it on screen. And I don't think you

(01:28:31):
should ask, you know, children to even act it out,
or adults for that matter. You know, UM, I think
that there are other ways in which we can show
the psychological impact or any kind of impact even physical,
that that it might have on people without um recreating it.
I certainly feel this way about rape scenes. I cannot

(01:28:55):
I can't tell you one that I think is necessary
in any movie. Most of the movies that get a
ton of awards attention and then get kind of I
mean that most of these movies, almost without exception that
I can think of, show it, which I agree isn't necessary,
but but I feel like it is still. I don't

(01:29:16):
know that I may be rewarded isn't the right word,
But I think it's sort of a lack of imagination,
to say the least, on the part of the filmmaker,
you know, beyond also, like the issue here isn't like,
of course the abuses is happening, but the real issue
is what happens to a child when that is being done,

(01:29:36):
not in the moment, I mean, yes, you know, but
like the repercussions of it. You know, I really wanted
to say that because I think that's important as we
move forward, even from a female point of view, you
know what I mean. And again, I totally I respect
survivors who feel otherwise. I just that's my opinion, you know.
I say. Also, somebody who like has been criticized by

(01:29:57):
mostly women for showing a topless woman in my movie,
which I also found really interesting, you know, so again, yeah,
like issues of perspective are so important. Like a couple
of women were like, I felt like that that was
such a doo thing to do. My um intention with
that scene was to actually show her nudity in a

(01:30:18):
way that was not sexual. Now you know, if it
if it turns a dude on to see her kids,
well that's his issue. But it was about her vulnerability
and her also being naked alone in her house doing
her work, which to me felt very realistic and very
much me too, you know, like and other women that

(01:30:39):
I know that, like, you're alone in your house, you
don't need to put on a braw And actually, this
is the conversation I also had with Mary about it.
I said to her, it's more important to me that
you're comfortable than naked, So if you don't want to
be naked in the scene, don't be it. But again,
to me, it's not about sexuality, which I think is
the other thing that um people still don't get about

(01:31:01):
sexual abuse. It's not really it's not about sex. It's
about control and power. It goes against my instincts not
to prepare more for something like this, Like normally I
would have liked come back and read the book and
listen to your whole podcast, but I think because um,
because of you know the effects of it, and then
also obviously we know each other, and I know you'll

(01:31:21):
understand when I say, like, I can't really listen to
six hours of Lolita right now, which I know you're
you're going through as well. But but yeah, it felt
but also my God's kind of liberating. And I just
sort of gave you my visceral response to it, and
I am glad to talk about it because I and
I did hear the first part where you were talking

(01:31:41):
about how you came to it and all that, which
is not so you know, dissimilar to my experience of it,
that this is somehow fucking offered two young girls as
something to read. Thank you so much to Eva Vivas.
I cannot recommend her work enough. Speaking with Eva didn't
just kind of or if I realizing that movies seem

(01:32:02):
more likely to succeed when they explicitly depict abuse, and
also clarified that imperfect victims don't normally get much of
a spotlight in mainstream media. Working on this show has
really challenged and reinforced my views on what a survivor
of abuse can look and behave like. In Dolores's case,
one of the primary excuses made to make the severe

(01:32:25):
abuse she experienced this her fault is the fact that
she had a crush on Humberd when he first moved
in when she was twelve, when he started working on
this show. My response to her having a crush on
him was that couldn't have been true, no way, But
the truth is so fucking what if it was true?
When I was twelve, I absolutely had crushes on adults,

(01:32:46):
and if they had appeared to reciprocate that, it's entirely
possible that I could have tried to experiment with that power.
To ignore the fact that Dolores was a normal twelve
year old coming into her own sexually and navigating her
identity and experimenting with power would be to just label
her inconvenient as a victim, or to imply that only

(01:33:07):
certain types of behavior mean you deserve justice and care.
This sentiment is more succinctly expressed in Cis a Survivor.
Tashmika Tarak, in her essay casting aspersions why do we
always lay the burden of ending sexual violence at the
feet of those who have survived it. I've talked a
lot about how we see ourselves in Dolores, and I

(01:33:30):
would be lying if her story doesn't pull out parts
of my own history. I think that her story does
that for a lot of people, and that that's a
powerful thing. Dolores does not fit the perfect victim narrative
because of how she's blamed for having a crush, for
navigating abuse from her own guardian to escape, for escaping
to another abuser, because that was her only option. A

(01:33:51):
lot of what I think has really mangled Doloras Hayes's
legacy in popular consciousness is people levying questions at her
are often the same questions that oppress survivors. Why didn't
you leave? Why didn't you tell someone sooner? Why did
you go back? Why didn't you say something? Making it
all her fault instead of considering the context of what

(01:34:13):
she is experiencing. These questions don't take into consideration. What
if you have nowhere to go. What if you don't
have the financial independence or legal ability to leave. What
if you do tell someone but they don't believe you.
What if you love the person who is abusing you
and it takes time to acknowledge and understand what's going on.
What if you didn't realize that someone you thought loved

(01:34:35):
you could do that. In my experience as an adult,
whenever I got asked questions like why didn't you leave?
I got angry and defensive and embarrassed. I felt extreme
shame when a school counselor told me that assaults taking
place off campus weren't her problem, and knowing from friends
who had tried that going to the police was the

(01:34:55):
most traumatic biggest waste of fucking time I could think
of who do you turn to? And after enough time passed,
I decided I would try talking to the fucking police.
But you will not be shocked to learn that that
went nowhere. And this experience was happening to me in
the year fourteen, which is a couple of years. Shy
of the world asking you to believe women, My own
experience has happened nearly seventy years after Dolores's, and there

(01:35:20):
was still not a fucking chance of getting any justice.
Shit sucked that bad in fourteen, and in most regards,
sh it sucks that bad right now. The context here
is critical. This was sexual abuse that happened to a
twelve year old child in nineteen forty seven, and ultimately,
the societal image of Dolores is built around behavior that

(01:35:42):
she displays in around a twenty four hour period in
the day that Humbrick picks her up from camp, the
day before he drugs her for the first time, the
day before he rapes her for the first time, the
day before she learns her mother is dead, and she
is permanently in the clutches of a man who just
raped her three times when she's picked up from camp.

(01:36:02):
Dolores's behavior, as Humbert describes it, is bold and vibrant.
She jokes that she's been horribly unfaithful to him. She
initiates the kiss with him, calling it the kissing game,
and she's essentially experimenting a little with power. And when
I was starting the show, I think there's a part
of me that rejected this. Surely Humbert is lying, but
even if he isn't, none of this behavior from a

(01:36:25):
twelve year old means that she was inviting the destruction
of her entire life from a child sex abuser, or
that she was a partner in crime or a seductress.
To her At this point in the narrative, Dolores is
trying to figure out what's going on. Humbert was a
stranger that she had a crush on who had already
assaulted her before she had even left for camp, but

(01:36:45):
now he's married to her mom. The unfair image we
have of her as a seductress is a kid trying
to rationalize what this adult man has already done to her,
navigating her own sexuality and adolescence, and what she probably
considered is at this point in time, to be relative safety,
because as all this is happening, Dolores assumes that she's

(01:37:06):
on her way home and that she'll see her mom
any minute. I can't overstate what a disservice it is
to define her legacy by this afternoon. Experimenting with power
as an adolescent does not entitle a thirty seven year
old adult man to a child's body, ever, and it
completely ignores how much her life changes just hours after

(01:37:28):
this scene. She was twelve in As we discussed in
episode four, there was next to no mental health support
made to victims of abuse at this time, certainly none
for children, and no protocol on how to interview children
who had been sexually abused in a non coercive way.
Why didn't Dolores tell the police? If you're reading the

(01:37:48):
book carefully, Dolores and Humbert encounter police all the time
in their travels, often in situations that make Humbert look
more than a little suspicious. No one ever did anything.
Why didn't she tell an adult that she trusted? I mean,
my god, Dolores went to school for a year around
teachers that thought something was wrong with her for not
being more interested in sex. Instead of speaking with her

(01:38:10):
or having her speak with a mental health professional. They
turned to her abuser, who of course deflects everything in
order to continue abusing. Why didn't she tell anyone? Because
Humbert constantly threatened her with the idea that she would
be thrown into the foster system if he ever experienced
a consequence being surrounded by people you would commonly associate

(01:38:30):
with adults I trust who failed to notice or care
that Dolores is abused as part of why I think
she's such a powerful figure to those who have been
Everyone thinks they're going to be a hero in that moment,
but no one in Dolores's life is. Dolores is failed
by her mother, by the authorities, by her teachers, and
her neighbors. The only people who listened to her are

(01:38:51):
girls her own age who are most likely to be disbelieved,
and another abuser like Claire Quilty, who knows full well
that the cloak of respective ability makes it much easier
for abusers to thrive. Takes one and no one. She
is failed by every system she encounters, and these same
systems have responded by telling her that she failed. The

(01:39:13):
last thing about rereading lowly at this time that stuck
out to me was that last scene where Humbert. Humbert
sees Dolores when she's seventeen and pregnant and asking him
for money so that she can survive. I mentioned this
in the first episode that this scene always really affected
me in a way that I couldn't even explain, but
I think I can now. I do think that how

(01:39:33):
Humbert presents himself in that scene is fantasy. He gives
her money, he feels bad for ruining her life, he
figures out he really did love her. And these are
the elements that every adaptation focuses on, because that's what Humbert.
Humbert wants you to focus on. What really strikes me
here is how Dolorus is in this scene. This is

(01:39:54):
where the value lies. I think this scene is presented
to us as Humbert last stand to gain our favor
as a jury. This is a scene that, to those
inclined to sympathize with him, indicates that Humbert realizes that
he harmed Dolores and wants to make amends with her.

(01:40:14):
It's essentially fiction inside of fiction because what's ignored in
this interpretation is well a lot. Let's take a look
at the scene. I don't care how Humbert feels here.
What I care about is that Dolores reached out to
her abuser and former guardian as an absolute last resort.
In her letter to him, she says this quote, pardon

(01:40:35):
me for withholding our home address, but you may still
be mad at me, and Dick must not know unquote,
she doesn't want to see him. Humbert's tracking her down
is one final violation, a final disregard for her wishes.
And that's if you don't count how he erases her.
In the text of his book, Dolores's abuser shows up
on her doorstep unannounced, and he comes with an agenda.

(01:40:57):
Here's what we learned. Dolores escape from Humbert Clutches, only
to land in Qualities Clutches, another unrepentant child sex abuser
who insists that the fourteen year old participate in filming porn.
She says no, instead working jobs as a waitress before
meeting Dick Schiller, a career veteran who she cares about
deeply but does not seem to be in love with.

(01:41:19):
She admits this, What I never really processed about the
scene is that in spite of her being married and
pregnant and more in control of her life than she
once was, she still hasn't felt comfortable telling Dick about
the abuse she experienced with Humbert. When Humbert shows up,
all Dick knows is that Humbert is Dolly's father, and
Dolores begs Humbert not to say anything else. Even when

(01:41:41):
she's more in control of her life than she's ever been,
she still lacks someone she can completely trust. And finally,
after humbertsbus his bullshit of I loved her all along,
look at me, Dolores does get one moment of rebellion
from her former abuser. Humbert says he will give her
the money money that owed to her anyways from her
mother's estate, and Dolores assumes that he's asking her to

(01:42:04):
have sex with him in a hotel in order to
get it. It's not a ridiculous assumption on her part.
Remember that is exactly how she was expected to save
up money to get away from him at age thirteen
and fourteen, And for the first time, Dolores tells Humbert, no,
she is not going to do that. Humbert gives her
the money anyways, because it's hers. He asks her to

(01:42:25):
come with him, because he's decided that he has actually
loved her the whole time. She says no again. Humbert
does not control her fate in the direct sense anymore,
for denying him would have a price in the form
of abuse. During her childhood. She has formed a support
system around her, and she says no. And this time
saying no does not mean that she has to transfer

(01:42:46):
to another abuser, and she doesn't need to capitulate to
his physical abuse or his threats. She tells him no,
and he has no choice but to respect her wish.
This is what hit for me. His control over her
is gone, but that doesn't mean that she's won. The
damage to Dolorus Hayes's life is clear. If Humbert had

(01:43:07):
never manipulated her family, I still secretly think managed to
get rid of her mother and destroy her support system
by asserting himself as her guardian, she wouldn't be in
this position. She wanted to be an actor. She was
the best tennis player at her school. She was smart,
she had potential. She had difficulties and loss and growing
pains that her mother couldn't handle. But there's no doubt

(01:43:28):
that Dolorus Hayes's life would have been so different if
Humbert Humbert hadn't appeared in it, even he has to
admit it. Quote. Nothing could make my lowly to forget
the foul lust I inflicted upon her unless it can
be proven to me, To me, as I am now today,
with my heart and my beard and my putrefaction, that
in the infinite run, it does not matter a jot

(01:43:51):
that a North American girl child named Dolores Hayes had
been deprived of her childhood by a maniac. Unless this
can be proven, and if it can end, then life
is a joke. I see nothing for the treatment of
my misery unquote. And yes, that is the classic self
pitying Humbert bullshit style, But there is some truth in there.
So yes, Humbert puts a bullet in quilty who gives

(01:44:15):
a ship. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only
decent thing he's done. But it appears that Nabukoff wants
us to believe that he kills Dolores too. As John
Ray tells it, Dolores dies giving birth to a son
in a final strangely gendered punishment, but her childhood was
taken from her by her abuser and by a society
that made her realize from a very young age that

(01:44:37):
telling the truth would only make her life harder. It's
a really cruel fate, and when I still find to
be extremely harsh coming from the pen of a child
sex abuse survivor who lived to write it. Probably the
only thing I like about the Stanley Kubrick adaptation is
that Lolita lives at the end, but that's not how
this story goes. The scene I just described takes place

(01:44:58):
only three years after Dolores escapes Howards Clutches. Three years
she's still a kid and encountered only more abuse and
hardship after escaping him. What really strikes me is, in
spite of the strength she shows here and the life
that she builts for herself against every odd she still
reflectively apologizes to Humbert for quote unquote cheating on him.

(01:45:20):
There's no way that she's gotten the chance that she
deserved to process all the harm that had been inflicted
on her. Here's a kid trying to build a life
away from the abuse that she suffered in order to
raise a kid on her own without anyone that she
trusts with this information. Dolores deserved more because she represents
a lot of people. I've been thinking about my grandmother

(01:45:44):
quite a bit. She was born two years before Dolores.
It was very complicated and and sad. My grandma wasn't
a very nice person to most of us, certainly not
to her daughters or her husband, and I wasn't allowed
to see her or interact with her after I was
five years old. She suffered from mental illness and alcoholism
almost her entire life, but she was never willing to

(01:46:06):
get help for what she was struggling with. A lot
of that I believe had to do with how she
was raised in the forties and fifties and much later.
Admitting that you need help indicated weakness, that something was
wrong with you, that you were lesser. She was too ashamed,
I think, to confront those problems, and in a lot
of ways, it led to her isolating herself from most

(01:46:27):
of the people in her life all the way up
until her death. It hits for me, especially because although
she was never willing to see a mental health professional
in her lifetime, I am pretty nearly certain that I
have the same mental illness she did, and getting help
for it has changed the direction of my life, even
when it fucking sucks. The reason that she's been on

(01:46:49):
my mind is because when I was a teenager, my
grandmother told people that she had been sexually abused as
a child by her brother. I don't remember what the
circumstances were that made her bring it up, but I
do remember that as a kid, it didn't seem like
many people believed her, and I didn't question it. This
would have been the late two thousands, and while she

(01:47:10):
truly had nothing to gain by bringing this up, it's
still generally was not believed. And I think about that
in the context of everything else about her life, and
without excusing the abuse and pain she inflicted on the family.
I can't imagine that kind of pain and to come
forward with something like that in your seventies and still

(01:47:32):
almost no one believes you. This was a woman who
lied to us about a lot of things, but on
this point I see no reason not to believe her,
and many family members have changed their minds over the years.
For the entirety of my grandma's life, there was not
any public encouragement to believe those who had suffered abuse

(01:47:53):
it's so bleak to consider, but experiencing abuse for me
was comparatively easy. At least someone believed me eventually, and
I was living in a time where there were tools
and resources to navigate with. I think that we forget
sometimes seven talking about PTSD, mental health, health, feminism at all.

(01:48:17):
Outside of voting and having a job under dress, There's
not that much going on in these conversations in post
World War two in the US. My grandma came of
age in one of the least empowering times for survivors
of assault or for women in the past century in
the US. And I didn't really know her, but I

(01:48:39):
know enough about the time she came of aging to
know that coming forward for her was really not an option.
And seeing Dolores in this context, I had to go.
They have quite a bit in common. It's I had
to I had to go on a walk. She and
my grandfather were married the same year that Nabokov published

(01:49:01):
Lolita in nine, over fifty years before she ever spoke
about her abuse out loud, and still no one believed her.
I've been thinking about my mom, who was born in
the sixties and only recently started really dealing with events
that happened to her when she was a young adult.
And I'm encouraged by her open mind and forgive herself

(01:49:23):
the shame about things that weren't her fault, starting in
just kind of the past couple of years. And I
can also see how that shame was projected onto me
when I was struggling with abuse. I can see how
I projected my own shame onto others before I was
willing to deal with things. So, no, Dolores Hayes is
not a perfect victim, because no one is. She didn't

(01:49:43):
live to get to tell her own story. The person
who destroyed her life got to do that. As it stands,
she is really one of the only cultural figures that
represents someone navigating child sex abuse. But it's and it's
still her fault to a lot of people. There are
a few things that I feel more sure about after

(01:50:06):
working on this show for the past eight months. First,
that there is a desperate, pressing need to change the
way we talk about child sex abuse as a culture,
and by that, I mean we need to try to
talk about it. If we're at a point where a
cult like Q and On can disenfranchise survivors of child
sex abuse with conspiracy theories. How much clearer could it

(01:50:28):
be that we have not had an honest conversation about
how to prevent it. There is work to be done
in the psychology space, there is work to be done
in the education space, in the parenting space, and as
with many things, having this discussion comes hand in hand
with dismantling the racial, sexual, and gender based prejudices that
come with it. Because the numbers are there, it is

(01:50:50):
a near certainty that if you have not experienced sexual
abuse yourself, you know someone who has. So what good
could it possibly do to not challenge the cult trill
narrative that empowers abusers and reassures non abusers who are
apathetic towards the issue. It helps nobody. It does nothing.
I'm not saying that it's easy, but as Zoe was

(01:51:11):
describing earlier, it's a matter of empowering young people to
recognize abuse of tendencies instead of being encouraged to accept
it and even glorify it. It's a matter of finding
ways for those at risk to abuse before harming someone.
Another thing I've learned is what being labeled as a
lolita does do you. Whether it's done literally as it

(01:51:33):
was done with Sue Lyon, or whether it's done figuratively
to suggest that being a person navigating their own sexuality
while being abused somehow makes it your fault. And I've
learned that telling an honest story about abuse that does
not put an underage actor at risk by showing abuse
explicitly doesn't tend to make money. And I hate how

(01:51:54):
cynical that sounds, but I think a lot of the
reason that media that reaches us does so is because
it's market it's low risk. That's changed to an extent
with the Internet. But I don't think, as much as
we would like to believe, part of why Lolita is
such an effective book, I think is because it's written
by an excellent writer who is a survivor of child

(01:52:14):
sexual abuse, who didn't give a shit if he made
any money off of it. And that last part, unfortunately
is critical by all accounts. On top of hiring male
creators with little to no insight on the subject matter
in adaptation, any insight included in the project at its
beginning was eliminated, and when that old capitalistic logic kicked in,
this happens in every adaptation of Lolita. We're not going

(01:52:37):
to give you money if the protagonist is a bankable
movie star playing an irredeemable child sex abuser. So no,
Dolores Hayes has not gotten a fair shot, and that
makes it a lot easier to continue to use her
image to oppress other survivors. In terms of course, correcting
popular media that blames people for the abuse they experienced,
Dolores is a very logical place to start. A good

(01:53:00):
adaptation of Lolita is not going to change everything. There
is a need for stories about child sex abuse that
centers survivors of all kinds. But I do think that
a thoughtful adaptation of Lolita that prioritizes Delorous Hayes could
give us some amount of closure on how our culture
thinks about this story. And I think that that's absolutely
a worthwhile thing to do. There is a way to

(01:53:22):
make Humbert the despicable person he is through adaptation. He
tells us hundreds of times who he is. There is
a feasible adaptation where he tries to win your favor
and loses. Because the thing that is always true with
Lolita is it matters how it's framed to you. I
would love to live in a media landscape where saying
Lolita is not shorthand for underaged person who deserves and

(01:53:46):
is turned on by being sexually abused, because there shouldn't
be a fucking word for that. It's not a thing,
and that's not who Dolorous Hayes was. I think drawing
attention to this cultural fallacy could make people think differently,
both audiences who have spent decades of their adult life
thinking Lolita was asking for it, and for young audiences

(01:54:06):
being introduced to the story under false pretenses to encourage
them to think of this kind of abuse as normal.
Especially after speaking with Eva, I do think that there
need to be more stories about survivors who are able
to thrive. Lolita is not that story, but I know
that it has a lot of value. Humbered and Nabokov's
immortalizing the image of Lolita killed off the reality of

(01:54:30):
Dolores Hayes, just as she has killed off in the book.
But her story mattered, and no matter what garbage book
cover tells you it's the only convincing love story of
the century, that's not true. Dolores Hayes is in there,
and just as scholars and artists and everyday people who
see themselves in mythic figures have torn through the bullshit

(01:54:50):
that abused characters have been mired in since BC. Dolores
deserves that same chance. She is a uniquely American mythic
figure who speaks to the universal societal plague that is
c S, a child sex abuse that no one wants
to talk about, and when no one talks about it,
nothing changes. And maybe it sounds silly to say justice

(01:55:14):
for Dolores, you know, justice for a person who is fictional,
But it isn't silly, I don't think, because she represents
a lot to a lot of people across many generations.
She means a lot to me. There are entire communities,
hundreds of thousands of people over the past sixty five

(01:55:35):
years who have connected with this character because they saw
her in this text. They saw themselves or their friend,
or their sibling or their parents, and they saw how
the world misinterpreted this character's circumstance. And when they ran
out of things to see about her, they kept looking

(01:55:56):
because Dolores Hayes represents a person who deserved to survive,
and a lot of people see themselves in that. She
deserved more and didn't get it because survivors of abuse
deserve more and rarely get it. Her abuser was taken
at his word because historically that is overwhelmingly the case,

(01:56:17):
and she's killed before she ever gets to find her
peace with it or thrive in spite of it. There
is a poem Buying Nabokov called on Discovering a Butterfly.
It's short and it's beautiful, and it's about a butterfly,
not a thirteen year old survivor. But it just listen.
Here's how it concludes. Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that

(01:56:41):
pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die,
but ape the immortality of this red label on a
little butterfly. Dolores is read. Label has been misread, and
it doesn't need to take a thousand years for us
to try and read it close Are everything you knew

(01:57:02):
about Lolita is wrong? Dolores Hayes is a figure worth
fighting for. So will that ever happen? You tell me?
This was Lolita Podcast. Lolita Podcast is an I Heart
radio production. It was written and hosted by me Jamie Loftus,

(01:57:23):
produced by Sophie Lichterman, Beth Anne Markoliso, Miles Gray, and
Jack O'Brien. It was edited by the amazing Isaac Taylor.
Music was from Zoe Blade, our theme was from Brad Dickert,
and my guest voices this week were Caitlin Toronte and
Robert Evans as Vladimir Nabokov. I want to sincerely thank
everyone that has been with me in the journey of

(01:57:45):
making this show. I want to thank the members and
moderators of our discord who have been so kind and
so open with their experiences and with each other. I
want to think my partner and my very stinky pets.
I don't know how I would have gotten this show
done without them, so thank you for an amazing ride here.

(01:58:05):
I think I'm going to make a podcast about hot
dogs next Bye.

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10: Poems That Take 1000 Years to Die

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