6: Lolita the Cover Girl, Lolita the Pop Star

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. Vladimir Nabokov once said this,
for me, a work of fiction exists only in so
far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call
aesthetic bliss. That is a sense of being somehow somewhere

(00:22):
connected with other states of being where art, curiosity, tenderness, kindness,
ecstasy is the norm. There are not many such books,
and estatic bliss means different things to different people. Let
me tell you a tale of two different yet similar
stories from British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail. The first

(00:46):
is a story about a perfume called oh Lola by
Mark Jacobs. Top notes are raspberry, pear and strawberry. Little
notes are a piony, magnolia and psycholoman. Bass notes are vanilla,
sandalwood and tongue a bean. Their spokesperson was a seventeen
year old Dakota Fanning posing in a sheer white dress
holding a plastic rose near her crotch. Here's how The

(01:08):
Daily Mail described this photo shoot in two thousand ten.
The background is similarly a juvenile. It's monotone pastel pink,
compounding the innocence of the composition. But when a large
bottle of the scent featuring its signature rose top has
been placed provocatively in between the young Starlett's legs, the
teenager clutches it as she tilts back lasciviously and stares

(01:31):
intendedly into the camera. New Yorker Jacobs admits that his
intention wants to betray the young woman. As a reboot
of the tragic character and Vladimir Nabakov's novel Lolita, which
tells the story of a young girl's sexual relationship with
a much older man who becomes her stepfather. Thank you,
Daily Mail, that is certainly one way to describe that book.

(01:54):
Maybe you remember this ad I had a photo for
a minute hanging in my room in high school. Maybe
you don't, but you remember a similar image in advertising
throughout the years. This ad was eventually banned by Britain's
Advertising Standards Authority for sexualizing a child. Then Dakoda Fanning's
younger sister l start in another Lolita themed fragrance commercial

(02:17):
for a French scent called Lolita lamp Pica in at
age fourteen, and again the criticism was Swift. The ad
is a three minute video. The features l Fanning as
a forest nymph who we see in a series of
shots where she's chewing on her thumbnail, looking at the camera,
and then she falls in love with a deer right.

(02:41):
Or maybe you remember an Aldo campaign from the early tenths,
but a pale teenager in heart shaped sunglasses licking a
popsicle in an attempt to sell you shoes. Maybe you're
a little older than I am, and you remember the
famously controversial perfume scent Loves Babysoft from nineteen seventy four,
which ran with images of young white girls clutching teddy

(03:01):
bears wearing pink lipstick with the tagline because innocence is
sexier than you think. If you've never seen those adds before,
it's worth a google. They will ruin your life. Or
maybe you remember the Lolita inspired imagery that's appeared in
advertising or pop music or movies over the last sixty

(03:22):
five plus years. This hyperfeminine, young sexualized image has been
used to move product before Nabukov's novel and certainly after it.
In these contexts, Lolita is completely divorced from a novel
that is narrated by a child sex abuser. Its implications
are too entice to sell, to convince the viewer that

(03:44):
the underage are consenting. And this is the story of
advertising before Lolita was published, and certainly after it was
published in but the misinterpretations surrounding Vladimir Nabukhov's character Dolores
Hayes has ingratiated itself seamlessly into advertising culture, over and
over and over. Let's give the Daily Mail another shot.

(04:07):
Here's a story from trying to educate her. Bradley Cooper
thirty eight reads Lolita to Suki Waterhouse twenty one as
she sprawls across him in Parisian Park. Attached to this
article are a number of paparazzi photos of the actress
and model. Suki Waterhouse are climbing across Bradley Cooper and
reading a copy of Lolita, a book whose front cover

(04:29):
blurb from writer Martin Amis reads comedy, subversive yet divine.
In one shot, he lays in her lap, her hair
is pulled up and she's wearing very youthful overalls, and
he reads to her. And in another he points at
the back cover of the book and talks to her.
Not to be clear, they're both adults at this time,
and their relationship lasts for around two years, ending in

(04:51):
But even the tone of how this article is written
sums up so much of the dissonance that surrounds this
book and its legacy. So I want to to share
some of it here. Lolita was published in nineteen fifty
five by a French pornographic press and deemed so obscene
it was banned in countries including England, South Africa and Argentina.

(05:12):
But despite its scandalous content, today Vladimir nabucovs Lolita is
a fixture of many literature syllabuses, and was dubbed one
of the Time magazines one hundred best twentieth century English
language novels. So perhaps that explains why Bradley Cooper wanted
to share the classic with his much younger girlfriend, Suki Waterhouse.

(05:33):
The thirty eight year old was seen reading from a
well thumbed copy of the book as he reclined in
a Paroisian park. Suki sprawled across him. She listened intently
as he read, although at times looked amused as Bradley
brought certain passages to her attention. After a while the
British born star decided to sit on Bradley's lap and
then between his legs as he continued to read Okay,

(05:56):
We're gonna skip ahead a little bit in the article,
it continues quote. Wanting to capture the romantic moment in France,
the Silver Linings actor took out his mobile phone to
take a quick snap. Lifting up his sunglasses, he smiled
at the camera while Suki put her own sunglasses down
and tied her hair up as she pulled her best
model pose for the picture. Their seventeen year h gap

(06:18):
comes as a surprise after Bratley previously you declared that
he was too old to date his Silver Linings play,
but co star Jennifer Lawrence, who at twenty two was
a year older than Suki. He said earlier this year
regarding Jennifer even didn't happen. By now, it's never gonna happen.
I could literally be her father. Speaking about his love life,

(06:40):
he once said, I look for a girl that is fun,
a free spirit. I'm a romantic yea, so she would
need to put up with a little you know, gogglelled.
I can be soppy. Thank you. Daily Mail Journalism is
alive and well, now, seriously, Cooper said an interviews in
the past, Lolita is one of his favorite books, and

(07:02):
it just makes you ask on what grounds. Some suggested
at the time that Cooper was poking fun at the
media coverage that the age gap in his and water
Houses relationship had produced, but given the seriousness with which
he said an actor almost two years older than Suki
Waterhouse was too young for him, that's kind of a
tough game of forty chess for me to put together.

(07:23):
And yet there are still comments on this Daily Mail
piece that talked down to Suki Waterhouse. One of the
comments at the time reads, quote, it doesn't look right
to me. She looks about thirteen and he can do
better than that. Unquote. So the Lolita aesthetic is everywhere.
I mean, this Bradley Cooper Suki Waterhouse story is from

(07:44):
the past eight years and uses Lolita as this wink
and nod signifier, as if to say, yeah, we know
what this looks like. But what it looks like is
much more aligned with the advertising aesthetic of Lolita than
the events of the actual book. I mean, Nabucco's book
is not a fun read in the park by any stretch.
Of the imagination. I shuddered to think what their takeaway

(08:06):
from the actual book that day in Paris was, What
a sentence. Today we're going to look at a slice
of Dolores Hayes's life and legacy on the cover of
the book, chronicling her abuse in advertising and in popular music.
This is low lead to podcast. Welcome back everyone. This

(08:51):
is a little lead up podcast. I'm your host, Jamie
waft Us, and today we're going to be looking at
some of the aesthetics of how Dolores has been presented
to us outside of direct adaptations. There's a ton of
conflicting terms to describe the aesthetic and touching on here,
so I'm going to use the nymphete aesthetic or nymphet
culture to make things consistent. These terms are taken from

(09:13):
online communities revolving around Dolores Hayes themselves and are defined
as such by the Aesthetics Wiki Quote. Nymphete is an
aesthetic based on a novel written by Vladimir Nabokov Lolita,
published in nineteen fifty five, and it's movie adaptations from
nineteen sixty two and nineteen ninety seven. Nymphete is a

(09:33):
young girl who is attractive and sexually mature, but still
has childlike behavior and innocence unquote. Now, there's a lot
to unpack in that definition alone, and we will do
so in this episode. So, like everything with Lolita, there
is a wide range of things at play here. You're
going to be hearing about some of the most egregious
and harmful over sexualizations of Dolores Hayes of old time.

(09:57):
But at the top of this episode, I wanted to
make a quick note I unfortunately do not have the
capacity to address every single visual influence that Lolita by
Nabokov has had. I know, in particular, there is a
fairly large discussion about how Lolita has influenced a lot
of popular anime and manga, but it quickly became a
topic that was too large for me to possibly cover.

(10:19):
So I'm going to link to some resources I used
below if that's the history you're interested in exploring. I
want to untangle a couple of commonly conflated terms when
it comes to the Lolita aesthetic culture, because it does
get pretty confusing. So the three terms I want to
untangle here are Lolita fashion, wally con, and the Lolita

(10:42):
or nym fete aesthetic. Okay, we're getting in the weeds here. First,
there is Lolita fashion. This is a Japanese fashion movement
that began in the late seventies that has nothing to
do with the Nabakoff book. Although it is honestly really
hard to figure out why it's called Lolita fashion, could
not find a straight answer on that, but the community
in Lolita fashion pretty unanimously agrees that it is a

(11:06):
fashion movement unto itself, so it's confusing. But Lolita fashion,
which consists of wide skirted dresses with lace and bows,
are not related to Lolita buying a buck off, so
we're not going to be discussing it in the episode. Second,
there is the term lolly con, a term that pops
up very often around anime and manga. This does have

(11:27):
to deal with Lolita buying a buck off and borrows
Dolores Hayes's nickname from Humbert to describe the following phenomenon.
According to the paper lolly Con and its Effects on
Japanese Society, written by Jamie Rpan, Natalie Padilla, and Elizabeth Chandler,
Lolllykon is quote a Japanese portmanteau of the phrase lolita complex.

(11:49):
In Japan, the term describes an attraction to underage girls
or an individual with such an attraction unquote, and a
history of lolllycon could be an episode all its own,
but all let to say the term is connected to
the bulk of Lolita. Finally, the concern of this episode
is the Lolita aesthetic. And when I say that, I

(12:09):
mean the visual culture surrounding Lolita that is primarily pulled
from the movie adaptations by Stanley Kubrick in Adrian Line,
as well as a lot of nineties pop culture. I know,
pulling apart these three terms is kind of in the weeds.
I'll let TikTok user Nerdy Mixed Pan break this down
for you. People were confused by what I meant when

(12:30):
I said lolly in my last videos. Let me explain.
There are three different things that can be associated with
the shortened version lolly. There is Lolita fashion, which has
nothing to do with anything I was discussing. There's Lolli Khan,
which is what I was discussing. Then there is Lolita
the book, which is about a pedophile sexually assaulting a
twelve year old and kidnapping her, which the term Lolly

(12:50):
Khan came from. So that should tell you what Lolly
Cohn is. So hopefully that cleared up any confusion. Lolita
fashion has nothing to do with the Lolita book nor Lollycon,
although people try to synonymize all three, but that's incorrect.
Lolita Fashion, Lolly Con, Lolita aesthetics all different things. The

(13:13):
way I'm using the word aesthetic here is as defined
by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which says aesthetic is
to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a
kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience,
and a kind of value. Or, as concisely summarized by
American philosopher Ariana Grande, it's a mood, it's a vibe,

(13:35):
it's a look, it's a match. So let's start at
the beginning of Lolita marketing, the cover of the book itself. Now,
if you have ever owned a popular printing of Lolita,
you can probably guess what the most obvious problem is here.
It's far more likely that you will find a young
adult woman licking a lollipop on the cover than an

(13:56):
attempt to depict Nabokov's abused protagonist. There's disembodied legs, lingerie
and actual child pornography. Sometimes there's illustrations of Dolores and
Humbert that make them not just seem consenting, but that
Dolores is much older than the twelve year old in
the book. But the problem is going even deeper than
inaccurate representation on the cover, and it goes all the

(14:18):
way back to Nabokov's wishes back when the book was
first published, back when he was negotiating his American cover
for Lolita in Night. Here's what he suggested for a cover.
I have just received the five designs, and I quite
agree with you that none of them is satisfactory. I
want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst

(14:39):
above a receding road with a light reflected in furrows
and ruts after rain, and no girls. If we cannot
find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us
settle for an immaculate white jacket with Lolita in bold
black lettering. So this was written to his publisher Walter Minton,
and Minton would risk BacT this. The book would eventually

(15:01):
be published with just black text on a white book.
Nabokov was notorious for giving his unfiltered opinion on covers
and being very precise in his demands. He even ended
up letting his son Dmitri illustrate a few just to
avoid the assumptions and misfires of other illustrators of the day. Ever,
a judgey author king he eviscerated attempts that seemed to

(15:26):
age Dolores Hayes up and used some questionable language to
say so. He refers to a nineteen fifty nine Swedish
cover of Lolita as a horrible young whore. Yikes. And
here's what Nabokov had to say about a Turkish edition
of Lolita that depicted a very aged up girl embracing
Humbert Humbert also in ninety nine, I am not sure

(15:50):
who is older. As Lolita became more and more popular,
it became impossible for the author to oversee every cover,
and he eventually became a little resigned to the fact
that publishers are always, always, always going to push to
have a girl or woman on the cover, regardless of
whether it has anything to do with Dolores Hayes. In

(16:11):
the nine documentary The book of pulls a copy of
Lolita off the shelf from his personal library with a
girl on the cover, and he says this, this is
beautiful as a Dutch edition, isn't it nice? Beautifully done
on the point of view of an artistic version, I

(16:33):
think it's absolutely shouting Dutch. That's his real voice. Oh
my God. And by the end of the book of
his life he had no choice but to be resigned
to the injustice that culture had done to Dolores Hayes.
But he was salty about it until the very end,
saying this in a letter to a colleague the year
before his death. The pictures by Ovenden of that young

(16:55):
sea cow posing as my Lolita are of course preposterous,
yet was nothing much I can do about it. Recently
I was shown an advert in an American rag offering
a life sized Lolita doll with French and Greek apertures.
Salty indeed, so back when he was doing the first
American edition in Bok's wish for text in lieu of

(17:17):
a girl was done by Minton out of respect for
the Bokov's wishes, But as editions continued throughout the remainder
of Nabokov's life, and after his death in nineteen seventy seven,
the concern became more, well, how are we going to
sell this book. I've owned a few of these editions
over the years, and none of them would have passed

(17:37):
the Nabokov snuff test. My first copy was the fiftieth
anniversary edition, which came out in two thousand five. It
was designed by the renowned book cover artist John Gall,
who teaches book design and colleges and said he would
never assign Lolita to his graphic design students. You might
have seen it before. It consists of a tight shot

(17:58):
of a young white woman's bisy acted pink lips, the
text Lolita in cursive, and the name of the author.
This is the one I had taken from me by
a gym teacher in seventh grade, and as critic Ellen Pifer,
author of Nabokov in the novel, put in an essay,
it looks kind of like this, the close up of
a woman's enticing mouth, her full lips hinting at another

(18:19):
nether set of labia. Okay, So, John Gall is definitely
breaking Nabokov's rules. Here there is a girl on the cover.
It suggests eroticism. It's softly lit, certainly more of a
reflection of Lolita than Dolores, though not the worst offender
by a long shot. This cover definitely frames Dolores as

(18:43):
a willing participant, but gall defended his choices in two
thousand thirteen. I completely agree with Nabokov on what I
think is his main point no little Girls. On the
other hand, his description of what he would like reads
beautifully but would be a complete yawner of a cover.
It is so non specific that it could be the
cover of almost any novel ever written. To this day,

(19:05):
people remain pretty split on this cover, and honestly, from
the vantage point when this episode being released, I don't
think it really holds up very well, and I've seen
a number of people in the Lolita podcast discord lamenting
the lack of covers that are widely available for not
looking so Vassiline lens romantic cover that isn't so romantic,

(19:27):
It's just kind of ugly. Is the second copy of Lolita.
I ever owned, this one from when I was in college.
It's the annotated Lolita with annotations from Nabukov's former student
Alfred A. Powell. Published in It has a very nineties
triangle pattern with some text, not the sunsets that in
a Bulkhov describes, but Goal says that these designs don't

(19:50):
endure for a reason. He says this, there are two
directions for this cover. Either you take the title head
on and go with some representation of Lolita, or don't,
but be careful. The land of metaphor is filled with
furrows and ruts and roads going off in the distance. Okay,
I still think we can do better than adult lips

(20:10):
on the cover, but I will grant him that last part.
There's a lot of very specific ways to get a
cover of Lolita wrong. This may come as a surprise,
but the covers of Lolita have been much discussed over
the years. In fact, they were the subject of an
entire book, which, by the way, has a green cover
and the text of the no girls in a book

(20:30):
of quote in the background. This book is called Lolita
the Story of a Cover Girl, and it was published
in two thousand thirteen, edited by John Bertram and Urie Loving.
It contains a lot of really fascinating insight, not just
into book design, but around what consumers expect in a
cover of Lolita, and like most media inspired by in
a book of book, tend to be reflective of the

(20:51):
time and place that they're released into, and this extends
beyond the influence of the movie adaptations, although boy were
those influential. Even Aaron A. Bulk Off was photographed in
heart shaped sunglasses at one point. The attempts at the
perfect cover tend to fall into a few distinct categories.
According to a study of past covers of Lolita done

(21:11):
in by diater E. Zimmer, here's the breakdown of what
appears on two hundred and ten covers of Lolita, ranging
from forty countries from ninety five to one hundred Sixteen
of them have some kind of depiction of the character Lolita,
and maybe arguably in a few cases, Dolores sixty nine

(21:34):
are described as anatomic yes sixty nine, Please don't tweet
at me for a week about this. I fucking no
sixty nine. The word anatomic is used by Zimmer to
mean cropped images of bodies instead of full figures, and
coming in last place is simple text representations of the
title Lolita, with only forty nine covers, My most recent

(21:57):
copy of Lolita was passed along to me by my
friend and Alex, who I think picked it up at
a yard sale while I was working on these series.
It was published in nineteen seventy three in London, it appears,
and it features a blonde model in her twenties I'm guessing,
wearing a white page boy hat, licking an orange popsicle seductively.

(22:19):
And I guess this would fall into the Lolita imagery
category of this study, one of those hundred sixteen, and
I regret to report, while a terrible cover, it's not
even one of the worst. I just noticed there's an
inscription in this um on the front. Okay, so Alex
paid five dollars for this, and it says this this
book is the property of Oh, this is boring. This

(22:41):
book is the property of Lewis h Well not anymore.
Let's move on. So okay, one hundred and sixteen out
of two hundred ten Lolita covers feature a loan image
of Lolita. Twenty two of them feature Lolita and Humbert.
Out of these are movie times from the movie starring Jaring,

(23:03):
the Irons and Dominique Swain, and only nine feature Humbert
Humbert alone. And in case you were assuming the worst. Yes,
eight of these depict Lolita wearing underwear and seventeen depict
her as nude. So the book of was a right
to be defensive and piste off about this, But there's
more to it than cover designers with creepy ideas. These

(23:26):
designers were often very limited by what the marketing department wanted,
often oversimplification or over sexualization to reach the widest audience possible,
not to mention that the book designing gig doesn't always
pay well enough to give time for designers to read
the entire book that they're illustrating. The cover of. We
can make the off hand assumption that John Gall personally

(23:48):
thought that the bisected lips cover was the best possible
representation of a Lolita book cover in two thousand five,
but think again. Here's what he says, from my very
first attempt at designing a cover for Lolita, I attempted
a typographic solution. After this was shot down, I made
the decision to see if there was a way to
reinterpret the typography. So John Gall did try to do

(24:10):
closer to what Nabokov wanted, but wasn't allowed to buy
the publisher. Gal mentions that no matter what's on the cover.
Lolita will reliably sell about fifty thou copies a year,
and that seems to be true. And if that figure
is so relatively steady, why aren't publishers comfortable with letting
cover artists go their own way. Another element that modern

(24:30):
readers and Jamie's get frustrated with as much as or
more often than the actual pictorial depictions of Lolita are
the press quotes chosen for the covers of the book,
which is even further out of the control of a
cover's illustrator. Consider the quote we see most often on
the cover of Lolita from a Vanity Fair writer called

(24:52):
Gregor von Rossouri, who declares Lolita quote the only convincing
love story of the century. On quote. Of all the
many deeply offensive cover interpretations over the years, the inclusion
of this quote, I think does the greatest demonstrable harm
in sending out all the wrong information about what the

(25:13):
book is actually about. And maybe it sounds weird to
get into the weeds on the cover of a book,
but people famously judge books by them. Covers our art
in many cases, but their primary function is marketing, communicating
what the publisher feels is going to make someone by
Lolita over some YouTuber's poetry book. They communicate era and

(25:34):
values in much the same way that movie and musical
adaptations of Lolita, however terrible, communicate the time and place
they're being released in. Dieter Zimmer writes an essay in
Lolita The Story of a Cover Girl about the history
of Lolita covers in Russia and what they say about
Russian culture or culture in the USS are depending on

(25:54):
what you're you're talking about, and analyzes what they said
about where public opinion was in the Russia the eighties
and nineties. Unlike in the US, the Jeremy Irons starring
Adrian Line movie adaptation was a huge hit there, and
there's a ton of romantically illustrated tie in additions to
the movie. In Russia, there's also a lot of use

(26:16):
of classic erotic paintings, mostly unrelated to the text of Lolita,
and there is one horrific cover with child pornography on
the back cover from when Moscow was experiencing an influx
of child sex trafficking. Cover design may seem benign, but
it does tell us something about where and when it's
being released into I personally prefer typographical covers because with

(26:42):
material this sensitive, in my mind, it's just too easy
to get it wrong. More often than not, these covers
are sexualizing the victim of child sex abuse. But there's
examples that miss the point that also skew pretty silly.
There's one of like the Venus Demilo for some reason.
There's a cover that's a bad photoshop of Tobakov reading

(27:04):
a butterfly like it's a book. But there is one
cover that is mentioned a lot as a favorite by
other book cover artists throughout Lolita, the story of a
cover girl that includes a representation of Lolita, or as
they describe it, Dolores. This cover is by designer Megan Wilson,
who is an icon in the book designer community as

(27:25):
one of the most prolific women in the profession, and
she's actually also done other Novakov book designs. Her Lolita
cover came out in from Vintage International and is a
black and white photograph of a young girl's legs, not
an adults. The girl is wearing late nineteen forties schoolgirls
shoes with her knees crossed. I will let Lolita a

(27:46):
story of a cover girl. Essayist Peter Mendelssohn describe his
experience looking at this cover for the first time. When
I first encountered this edition, I assumed are supposed Lolita's
pose was flirtatious. She seems locked in some sort of
stylized sexual demurle. However, as time passed and my reading
of the text evolved, I began to factor in the dark,

(28:08):
ominous lighting, and the gaze of the photographer became threatening.
The pose of the subject one of discomfiture. The knee
crosses protectively. What seemed to me at first has come
hither has evolved into please don't so far for many
prominent cover designers. Megan Wilson's work successfully communicates the nauseating

(28:29):
feeling of reading the book itself, but like Mendelssohn mentioned,
it's pretty open to interpretation, and taking in the image
of a young girl's crossed legs at face value can
lead to harm and misinterpretation. There's a number of international
editions that came out after Megan Wilson cover that are
clearly playing copycat like hers. They're all black and white

(28:52):
photos of a young girl's cross legs wearing Mary Jane's
but these rip off covers from Croatia, Taiwan, Oland, and
Paris pose the young girl in a way that is
very frankly sexual and inviting, not anxious, and somewhat ambiguous
like Wilson's. That is to say, these other cover artists

(29:12):
or other marketing departments saw a pair of legs on
Wilson's cover and assumed that they were there to entice
the reader. I will link these images in the description.
The whole thing looks like a very depressing game of
telephone and the book of frequently admitted that he was
a creature of aesthetics. He was a synesthesiac, or a
person who associated numbers and sounds with colors, who believed

(29:36):
that reading a book should feel like witnessing a painting
by the third or fourth time you read it. He
could write in three languages, but said he quote thinks
in images. Most tellingly, he says this, we think in images,
not in words. And then in the last interview he
ever gave images are mute. Yet presently the silent cinema

(30:00):
to talk, and I recognize its language, the language of images.
So what I'm saying is I would give up my
life savings to know what Nabokov thought of Lana del Rey. Yeah,

(30:26):
book covers have been over the years one of the
most powerful communicators of public misinterpretations of Dolores Hayes. In many,
she is sexualized, she looks older, she is inviting the
reader to look at her. These images spoke louder than
the text itself for many, and trickled into popular music
and onto the Internet, particularly one artist who exists where

(30:50):
these points meet. In two thousand and twelve, Lolita culture
began to migrate to a visually driven, almost entirely pictorial
microbe bogging site. Oh my god, I haven't said the
word micro blogging out loud in at least eight years.
A micro blogging site called tumbler in the early two
thousand in tents now in the book of As He

(31:12):
Just Told You is the aesthetics guy, so I think
that this would have honestly been his platform over good Reads.
Lolita themed tumblers exploded, and then a musician named Lana
del Rey comes on the scene, and this escalates nymphet
culture online in a completely unprecedented way. Fun little look

(31:36):
at the production of this show. I cannot use any
copyrighted music here, so I had a bunch of my
friends read pop lyrics like their verse poetry. Oh elegant solution,
Thank you so much. I don't think it's an overstatement
to say that Lana del Rey at present is the
pop cultural gatekeeper of Lolita musical imagery. But that's not
to say that Lolita and the Bulk of weren't commonly

(31:59):
referred to in mu before Lana got big. Lolita has
been referenced in countless songs over the years, and many
artists seem to get the point of the book, while
many absolutely do not. There's this song called Lolita from
pop duo The Veronicas from So Illegal. No evil is

(32:19):
seen with these eyes. I won't tell if you won't,
and I will if you want. Nothing is sacred, don't
care if it's wrong, Very forbid and lovey. It's a
no for me. This song was written by the two
members of the band, who are twins, as well as
two other songwriters. One of The Veronica's, Jessica Oregli, also

(32:39):
said the following about the Nabokov inspired song. Quote to us,
Lolita is about power play. It's the power play between
genders and age groups, as well as people's perception of
taboo boundaries, what is acceptable and what a Lolita is.
She's a badass and she's on a mission. She wants
to destroy something, either her own option of what's right

(33:00):
and wrong or everyone else's. She wants to prove something
to herself unquote okay then. French singer Elise has a
song called Wa Lolita that came out into thousand when
she was only sixteen after she appeared on a TV
talent show. The lyrics are written by French musician my
Lean Farmer, and these lyrics are translated on Google. My

(33:24):
name is Lolita low or Lola more of the same.
My name is Lolita. When I dream of wolves is Lola?
Who bleeds? When fork my tongue, I have there a
giggle as crazy as a phenomenon. This song is accompanied
by a baffling music video, especially if you don't speak French.
Miley Cyrus references Lolita in her Can't Be Teamed album,

(33:47):
which was released when she was seventeen and first breaking
out of that squeaky clean Disney image. In the song
Permanent December, she sings, I met a boy in every city,
no one kept me amused, but don't call me a
Lolita because I don't let them through, because I'm saving
all my loving for someone, and it's you. This song
was written in collaboration with Cyrus and two male producers.

(34:12):
There is the nineteen eighties seven Celine Dion song called
Lolita parentheses too Young to Love, which is written by
two guys in their forties. Celine Dion is nineteen when
the song comes out, but Selene loved this song and
said she sang it to her manager and future husband,
Renee Angeliu, saying this at the time quote the first

(34:35):
time I sang the words to Lolita, I was in
front of Renee, and I sang it to arouse him. Unquote.
Selena Renee would eventually be married for over twenty years,
all the way up until his death. But they met
when she was twelve years old and he was thirty eight.
Here are some of the lyrics she's talking about. You
say I'm too young to live with a man. I

(34:56):
tell you I don't care. I don't care, and then
the chorus Lolita is not too young to love, is
not too young to give when desire devoured her body
down to her finger tips. Never too young to love,
Never too young to give. American Electronica singer songwriter Emily
Autumn sings about Lolita back in OH six in a

(35:18):
way that I found to be completely unique and haunting.
She sings from Dolores's perspective, saying this, I don't mind
telling you my life was ended by your hand, the
kind of murder where nobody dies. But I don't suppose
you'd understand. If I am Lolita, then you are a
criminal and you should be killed by an army of

(35:40):
little girls. The law won't arrest you, the world won't
detest you. You never did anything any man wouldn't do.
This song is pretty bad as then there's a lot
of early Fiona Apple, who was a music industry darling
from her debut and was also constantly compared to Lolita
in her early career while she was still a teenager,

(36:02):
and to be clear, not do Laura's Hayes. Kristin Iverson,
a writer at Nylon, summed up this era of Fiona
Apple music and her piece men explain Fiona Apple to me,
speaking particularly about when an eighteen year old Fiona sang
songs about love and pain she wrote when she was
even younger, most famously in the song Criminal. Iverson says this,

(36:25):
quote criminal went viral before that term meant anything, and
it's blatantly seductive. Imagery of a hyper attentuated Apple lolling
around a rec room with an anonymous group of men
and women guaranteed that it would be a focal point
for the kind of critics who love to apply the
name Lolita to any young woman whose sexuality threatens them
more than that, though, employing the Lolita trope a very

(36:49):
different thing than understanding what Lolita is actually about is
an easy way of dismissing a woman, calling her out
for being not just childish, but a child Because to
be a Lolita is to be a schoolgirl, a cipher,
an object whose value is in its pliancy, And when
a Lolida becomes inconvenient, well, then the narrative arc of

(37:10):
a Lolita is clear. She dies unquote. Irison goes on
to say in this same piece quote it is wrong
to compare Apple to Lolita. But still, the insults leveled
at Apple for her honesty about celebrity culture sound like
those that would have been thrown at Dolores Hayes if
she'd complained about being kidnapped and raped. How insufferable could

(37:31):
one girl be? Didn't she know how lucky she was
to get to travel around the country. Unquote even more complicated,
Apple was constantly compared to Lolita, the image to imply
a sexual knowingness and seduction, all while having a very
tragic critical commonality with Dolores Hayes. Funa. Apple was raped

(37:53):
when she was twelve years old near her parents apartment
building in New York, an event that understandably traumatized her
for long long after, and images and ideas of which
came up in her early work and still in her
most recent album. Fiona was not shy about talking about
this event while she was a teen performer, and still
the Lolita comparisons were pushed upon her at the exact

(38:16):
same moment in her career. It's no wonder she had
such disdain for the commercial culture she was made to
operate inside of in those early years. Unlike Dolores, Fiona
was able to state what happened to her over and
over and over, and while it resonated with a lot
of listeners, particularly survivors of sexual trauma and teen girls,

(38:37):
the culture at large in the commercial creeps making money
off of her image just viewed this as a selling point.
Fiona Apple is a fascinating case study of connecting to
Dolores Hayes while being presented to us as Lolita. And
as we've discussed in past episodes, every boomer band on
the face of the planet that my uncle's listened to

(38:59):
have some weird ode to having sex with an underage
or barely legal girl. It's just it's all of them.
Here's a short list. The Beatles with the song I
Saw Her Standing There, the Rolling Stones with stray Cat blues,
the Police don't stand so close to Me kiss in
the song Christine sixteen, Wonder what That's about, the song

(39:21):
My Sharona. The list goes on. We don't have time.
So Lolita references are not new to music, but both
aesthetically and in the sheer volume of lyrical references. Lana
del Rey is the Queen. Laana del Rey is the
stage name for a singer songwriter Lizzy Grant, who became
famous in her mid twenties and references Lolita explicitly and

(39:45):
heavily in her breakout album Born to Die. She uses
references to the book and to classic Americana imagery from
the nineteen forties and fifties. Think Them fatale imagery, popsicle stands, beaches,
American flags posed dramatically behind lyrics about pain. I mean
to be honest, I was pretty into it when it

(40:06):
first came out. And in these images and lyrics, Lana
sort of casts herself as Lalita in spite of being
well into her twenties. It's a deliberate artistic choice that
she's making. But not all female pop stars are lucky
enough to say that the lolitification of their image was
quite as voluntary. On the other end of Lana, there's

(40:26):
young artists in the music industry were asked to grow
up way too quickly in order to move product. I'm
talking about the Disney and Nickelodeon pipeline that yielded stars
like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera starting as kids on
The Mickey Mouse Club into increasingly sexualized commercial pop stars
when they became teenagers. The same pipeline that took Miley

(40:47):
Cyrus from Hannah Montana to straddling a wrecking ball. You
know what I'm talking about, And this doesn't make the
work of these artists less valuable. I'm mentioning it to
reinforce that we're not out of the woods and taking
child stars of any gender in monetizing and exploiting their
coming of age. I'm going to give three examples of
pop stars that sort of lead up to Laana del

(41:09):
Rey here. They're all very different and complicated and warrant
longer discussion, but just to contextualize the loliticization effect that
the music industry and the entertainment industry tends to have
specifically on young girls. Put a pen in Laana, she
will be back soon. One of the most iconic images
that is invoked when talking about how lolita culture has

(41:32):
cropped up in mainstream media is a photo of Britney
Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone in at age seventeen.
You have probably seen this photo before. She has posed
in a bra and panties and she's talking on the
phone while holding a Teletubby's doll. It's po for all
my Teletubbies heads out there. The intent is very clearly

(41:54):
to juxtapose the fact that Britney Spears is still a
child with the fact that she is coming of age sexually.
The cover says Brittney Spears inside the heart, Mind and
Bedroom of a teen dream. Inside this issue were pictures
of seventeen year old Brittany in lingerie in a bedroom

(42:14):
full of porcelain dolls. A photo of Brittany wearing skimpy
shorts with the word baby in rhinestones while holding a
pink bike that seems to be for someone much younger
than seventeen. There's another photo of Brittany in a tube top,
jumping around in a room full of childhood participation trophies,
along with a girl who appears to be maybe ten
years old. These photos, interestingly enough, are no longer included

(42:37):
in the archived version of this article on Rolling Stones's website.
When you go back to look at this interview now,
all the Rolling Stone website shows you is a very
wholesome headshot of a seventeen year old Brittany nice Try.
Rolling Stone reflected on this iconic cover and attempted to
explain the photo shoots theme with photographer Dave la Chapelle.

(43:00):
Rolling Stone writes this, Spears and La Chapelle both said
they knew the photo would cause a bit of commotion,
but they figured it was worth it. I said to her,
you don't want to be buttoned up like Debbie Gibson.
La Chapelle recalls, I said, let's push it further and
do this whole little Leita thing. She got it. She
knew it would get people talking and excited. Spears proved

(43:23):
even then that she was going to take charge of
crafting her own image. One night, while they were shooting
La Chapelle, says, Spears manager Larry Rudolph walked in at
two am to find her posing in her bra and panties.
Rudolph demanded to know what was going on. Brittney said, yeah,
I don't feel comfortable, says the photographer. At first I

(43:43):
felt betrayed, but as soon as Larry walked out, Brittany said,
locked the door and unbuttoned her shirt wide open. Now
I can't say for sure how Britney Spears felt about
this at the time or now, and I would never
want to assume. However, this quote from Dave la Chapelle
hits me as a bit of a deflection. In nine,
La Chapelle was a twenty five year old fashioned photographer

(44:06):
most famous for shooting adult female celebrities in the nude.
A year after this photo, La Chapelle would take the
iconic photo of a nineteen year old Paris Hilton, wearing
nothing but a mesh top, flipping the camera off in
the middle of her grandmother's ornate living room. Also referenced
in this quote is Larry Rudolph Spears, as longtime manager
who has been with her since childhood. They're just not

(44:28):
two people whose opinions on how amenable a seventeen year
old girl was to a very exploitative photo shoot that
I trust pretty Spears says this later in her career
to in Style in two thousand thirteen, In this business,
you make a deal with the devil. Another pop star
I feel very strongly about, whose initial marketing and tragic

(44:51):
details of her too short life reflect lowly to aesthetics
and patterns is Oh Yeah, the nineties R and B
pop singer whose career toge story intersects directly with sexual
abuse as a child. From the very beginning of her career,
Aliyah was discovered by former musician R Kelly, who, as
of this recording, has been convicted of eighteen counts of kidnapping,

(45:13):
force labor, child sexual exploitation, child pornography, production, and obstruction
of justice. These abuses were the subject of a docuseries
called Surviving R Kelly which I would recommend if you're
seeking out the full horrifying context of what I'm talking
about here. Aliyah tragically died in a plane crash at
only twenty two years old back in two thousand and one,

(45:35):
but she was first introduced to R. Kelly around the
age of twelve by her uncle, who at that time
was Kelly's manager. Kelly became Aliah's mentor and wrote all
the songs for and produced her first record, which was
released when she was fourteen years old. The album was
called Age Ain't Nothing but a Number, and it was
a huge hit, going platinum twice. The title track was

(45:57):
written by R. Kelly and produced by R. Kelly and
is about an underage girl who wants to date an
older man. You may have heard it before, but here
are some lyrics. Take my hand and come with me.
Let me show you to ecstasy. Boy, be brave, don't
be afraid, because tonight we're going to go all the way.
Don't need to be bold. Got to let you know

(46:18):
I got a thing for you and I can't let
go my age Ain't nothing but a number Robert Kelly's
words sung out of Aliyah's mouth around the time of
this song's release, there were rumors that Kelly and Aliyah
had secretly married when she was just fifteen and he
was seven. It was later revealed that Kelly had illegally
married her in August when she was fifteen, something that

(46:42):
required false documents about her age to accomplish this, as
she was not old enough to legally marry without her
parents consent. Demetrius Smith, R Kelly's former tour manager, admitted
in on Surviving R. Kelly that he helped falsify these
documents and that Aliyah looked quote worried and scared unquote
during the Shotgun wedding, all while being marketed as the

(47:04):
young girl enticing older men. Aaliyah was encouraged to downplay
her relationship with Kelly, even after they've been illegally married.
In Vibe magazine in nineteen ninety four, Aliah says she
and Kelly would quote go watch a movie unquote, and
go eat and then quote come back and work unquote,
and that their relationship was rather close. These rumors that

(47:27):
dogged this incredibly talented fifteen year old artist affected her
professionally at the time, especially after Vibe confirmed that the
wedding had happened in January Aaliyah reportedly filed to have
this marriage and knowlled in late nine when she was sixteen,
and cut off all relations with Kelly and refused to
discuss the rumors publicly all the way up until her death.

(47:50):
Her partner at the time of her death, Damon Dash,
told the magazine Hip Hop Motivation in twenty nineteen that
Elijah rarely spoke of R. Kelly in her private life,
only referring to him as a quote bad man unquote.
Aliah went on to make two other albums, One in
a Million and Aliyah before her death, and they're so
good and her place in music history is deservedly secured

(48:12):
in spite of how soon we lost her back in
August two one. And this is of course a much
more complicated topic and story that I'm going to be
linking resources to in the description, as Kelly's abuse of girls,
specifically black girls, ranges far beyond Aliyah. This also connects
to the fact that we as a culture do not
prioritize protecting black and brown girls as we need to.

(48:36):
As we've discussed on the show before, Black, brown and
Indigenous girls and women are far more likely to be
sexually assaulted than white girls and women, far less likely
to be covered in the media and more likely to
be over sexualized in popular media. The point I want
to make here is that Aliyah's treatment by r Kelly
was happening more or less in public. Everyone knew that

(48:58):
age ain't nothing but a number. Weren't Aliah's words, they
were Robert Kelly's and so many knowing adults around her.
I did nothing to stop it, and in the nineties
this was not disqualifying from getting you onto the music charts,
and in fact, this was used as a marketing point
to initially launch Aliah's career. There are accounts called Aliyah
dot Lolita two thousand one. To this day, Dolores always

(49:21):
comes into the conversation when it comes to romanticizing the
relationship between an underage girl and an adult man. What's
deeply tragic on top of everything is that Aliyah isn't
here to tell us what she feels now. She never
got that chance, and resources are included to learn more
about other survivors of Kelly and how to support them.

(49:42):
In the description of this episode, the third pop star
I want to talk about that gets us even closer
timeline wise to where Lana del Ray comes into prominence.
Is Katie Perry, another contemporary pop star who has referenced
Nabokov's work explicitly, starting very early in her career. Yeah.

(50:14):
Katy Perry born Katherine Hudson was born into a family
of Pentecostal pastors and began her career in gospel music
as a teenager. She released her first gospel album at sixteen,
then changed her name when signing with Deaf Jam Records
in two thousand four. This pivoted her from gospel to
pop music hard. By two thousand seven, she was producing

(50:35):
hits like I Kissed a Girl and Hot and Cold
for her two thousand and eight record called One of
the Boys. On the cover of this album, Katy Perry
is laying in a suburban backyard garden and a crop
top in shorts, biting on a pair of wait for it,
dark glasses. The cover of this album is an explicit
reference to Lolita, And if that's not enough of a

(50:57):
reference for you, there's a line from the title track
of One of the Boys that goes like this, So
over the summer something changed. I started reading seventeen and
shading my legs, and I studied Lolita religiously, and I
walked right into school and caught you staring at me.
So you know, in context, I don't really understand these lyrics.

(51:18):
Katy Perry was twenty four when this album was released,
but the song One of the Boys is written about
the time when she was a teenager and very likely
did not have a nuanced understanding of Lolita buying a
book off. But then on the press tour for this album,
she says this about her history with Lolita, and for
some reason, I have this obsession with Lolita, and I

(51:39):
think it's because she's both innocent and knows she's a
little bit of a sex kitten as well. And she
walks that line, um, and uh, you know, I think
it's boring if you're too goody two shoes and you
come out looking like a sleep here, if you're a
packer all the time, so you gotta walk that line.

(52:00):
Who I genuinely don't want to pass too much judgment
on this. We're all growing, I hope, And this was
two thousand and eight, but yeah, this perspective was certainly
reflected in a way that Perry perpetuated the Lolita aesthetic.
In this case, I mean an adult woman presenting as
a consenting, inviting underage girl. In the case of Britney

(52:20):
Spears and Aaliyah, the Lolita aesthetic means an underage girl
styled to look like a consenting adult. It's complicated, but
the aesthetic looks very similar. We see themes of this
also in Perry's album Teenage Dream, released when she was
twenty five. So here we are back at Lana del Rey,
and it would take years and years to give you

(52:41):
the full context on what gets us to her work,
but I hope that three examples I've chosen have helped
Katy Perry and Lana del Rey make very different sounding music.
But unlike Britney Spears and Aaliyah, they are intentionally referencing
Lolita and their work in music they themselves are writing.
Britney Spears co writes some of her leader work, but
all of her early heads are written by adult men,

(53:03):
and as we know, are Kelly wrote Eliyah's entire first album.
Katy Perry and Laana del Rey have the benefit of
adulthood and more active collaboration in their work, and especially
now that I've been knee deep in Tumbler for several
weeks and feel like I have a pretty clear idea
that her work in romanticizing Lolita is still to this

(53:25):
day very impactful, and she's never really addressed it. Look,
I don't even think this is like a hot take.
I think that in these online communities especially, Lana has
done net harm with her messaging. Lana del Rey released
this music when she was my age, when she was
like in her late twenties, so it's inconceivable to me,
even with the additional pressures of the music industry, that

(53:48):
she was not aware what she was doing or who
her audience was. And Lana del Rey references Lovelita explicitly,
both visually and in lyrics very frequently. When discussing Born
to Die, she referred to her music as quote, Lolita
lost in the hood unquote, And to complicate things further,
she's been pretty historically resistant to identifying as a feminist

(54:10):
in the traditional sense, saying that her quote idea of
a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough
to do whatever she wants unquote. As recently as the
past year, she's been publicly frustrated at the suggestion that
her lyrics and aesthetics have glamorized abuse. The Lolita discussion
and the high concentration of Lolita references is a part

(54:30):
of why she's faced these criticisms over the years. There
are many Lana songs that use a single line or
reference to the book, but I'm just going to use
the most major examples here to save time. From her
self titled album, the song put Me in a Movie
is about a young girl who desperately wants to become
an actress, featuring the line come on, you know you
like little girls. And then from her breakout album is

(54:55):
Born to Die, here are the references. The song Diet
Mountain Dew is a song of about forbidden and uncertain love,
featuring this lyrical clincher baby put on heart shaped sunglasses
because we're going to take a ride. I'm not going
to listen to what the past says. I've been waiting
up all night. Then there's Off to the Races, a

(55:17):
song that is entirely about Lolita and Humbert. Humbert lyrics
read my old man is a bad man, but I
can't deny the way he holds my hand and he
grabs me. He has me by my heart again, implying
that Dolores is deeply infatuated and in love with Humbert,
when a close read of the book makes it pretty

(55:39):
clear that Dolores Hayes is crushed on Humbert ends when
the abuse begins and never returns, and a lot of
the music videos on Born to Die movie adaptation on
Lolita is visually referenced. And then and off to the races.
We've got this chorus, light of my life, fire of

(55:59):
my loins, be a good baby, do what I want,
Light of my life, Fire of my loins. Give me
them gold coins, Give me them coins. Now, the meaning
from the book that's lost in that chorus is pretty obvious.
The gold coins that Lana is referencing is Dolores Hayes
hiding her allowance from Humbert Humbert and the books book

(56:22):
so that she can afford to escape his abuse, not
so she can exert this maximalist capitalism control over him.
Like Lana describes, Dolores Hayes is hiding quarters and dollars
for survival. She continues, my old man is a thief,
and I'm going to stay and pray with him till
the end. But I trust in the decision of the

(56:44):
Lord to watch over us, take him when he may,
if he may. I'm not afraid to say that I
die without him. Who else is going to put up
with me this way? Again, these lyrics straight very far
from what the book has taught talking about. Dolores did
say for money, up and fled, Humbert humbered tragically with

(57:05):
someone who ended up being another child sex abuser. The
narrative being presented in the song Off to the Races
is that Dolores would die without Humberd and that's completely
false advertising. The Dolores Hayes of the book seemed to
feel the exact opposite. Off to the Races ends with
the line you are my one true love, repeated three times,

(57:26):
then we're still going. On the deluxe edition of Lana
del Rey is Born to Die, there is a bonus
track that is literally named Lolita, with the chorus ha Lolita,
hey ha, lolita, Hey I know what the boys want,
I'm not going to play he lolita, hey ha, lolita,
Hey whistle all you want, but I'm not gonna say,

(57:47):
and a number of vague references to the imagery of
the movies and the book like this No More skipping rope,
skipping heartbeats with the boys downtown, just you and me,
feeling the heat even when the sun goes down. Laana
likes Lolita. I don't know if she likes Dolores. There
are other songs with references, but they are mainly from

(58:09):
leaked music that we're stolen or otherwise hacked. And I'm
not a fan of holding someone accountable for art that
they didn't choose to release. But everything I just told
you is on the record. Monetize releases by Lana del
Rey about Lolita. YouTube is overflowing with fan edits of
the Lolita movie edited with these songs in the background,

(58:31):
and Lana herself promoted the song Lolita with an image
of her with blonde pigtails with pink ribbons in her hair,
biting her thumbnail and looking seductively at the camera. She
is twenty four or five in this picture. Because it
is sence is sexier than you think. Laana del Rey
has been criticized extensively, most recently for comments that are

(58:54):
extremely tone deaf if you're being generous, and what many
perceived to be full on anti black comments as pertains
to how sexuality is presented in pop versus how she presents.
She's also been put on a blast for wearing a
mesh face mask in the middle of a global pandemic.
The list goes on, but this discussion around Lolita culture

(59:14):
and her music and music videos while having her music
marketed to a primarily young audience, was one of her
earliest major controversies. This, among other lyrics and themes in
her music, were often categorized as glamorizing abuse, something that
Lana continues to push back on to this day. I'm
going to share the controversial comment that she made in

(59:38):
that I think very rightfully got her a lot of
blowback because it kind of bundles all of the controversies
I just described into one problematic Lana del Right quote.
It says this question for the culture now that do
Jaquat and Cardi, b Arianna, Camilla, Klanni, Nicki, Mina, and

(01:00:00):
Beyonce have had number ones the songs about being sexy,
wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating, et cetera, Can I please
go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by
being in love even if the relationship is not perfect,
or dancing for money or whatever I want without being

(01:00:24):
crucified or saying I'm glamorizing abuse. So, first and most importantly,
the artists that Launa lists are majority black and brown
women who already face aggressive racist stereotyping in culture as
being overly sexual, and Lata tearing them down in favor
of bringing up an old gripe she has about glamorizing

(01:00:46):
abuse is stunning, lee tone deaf to say the least.
Then there's a lot of thoughts on feminism taken from
this fatal interview. For me, the issue of feminism is
just not an interesting concept. I'm more interested, you know,
in Space X and Tesla what's going to happen with

(01:01:09):
our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I'm like, God,
I'm just not really that interested. Wake up, feminist people.
We need to be talking about SpaceX and Tesla. Lana
expands on her thoughts on feminism in the comments I

(01:01:31):
was referencing earlier, saying she's quote not not a feminist unquote,
but wishes that feminism would make space for women who
look like her, as if feminism hasn't served white women
from the jump, she does argue that it should not
be taboo to sing about abusive dynamics and a relationship
and as it pertains to her personal life, saying about

(01:01:51):
whatever you want, Lana Again, I've listened to her music
when navigating shitty relationships myself. But as it pertains to Lolita,
she's not singing about her own experience. She's using a
famous text about abuse and turning it into something romantic
in lyrics and in visuals. Ultimately, I am not here
to litigate whether Laana del Ray is good for feminism

(01:02:13):
or bad for feminism. That is one of the most
tired pieces of discourse in the history of the Internet,
and I have no wish to rehash it here. What
I'm here to talk about is what Laana del Ray
has done for the Lolita or Nymphete aesthetic, and whether
the heavy references she makes to the book and to
Dolores are transformative or effective in really any way. And

(01:02:36):
then this discussion about glamorizing abuse has a lot to
do with how Laana frames Lolita in her music, both
lyrically and visually, and that she brought about a pretty
significant resurgence of this Adrian Line movie aesthetic. Except at
the time she was a twenty seven year old woman
cosplaying as a twelve year old and given that del

(01:02:57):
Ray would have been twelve at the time the rein
Line movie whilst we released in nine, I mean it's
not unlikely that it really affected her. She's mentioned many
times in interviews that her life as a teenager involved
growing up way too fast, drinking, and spending time with
older men. Here's a bit of an interview she did
with German newspaper Dzit in two thousand thirteen. D ZiT asks,

(01:03:20):
how do you get along with feminists? A lot of
people had a problem with your lolita look in the
video for Ride. Del Rey responds, I don't play the
role of a lolita. I just like the text. Lots
of pop stars play with a lolita thing, barely wear clothes.
It's different with me. I wish I knew how to

(01:03:42):
explain it. It's not about being a lolita. It's more
about an attitude, as if one was choosing polygamy, everree
love or whatever. It's my choice. It's not about the
woman's movement for me, and my songs aren't a comment
on today's pop music either. Dsight asks more of a

(01:04:06):
mix of diary and personal confession del Rey replies, let's
take the song born to Die. The autobiographical verse is
about not giving up on being a good person. I
was with the man back then, I just let himself float.
We both made a decision together to lead a drug
free life, but any more or less runaway and everything

(01:04:29):
I could do for Himma's prey and the cars. It
all opens up into passionate fantasy. Come and take a
walk on the wild side, let Me kiss you, hut
in the rain. Ultimately, it's an escape and semanticism. With
this in mind, no matter what you feel about it,
you can't assume that all of her music is about

(01:04:52):
Dolora's Hayes. A lot of it, including some of the
Lolita imagery, seems to be pulled from Lana del Rey
or Lizzy Grants real life experiences, and it's not up
to us to tell someone how to properly interpret their
own life. But the times she is explicitly addressing the text,
it's a pretty heavy rewrite of Dolores's story that implies

(01:05:12):
the same kind of devious nous, cunning and sexual strategic
nous that many of the adaptations falsely do. Ultimately, I
just don't think that Laana Delray is really bringing anything
new to the table. Unfortunately, it is mostly a reselling
of old, harmful Lolita aesthetics. I'm not a music critic,
but in terms of the messaging and this era of

(01:05:35):
her work, I honestly don't see anything visually or lyrically
from Laana that demonstrates a close reading of Nabokov's book.
And for a pop culture figure who references Lolita more
heavily than anyone else in the space, this is far
from ideal. She Lizzie Grant, has very likely read the book,
but in terms of how her Laana as Lolita is styled,

(01:05:58):
in terms of how the Humbert gear in these songs
is painted as a tragic, romantic pathetic man, and Lana's
Lolita is sexually forward, very knowing, seductive, conniving. At times,
it strikes me as being far more influenced by movie.
There's really no influence here that couldn't be gotten from

(01:06:18):
watching the movie for free on YouTube a couple of times,
and watching the DVD extras and going back to those
visuals Laana and heart shaped Glasses and all this feeds
more into the cultural image we have of Lolita than
it does really challenge or change it. And to be fair,
Lana's work does not imply a happy ending coming for
her Lolita. But the image is a twentysomething in pigtails

(01:06:41):
and heart shaped sunglasses, not a twelve year old, not
a fourteen year old, And of course that's an image
that's much easier to consume innocence is sexier than you think.
Her imagery doesn't read that different than a bad book
cover or an ikey perfume ad all musicality aside, it
plays right to our cultural tendency to assume Dolora's Hayes

(01:07:03):
is much older than she actually is. So that's Lana.
Her Lolita aesthetics are so notable because their release into
the tens, two thousand, tens, twenty tents. What are we
going to call that? Someone decide? Her release of Lolita
aesthetics in the twenty tents collide with the popularity of Tumbler,
where Lolita and nymphete blogs explode, and these blogs heavily

(01:07:26):
feature pictures, words, and images from Laura's music. So to
talk about this and to contextualize the effect that Laana
del Rey had on girls who had recently picked up
the book Lolita. I talked to video essayist and writer
Miss Lola. She's made a number of video essays and
reviews of Lolita's derivative works, as well as one about

(01:07:46):
problematic Favorites and Laana del Ray. I'm linking her work below.
It's truly great. We caught up around the holidays to
talk about Lana's effect on her life and on Lolita
and nymphete culture. I was a whige fan of a
series of unfortuate events, so that's when I first heard
about it. And then a couple of years later I
got into Launa del Ray and I was and I

(01:08:08):
found the old notebook where I had written down his
book recommendations. So I was like, it's a sign I
actually changed my name. Not a lot of people noticed,
like basically only people in my personal life. But and
you're free to include this of course. UM. But I
like I when I moved away from my hometown, it
was a pretty bad situation. UM, and I decided it
would be positive. Like you know, sometimes when you when

(01:08:31):
you get out of a bad situation, you kind of
do want to metamorphos size um to take a butterfly
metaphor so Um, I thought it would be kind of
symbolically powerful to take like the name of a survivor
um and to carry her name as an adult woman.
So I wanted to ask you as well, Um, were
you ever involved in Lolita tumbler culture? Was Was that

(01:08:55):
ever like a space that you browsed there? There's been
a lot of people I talked to you when I
was researching for the initial video who discovered the book
through that, and there were a lot of you know,
let's put out the call. At the time, it was
just on Facebook because I wasn't on list. Just the
crazy thing is, I wasn't really on social media until

(01:09:16):
I started doing my YouTube channel, and I kind of
regret it because, um, I think, I, you know, it's
kind of like where it's at. Yeah, I don't realized
that these conversations were being had. I want to talk
with you about Lana del Rey, um, because I know
you have made a really wonderful video discussing this in

(01:09:37):
depth about problematic faves, Laana del Ray being one of yours.
But um, yeah, I want to talk about your experience
in that fandom and how it kind of connects to Lolita.
It's interesting because again her music was not the introduction
for me, um, but it was definitely encouragement. UM that said, Um,

(01:10:03):
it's hard because I wouldn't go so far as to
say that it's my experience that there was any sort
of Paris social grooming. Um. And I'm talking about this
in a future episode about how I think the whole
Paris social relationship thing passed right over me because I
wasn't um so on social media. But it's a very
big part of a lot of people's lives, and I

(01:10:24):
think that you know, it's going to become a bigger discussion,
this whole element of Paris social grooming, because I've definitely
now talked to people who are like Listen, if I
hadn't gotten in her music, I wouldn't have started romanticizing
all of that. We'll be talking with Dolores more later
in the series about her experience commenting on Lovelita on YouTube,
and make sure to check out her video essays, particularly

(01:10:47):
the video we need to talk about Lolita on her
YouTube channel. So, Lana del Right and the online nymphet
aesthetic exists alongside each other and have for a long time. Now. Again,
I'm not here to tell you how to feel about
Launa's alright, but I take issue with her perspective on
whether she's perpetuating the misconceptions around who Dolores Hayes is.

(01:11:07):
Part of the reason we're having this discussion at all
is because her music is very popular and I like
a lot of it. I mean, it's catchy as hell.
The last album was good. The messaging is very much
up for criticism. The problem here is that the most
influential steward of the Lolita aesthetic in modern pop culture
is pushing the same old false reed of the text.

(01:11:30):
I've heard many times in her defense that Lana is
making an almost satirical comment on Lolita, but per her interviews,
that's not the case. I've also heard the defense that
she is presenting Dolores as someone reclaiming their power, this
kind of pseudo feminist message, but per her interviews, that's
not the case. What we're left with is what's in

(01:11:52):
the work, and none of these galaxy brain interpretations of
Laura's early work seemed to factor into how much of
her fan base receives her. The one contemporary cultural figure
that is prominently figured on nymphete blogs and forums to
this day is her. So that's a look at a
smattering of the more influential perpetuations of Lolita imagery in

(01:12:16):
pop culture. And the only visual influence that persists stronger
in the history of Lolita, stronger even than heart shaped
sunglasses and the occasional rogue Lana del Ray lyric is
the Adrian Line movie adaptation, So we'd better take a
look at that right next time on Lolita Podcast. Lolita

(01:12:38):
Podcast is an I Heart radio production. It is written
and hosted by me Jamie Loftus, produced by Sophie Lichtman,
Bett and Wacaluso, Miles Gray, and Jack O'Brien. It is
edited by the wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoey Blade.
Theme music is from Brad Diggert and My guest voices
this week are Robert Evans, Caitlin Doronte, Melissa Losada, Oliva,

(01:13:01):
Maggie may Fish and Daniel Goodman. See you next week.
H

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}1. Stuff You Should Know

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6: Lolita the Cover Girl, Lolita the Pop Star

1. Stuff You Should Know