8: Dolores Logs In

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. There are a lot
of ways to see Dolores Hayes, and how you see
her really depends on not just where you're sitting in
the room, but all of the places you've been and
experiences you've had before you even enter the room in

(00:21):
the first place. And you're like, Okay, the metaphor is
getting a little heavy here, but go with me for
a second. There's a million ways to see and perceive
Dolores Hayes. Most are exposed first to the images laid
out that reference an image that her abuser constructed, whether
that's in movies or advertisement or pop music. Some of

(00:42):
us see her through the peaks that the Book of Humbert.
Humbert gives to her true authentic self in his book,
Dolores being a better tennis player than Humbert but always
letting him win anyways. Dolores crying herself to sleep at night,
Dolores dropping a knife onto her foot upon seeing her
friend's father genuinely expressing love to his daughter. But no

(01:04):
matter how you see her, we all see Dolores in
relation to ourselves just like we see really anything. There's
a four part series that you can watch for free
on YouTube called Ways of Seeing, which was originally aired
on BBC two in nine two, and it's hosted by
writer John Burger. Maybe you've been taught this in a
class you've taken before, or maybe you have like an

(01:25):
exhausting friend that brings it up at parties. But Ways
of Seeing is all about the ways that modern audiences
consume mass images and how different image consumption is from
the centuries of sacred imagery being more difficult to seek
out before mass production was possible. There's some parts of
this documentary that are really cool and others that are
really dated. How you can devote an entire episode on

(01:47):
how women view themselves by speaking to five white women
in Britain of the same financial classes like um come on.
But in the first episode, John Burger conducts a pretty
interesting experiment that I think uniquely suited to how we
see Dolores so okay for science picture. The most popular
image in our culture of Lolita Sue Lion gazing over

(02:11):
those heart shaped sunglasses in two. Here's what Burger says
in the first episode of Ways of Seeing as you
look at them now on your screen. Your wallpaper is
around them, your window is opposite them, your carpet is
below them. At the same moment, they are on many

(02:32):
other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colors, different sounds.
You are seeing them in the context of your own life.
They are surrounded not by guilt frames, but by the
familiarity of the room you are in and the people
around you. Okay, so let's think about the Sioux Lion
image in that context. This image has been reproduced countless times,

(02:57):
whether it's this exact image or later reimagined versions of it,
but the way that you see it is uniquely connected
to you, You goddamn snowflake. Whether you like it or not,
you're gonna see this heart shaped glasses image in the
context of your own life. So some people are going
to see a sexually appealing and consenting underage girl. Others

(03:19):
might see an aspirational image. Wow, I want to look
like that. Others might recoil from the image. How could
they make a girl pose like that? She's so young?
Another person might say, Hey, I've forgot I was going
to watch that movie. The image exists in a context
and not just the societal context we've been talking about
throughout this series, it's also the context of you, how

(03:41):
this image comes to you and how you interpret it.
John Burger also speaks to how the meaning of an
image changes when placed alongside other images. A picture of
Sue Lion and heart shaped Glasses on its own has
a different implied meaning than if the heart shaped glasses
picture is placed beside a photo of Sue Lion when
she was the years older, or if the heart shaped

(04:02):
glasses picture is placed next to an image of Stanley
Kubrick berating a female actor. When placed next to something else,
the meaning of the original image often changes. I've now
emphasized the ways in which reproduction makes the meaning of
works of art ambiguous. This is not as negative as
it necessarily sounds, if we realize what is happening. What

(04:24):
it means in theory is reproduction of works of art
can be used by anybody for their own purposes. Images
can be used like words, we can talk with them.
Reproduction should make it easier to connect our experience of
art directly with other experiences. So, as John Burger is
describing this, we see a series of very nineteen seventies

(04:46):
images juxtaposed next to each other for our purposes. Think
of a bulletin board in a teenager's room where there's
pictures of celebrities pinned up next to pictures of friends
and family. Think of vision boards that people made back
when New Year's resolutions and hope for the future was
still a thing that we had. And while we're at it,
let's take that same energy and apply it to the

(05:07):
wonderful world of online. Think of how images interact with
each other and change meaning based on what kind of
Pinterest board they're placed on, Or think of how images
interact with each other on a Tumblr page. It's a
full on death battle of esthetics. Each image on its
own has the original intended meaning from the artist, and
then that meaning probably changes when it arrives to you,

(05:31):
And then that meaning can change again when you see
it placed on a scrollable grid of hundreds of thousands
of other images. To quote a late two thousands inscrutable
Facebook relationship status, it's complicated. In an essay she wrote
on her own experiences with Lolita in the upcoming collection
Lolita in the Afterlife, one of my favorite writers, Morgan Jerkins,

(05:53):
directs us to in a bulk of quote from a
January four interview with Playboy writer al And Toffler asks
Nabokov if he ever regretted writing Lolita nearly ten years
after its original publication. Nabokov replied, 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

(06:16):
one is a mirror view of the other depending on
the way you look the way you look. Dolores exists
in relation to you, as we've discussed since the first episode,
and she exists in relation to advertising and commercial images. Today,
we're going to talk about how the image of Dolores
Hayes has functioned as a community builter, and how the

(06:38):
reproduction of her image and the discussion of her character
has been connecting people to each other since the dawn
of the Internet. Because there is in fact a little
bit of justice in this world. People who have more
in common with Doloras Hayes than Humbert. Humbert have found
and appreciated her over the years and formed communities around

(06:58):
her image as well learned today, these are pretty widely
diverse groups of people spanning many races, sexualities, genders, and
many are survivors of abuse. So that's ideal, right, do
we do it? Well? Hold on, because if we're building
a community around the icon and the image of Dolores Hayes,
we need to remember who has prepared and curated the

(07:20):
image of Dolores Hayes for us over the last sixty
five years. Well, mainly advertisers who are translating Humbert Humbert
the abuser's account of Dolores Hayes basically at face value.
And while these fan communities can certainly break through a
lot of this noise by bringing the perspective of their
own experiences, when an icon is shaped completely by the

(07:42):
male gaze, and this image of them is perpetuated by
every movie ad or pop music campaign it can ladge
onto for over half a century, aren't things bound to
get messy? Let's find out. Dolores logs in This is
lowly to Podcast. Hello and welcome back to Lolita Podcast.

(08:33):
I am your host, Jamie Loftus, and today we're taking
a look at the brief but fascinating history of Lolita
fan forums. Now, there's no doubt that there's ones that
I have missed here because, as with all things extremely online,
these histories are very specific, they're very intense, and they
can be very difficult to find. I'm going to present

(08:54):
Lolita forums to you from three points in internet history today,
one snapshot from the early two thousd s, one from
the mid two thousand tents, and a look at the
state of Lolita forums or the nymphet community as it
was called up until pretty recently today in the twenties.
And will also be touching on the associated esthetic movement

(09:14):
non sexual nymphete fashion. So before we get into the
history here, I wouldn't start this episode by saying that,
while I think it's important to understand the histories of
these forums and how they've evolved over the decades, it's
important to acknowledge that, as many of the members I'll
be quoting today will tell you, there's been a lot
of direct and indirect harm done by online communities that

(09:38):
have at any point glorified predatory relationships and child sex
abuse in any way, no matter who these communities are
run by. I've heard from so many listeners on our
discord and in emails who describe being genuinely fucked up
by Lolita Tumbler in particular, and I am no exception
to that rule, particularly when encountering unities that are splashy,

(10:01):
visually driven and not communicating very much in the way
of context or nuance. It's been a really commonly relayed
experience that finding these blogs while still a kid and
very much in the process of figuring out who you are,
often looking to online peers for guidance on how to
be this messaging could be really harmful. I want to

(10:24):
share two messages I've received on the subject, both anonymously.
Of course, Tumbler introduced me to the Lolita style, mainly
through Laana del Ray. I spent most of my time
after school on tumbler esthetic blogs, which created a very
rose colored idea of Lolita. I had no context for
the actual novel and felt uncomfortable and intrigued by a

(10:46):
lot of the media this was around, and me and
my best friend were some of the nerdiest girls at
our school, nonetheless, who would spend lunch hour singing to
Launa del Ray songs, specifically off to the races in
my friend's car. Nearly every day when we were home
from school. We would repost things about the music and
aesthetic on Tumblr. There's a strange thing for me, since

(11:06):
at school I was known as the smart girl. Listening
to the music and engaging with the culture surrounding Lolita
felt like a way to escape from how it is
perceived by others. Who says also pre related to my
transition to almost exclusively crop toss and a skirts for
a year or so. That ties into a couple other things.
Though I am now able to see a lot more

(11:26):
of the flaws within the culture. Let's I've gotten older
and had more experiences in my life. I was the
subject of a lot of attention from adult men when
I was young, and I really engaged with the book
in the movie, generally not in a healthy way. I
was on Tumbler when the Lolita aesthetic exploded, and I
feel like that aesthetic will always be rooted somewhere deep

(11:49):
in my brain. I truly can't overstate how many messages
like this I've received from listeners with a wide variety
of backgrounds, and how much of it is connected to
Laana del Rey. So to the several listeners who have
contacted me asking why I'm talking about her so much,
it's because current Lolita imagery is very connected to her

(12:10):
early career. From what I've noticed, there's a notable uptick
in activity in these online communities, first when movie became
more accessible at the same time the internet did in
the late nineties early two thousand's, then again in the
early two thousand tents, when Lana del Rey came into prominence. Okay,
one last meme, I promise this is from Instagram user

(12:34):
psyche Delicious three thirty three from just a couple of
days ago. Here are a few different panels of the memes.
Those red flags look pretty green when you idolize Laana
del Rey as a preteen. I would give anything to
be able to forget all the ship I learned from tumbler. Uh,
this is over some images of common Lolita tumbler posts.

(12:55):
Do not trust bitches who post shit like this, worst
mistake of my life. And then lastly, a picture of
Lana del Ray with the speech bubble saying this, Yeah,
I romanticized the little lad to aesthetics so much that
I got hundreds of my underage fans dangerously obsessed with it.
So what. There is a big reckoning going on right

(13:16):
now about misinterpretations of the book stemming from Internet culture
of the two thousand tens, and it's been fascinating to
watch it unfold. And a lot of comments like this
cropped up when Lana del Ray's latest scandal involving her
using very racially charged language to explain how she is
not racist. But when she did this and every time

(13:38):
she does this, there is a wave of tweets from
people who were there for her big moment on Tumbler
in the early two thousand's and how that has affected
their image of themselves. There is a great recent Twitter
threat about this from Jezebel staff writer actually rees from
this last week on the subject. Here's two of the tweets. Okay,
but being on Tumbler when Lana was first coming out
was an experience. Let me tell you. She goes on

(14:01):
the gift sets, the cultural appropriation arguments, the SNL thing,
where are my veteran benefits? And she's right. I mean,
this was a subculture on the Internet from almost ten
years ago, and it is haunting people. Many of Llama's
credics have characterized her framing of Lolita, which we discussed
at length a few episodes ago, as a form of

(14:22):
paras social grooming and if you're not familiar with the term.
It consists of two kind of interconnected terms. The first
is para social, so i'll go lemony snicket mode for
a second. Paras social is a word which here means
a psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated
encounters with performers in the mass media. So this is

(14:42):
the feeling a consumer gets when they feel like they
know someone who is a public figure, when of course
that public figure doesn't know them, Like when I talked
to like a framed photograph of Rachel Weiss. She cannot
hear me, she does not know me, but I love
her performances so much that I feel like she's my friend. Tumbler.
Users of the Two Thousand Tents didn't know Lana del Rey,
but they did know her image, and her image and

(15:04):
music made this young audience often feel like they did
actually know her and that she was someone to look
up to. So the second half of that phrase is
when we've discussed on the podcast before, and that's grooming,
which means quote when someone builds a relationship, trust and
emotional connection with a child or young person so they
can manipulate, exploit, and abuse them unquote The implication of

(15:26):
para social grooming is basically that a public figure that
many kids looked up to and felt like they knew,
made them feel like and made money off of convincing
underage fans that the dynamic between Humbert Humbert and Lolita
was romantic and something to aspire to. I mean, after all,
if it wasn't, why would your para social friend Laana

(15:47):
del Right be saying it? And why would all your
online friends be so encouraging and excited about it. This cycle,
as many have told me, created at times a vortex
of misinformation and mischaracterization that young users were spreading to
each other. All this to say, there is no doubt
that Nymphete and Lolita forums have over the years provided

(16:09):
both a space for teens to congregate around Dolores Hayes
and spread a lot of confusion well into the two
thousand tents that glorified the Humbert Lolita dynamic and perpetuated
information that really messed with people's heads. And yes, Lana's
approach to framing Lolita has a lot, a lot, a
lot to do with where those misconceptions were coming from.

(16:33):
That said, I think it's really valuable information to know
a little more about the history of these forums and
all the nuances that come with them. So let's get started.
But first, let's rewind the clock about twenty years back
to the early two thousands. George W. Bush has stolen
the election. Songs like Oops, I Did It Again and

(16:54):
Drops of Jupiter are topping that charts. Low Rise Jeans
are offensively on Trent and the Sex in the City
and Spice Girls driven girl power. Highly commercialized third wave
feminism is kind of the best we have to offer
in the mainstream. Adrian Lines movie was a hit overseas
in n but in the US was relegated to showtime

(17:16):
and home video. Not that that stopped teams with access
to a Blockbuster membership to getting their hands on a copy.
It's in this era that the first Lolita fan websites
begin to crop up. Around this time, there weren't many
centralized places to find conversation around Lolita. It was something
you had to really look for, predating all the big

(17:36):
social media giants, and something that's challenging but not impossible
to find traces of now these days you'll find almost
exclusively dead links and dead profiles, but here's a summary
of what remains or is remembered in old blogs and
reddit posts about these early Lolita message boards and forums,

(17:57):
a real graveyard of the Internet. So I'll summarize some
common themes. First, overwhelmingly users identify themselves as teenage girls
on these forums. The topics they focus on kind of
very There are conversations about the movie, definitely more so
than the Stanley kuberc nine sixties one. There are images

(18:19):
which are half dead links now of mostly young sis
white girls imitating images from the movie, and some discussion
of what they thought it meant to be a nymphete,
with a pretty wide array of responses. Some users think
that it is about presenting yourself as a cultural Elita,

(18:40):
as an underaged person who is interested in people who
are much older. Others are more willing to believe that
it is an aesthetic or an attitude. Next, there is
the occasional post or mentioned from dead linked users who
creeped into these forums who are identifying as hum arts.

(19:00):
So this is the Internet of the early two thousands, remember,
so Generally claims of being an older, attractive doctor or
lawyer are extremely difficult to verify, as they provide no
photos or last names. These older men are tentatively tolerated
in these communities, it appears, or at least are not
asked to leave right away if they gaze from a

(19:22):
respectful distance without harassing the teenage users. Then the occasional haters.
There are rogue posts from people who warn these teen
communities badly edited HTML, dizzying backgrounds and all, that these
teens don't get Lolita, that it was actually a book
about abuse, and that by discussing Dolores Hayes or admiring

(19:46):
images of her in any way, they were inherently misunderstanding
the texts. These posts are understandably not received very well
in these communities, but not without reason, because my final
observation is that even in the two thousands, there is
a lot of conversation about Dolores Hayes herself, and it's
clear that these teenagers have read the book. It would

(20:09):
be an oversimplification to say that teen girls were glorifying
the message of Lolita. I don't think that's necessarily true
during this era. At least, it would be more accurate
to say that they are glorifying the image of Dominique
Swain as Lolita in a pre Lana del Rey world.
This is the strongest image there was to pull from,

(20:31):
along with other nineties era teen seductresses, your Drew Barrymore's,
your Alicia Silverstones, and this era is generally a push
and pull between wanting to be the girl Dominique Swain
plays and genuinely discussing the Dolores Hayes of the book.
So it's a mix of emulating these very male gaze

(20:52):
images fed by nineties and early two thousands culture, and
some pushing back on them. It's not unknown in these
forums that Dolores was an abused child. The teen girls
on the forum were not necessarily there to glorify relationships
with older men. There are some talks about encounters they
had with older men, but just as much talk about

(21:14):
being interested in people at their age. For some users,
and I could relate with this, the desire for someone
older seemed a little more abstract and more of a
response to the questionable maturity of teenage boys on offer.
I mean personally, I definitely remember thinking how much better

(21:34):
dating an older person would be than the filthy fourteen
year old boys that I went to eighth grade with.
So at this time, it's really a mix of different
approaches to the material, grounded in a common interest in Dolores.
While the core imagery is very tied into and as
far as I was able to observe, motivated by interest

(21:55):
in Adrian Lines adaptation, the users have clearly read the book. Look,
the core difference I noticed with more contemporary teen users
is a willingness to tolerate the presence of older men
observing the forums and a less whole condemnation of the
power dynamics within the book. What I was surprised by
and kind of touched by, was that these were, however,

(22:17):
completely dead now communities. At the time, they were teenagers
talking to each other about their common experiences, saying that
you could be a nymphant at any age. It's an attitude,
it's an aesthetic, and the real commonality was processing their
experiences through Nabokov's text and often through Adrian Lines movie.

(22:39):
So the first wave of nymphet forums are clearly motivated
by the nineties movie and briefly thrive in a pop
culture landscape that was not shy. As we've discussed in
many past episodes about eroticizing images of underaged teens, even
making them at times active threats to older male characters

(23:00):
rather than the other way around. But these forums die
down and seem to stay dead as far as I
could tell, for a while. But in the late two
thousands and early two thousand tens that changes the work
of Laana del Rey provides a new generation with a
massive resurgence in these kinds of communities, with marked differences

(23:21):
that reflect the changing values of our culture. So what
I think is important to keep in mind, and something
I feel is often lost in the discussion of Lolita
at every point in these communities is this the online
culture surrounding the book, And as we're about to learn,
Lana del Rey's relation to it was a formative and

(23:41):
confusing phase for many of the teens who were active
within it at literally any point in time you can
direct to I see discussions about this all the time
on the Lolita podcast discord and an emails that I
received from listeners. These online spaces are flawed and leave
a lot to be wanting in terms of inclusive, civity
and nuance, and we'll get to that in a bit,

(24:02):
But they're curiated mainly by teenagers who are figuring ship
out under constrictive and complicated societal pressures, not unlike Dolorous
Hayes trying to figure herself out as a young teenager
under the most traumatic circumstances you could imagine. Back So
let's move forward. Enter Tumbler, the micro blogging what a

(24:23):
ridiculous word platform established in two thousand seven and exploded
in the early to mid two thousand tents. Going back
into Tumbler for this episode gave me just just flared
up a little bit of PTSD. Tumblers in the early
informed my life in a way that I can't even
fully describe. For for better and for worse, it still

(24:47):
haunts me. Tumbler is a very visually driven platform, and
essentially in the early what happens is that the forums
that keep Elizabeth Russell participated in during the two thousand's
evolve into nymphete tumb Lers. The main difference is that,
due to the nature of this platform, these blogs are
generally more driven by images than text, and the interface

(25:07):
doesn't really encourage commenting or ongoing conversation in the way
that Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or even TikTok does.
That's not to say it's not impossible to have a
conversation on Tumbler. It's very possible to build a community,
but it's a visually driven community, and the Wilita Nymphet
corner of Tumbler came into the analysis space in about fourteen.

(25:29):
In this section, I'm going to be citing both analysis
from outside writers looking into the community at the time,
as well as Nymphet Tumbler historian eighteen year old Nlijah Mesa,
who has made the most comprehensive history of this community
on the entire Internet in a YouTube video called the
Revisionist History of the Nymphet Community. She's our source on

(25:51):
the inside, and I'm using clips of her video here
with permission from her. Nalijah got involved on Nimphet Tumbler
at age twelve back in twenty four teen. I'll let
her describe how she first learned about it. So for
some backstory, I am currently eighteen years old um, and
I've been in the ny fact community since I was twelve.

(26:15):
I want to say I was there since I joined
because I had um listened to off to the racist
by Lando the first time I want to comments to
mention Lolita and I was like, oh, I wonder what
it's about because the song that gives me such this
weird nostalgic feelings that I don't understand. And I found
out about Lolita that way, and then honestly, I didn't

(26:37):
watch the movie until later, and then I just slowly
found out about like the whole num faed thing through
Tumbler because I saw a picture lived Tyler and I
thought her ouse it was cute, it was a lot
of fun. I'm not gonna lie like. I never really
saw it as myself pretending to be dolors or pretending
like I was in her situation. I watched the ninety

(26:59):
seven Lolada, I was like, damn, her outfits are cute,
and I decided to just like that. A lot of
people seem to think that the NYMPACT community was filled
with privileged white girls who had daddy kinks or um
were sexually abused. It's not necessarily the case. Were some

(27:21):
of them wealth your white girls, yes, but not a
majority of them. They're don't like three, no, after there's
like two, did we all have daddy kings? To know
that there was a lot of lesbians like something that
you don't know the NYMPHAC community was full of fucking
lesbian gays only event. Okay, it was a lot of

(27:41):
lesbians in the Pampat community, and also there was a
lot of girls who had questions on people their age, Like,
it wasn't just people fetishize, like obviously in every community
there's good and bad. Of course, it was obviously some
girls in the NYMPACT community who did fetishot as alidable.
I will tell you what, not the best majority of them.

(28:01):
It was not the beast jority of them. Because we
policed within ourselves. We helped each other. It wasn't a
one person tells you to do this and you do it.
It was everyone worked together. Like we literally had an
entire network. It was the NYM fed girl gang where
we sent in like pedophiles, creeps, everybody would like cop
in our d m s and we would send them

(28:23):
to the police. Then after a while they stopped dm
he goes or stopped controlling the track tag because they
know they were going to be put on that network
and then they knew that we were gonna get a
fucking trouble. Ye, So the communities are very close knit

(28:49):
and protective of other users. Now, back writers taking a
look at this community saw it quite differently. Writer Sarah
Catherine Cleaver wrote a butt nam Feed Tumblers pretty critically
for the publication Show Studio. She describes the main components
of the blogs at this time like this. Firstly, and obviously,

(29:10):
Lolita quotes from the book, stills, memes, and gifts from
either film. Kubrick two is better stylistically, but Adrian lens
version is the more popular, probably because it's closer to
the book, darker, more sexual, and far less perfect. Dominique
Swan's screen tests from the same film denotes a real
Lolita buff, as do the deleted scenes found in the DVD.

(29:33):
Other age gap films seen over and over again include
Pretty Baby, The Crush, Juna Julie. Then there are vintage signifiers,
pulp novel covers ranging levels of bad taste, my personal
favorite Daddy I'm Coming, photographs of vintage underwear, apparition, street photographs.
There's a personal post I dropped my pen leture today
and two guys in the lecture went to fetch it

(29:55):
for me. And is this nymphat power or what hashtag
nymphat hashtag thoughts. This aligns with Elijah's descriptions of the
blogs at this time as well. But Cleaver's conclusions on
what these blogs mean, particularly given how young most of
the Tumbler creators in question are, comes off pretty harsh.
The type of femininity these young women and for that matter,

(30:17):
Lana del Ray have chosen to identify with, is one
that is doomed from the start. Either Oscar Wilde or
George Bernard Shaw said, youth is wasted on the young.
These particular girls are wasting their's fetishizing it, treating youth
as a theme to be curated, collected, and carefully documented.

(30:38):
It's this juxtaposition of the Q and gru wish with
the violence that expresses the core theme of Lolita better
than any blond team sucking lollipop on numerous book jackets ever.
Can yeah you tell those twelve year olds? This perspective
was pushed back on by other writers of this time.
Writer Miska Housin wrote a piece for literary journal Plowshares

(31:02):
a couple of years later, in response to Sarah Catherine
Cleaver that describes the Tumblers a little closer to how
Kate Elizabeth Russell describes her forum from the two thousands.
Here's what Husson has to say. I wrote an essay
about watching Adrian lan adaptation of Lolita, relating to my
experiences of sexual abuse as an adolescent and the experience

(31:25):
of reading the novel. A baragraph in the essay was
quoted on tumbler and found some attraction on the same
nymphant blogs. And this is where something darker, more complex,
and more powerful shows itself. The blogs this was shared
on had this standard nymphant blog fair steals from movies
with age gap relationships, American Beauty, Leon, The Professional Stealing Beauty,

(31:46):
and of course Lolita, lines from Lana del Ray songs,
quotes from the novel straight up d d l G porn,
but also that quote for clarity. D d l G
is with an area of kink and a subgenre of
porn that stands for daddy dom little girl, where generally
a male partner plays the part of father and the

(32:09):
woman plays the part of a young girl when done safely.
My understanding is that d d l G is an
extension of the b D s M community that involves
to consenting adults who are completely on board with the
power dynamic being established. And I'm not here to kink
shame if it's done safely then whatever. But as far
as the d d LG images on these communities go,

(32:30):
it's a little more complicated than that, because as it's
portrayed in static, cropped and edited tumbler posts, the potential
safety of the dynamic is not as easy to establish.
Elijah Maisa and the other prominent nFET culture YouTuber Skylar
Rain resist association with the kink community pretty strongly in

(32:51):
order to protect their own communities, both for the safety
of underage users and the fact that they don't want
the nymphete aesthetic to be sexualized. Here's Kyler Raine speaking
to this in a video from two thousand nineteen. Her
intro to this video says Skylo Raine promoting nymphet fashion
without kink. There is not only one way to go
with a fashion. You don't have to be into like

(33:13):
dada LG. You don't have to like older men, you
don't have to have some daddy fetish or whatever. So
I guess my goal was the channel is to show
that yes, it is okay to like these clothes. That
doesn't mean you have any sort of kink. You just
like a particular style that's inspired from a movie and
it's okay. She repeats a similar sentiment in a video
from late Another big point that I want to make

(33:36):
before we get into the fashion is that nymphet fashion
is a fashion. It is not a king. Please do
not try and make it a king. Nimput fashion has
zero relation with daddy kings or like old man king
And I don't understand why people try to make it
that way because like Dolores was never into older guys.
She was never into like any sort of daddy of fetish.
And this is essentially where the two thousand fourteen era

(33:58):
of nymphete tumbler stands. Fast forwarding to a student named
Rachel E. Davis at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
wrote an honors thesis called tell Me You Own Me,
Give Me Them Coins post feminist fascination with Lolita, Lana
del Rey, and sugar culture. This paper examined tumblers from

(34:19):
into Seen. Davis's takeaways are also really interesting and connects
the curation of these blogs to the ideas and expectations
that both post feminism and neo liberalism. Took me six episodes,
but I said, I said neoliberalism. Sorry, As these words
are used in Davis's paper, neoliberalism is defined as stay

(34:41):
with me, We're headed somewhere quote, a form of governance
that argues that market forces, rather than state intervention, should
be allowed to drive the economy unquote. Post Feminism is
defined as quote a fusion between neoliberal subjectivity in a
feminist politics reimagined through the logic of consumer morism unquote.
Davis says in her abstract to this paper that in

(35:03):
the tumblers that she analyzed, there was a prevalence of
posts expressing depressive, suicidal, and self destructive ideas. Indicates that
these individuals may experience the failures of neoliberalism and post
feminism as personal failures. This mention of depressive posts was

(35:25):
not mentioned in previous work written on nimphet tumblers, but
it's unfortunately not surprising that these and self harm posts
would find their way into these communities. Tumbler had and
has a very complicated history with hosting blogs that promoted
romanticized and instructive methods of self harm and encouraging eating disorders.

(35:47):
Take my word for it, and this paper is the
first mention of these kinds of posts entering the community.
Davis draws a clear line on how these concepts relate
to the trends commonly found in these blocks, which extend
back to the comunities that Kate Elizabeth Russell described. Davis
describes the work of Adrian Evans and Sarah Riley in
their teen book Technologies of Sexiness. As Evans and Riley

(36:10):
pointed out, quote, the constant transformation required by this kind
of consumerism means that femininity is constituted as a site
of self surveillance and discipline end quote. The danger of
this ideology lies in the fact that the cycle of
consumerism never ends, which quote sets people up to fail
while encouraging them to locate these failures as their own

(36:32):
individual failures rather than as failures of the social structure
or in the logic of neoliberalism itself. End quote. So translated,
she's presenting the idea that these blogs that primarily feature
Lolita content as well as sugar baby blogs, replaces of
self expression as well as an area for self surveillance.

(36:55):
I will add here quickly in case you don't know
that a sugar baby is defined mind as a quote.
Transactional dating practice typically characterized by an older, wealthier person
and a younger person in need of financial assistant in
a mutually beneficial relationship unquote. Davis's paper goes on to
discuss the intersection of the Lolita slash Nymphete and sugar

(37:18):
Baby tumbler communities, citing blogs with names like Nymphett's Life
or Dolly del Ray. Lolita blogs of this time skewed
more fatalistic and oppressive, consisting mostly of movie images and
deep sadness, whereas the sugar baby blogs were more aspirational,
featuring luxury goods type, crops of women's bodies, stacks of money,

(37:39):
girlish lauderie. What these blogs had most in common were
a preoccupation with Lana del Rey, the problematic, unkillable queen
of the Internet. And then I Jamie Loftus, host of
the show Hello, went back into Tumbler in two thousand
and twenty to find out if nymphete tumblers still existed
and what they look like now. And so before I

(38:01):
share my extremely scholarly findings, there are a number of
important changes that took place on Tumbler between and now.
First of all, it's just not as popular as it
used to be. But one of the big reasons people
fled from the platform was a site wide ban on
all quote unquote adult content in late This exploded a

(38:23):
number of communities and boiled down to the Nymphet Tumbler
community of this time entering a phase of transition and
a huge schism within the community. I'm going to kick
it back to Elijah here to explain what was going
on in the community at this time, which basically boils
down to Tumbler disempowering the hashtag nymphete tag, as well

(38:45):
as a number of d d l G kink bloggers
infiltrating the space that Nymphet Tumbler used to inhabit. This
drives a wedge into the community that ends up splitting
it into but well, some of us outgrew it perfectly fine,
every body else grows aesthetics. Some girls still liked it,
but the problem was constant harassment by older men. We

(39:07):
can do ship and eventually the d D O G
and kingsters moved into the n infant tag and we
were like, funk it, we gotta go. We gotta go.
Because when the community ended, a lot of us were
already following each other on Instagram or we moved to
follow each other on Instagram because we didn't want to
lose contact with each other. Because a lot of us
became friends. I have farmed lifelong friendships through nymphatic community.

(39:31):
I have three people who I cannot see my life
without because of that community life. So the community that
once thrived on the hashtag nymphat page split into two communities,
one that is far more diverse and race, gender, and sexuality.
Elijah explained where the split and interest as it pertained
to Lolita ended up falling between these two communities. New

(39:55):
Fan and Coquette felt very much like celebrating Dolores as
first as the fun bubb wee girl she was on
summer camp with her friends, swimming in the lake, when
she was with her mom, picnics with her neighbors before
Humbert even enters the picture. It was about celebrating her

(40:16):
as a person and as who she was before anything
happened to her. Is immortalizing the happy child that she was.
To see that, Billette feels like celebrating crying traumatized Doors
on the road with Humbert. It feels very much like

(40:38):
immortalizing the traumatized Lolita instead of the happy Doors. And
I just cannot sunk with that. This is a fascinating
split to me, two groups of majority teenagers who are
fixating on very different points of the same book. Now,
the spirit of Nymphet Tumbler, so like stills of Alicia

(41:02):
Silverstone in the Crush, fashion spreads and on and on,
definitely still exists, but they're evolving. Since Davis's paper was
published in early a lot has changed. And I think
it's also worth mentioning that the me too movement that
began in late has had a clear effect on the community.
I took a look at a couple of tumblers that
are still semi regularly posting from July. Here's what a

(41:26):
post from her dash name dash is dash Dolores dot
tumbler dot com says, as someone who has sexually assaulted
as a child, Dolores Hayes means so much to me
and I will defend her. Hell yeah, this is very
different from what we hear earlier and lovelidus online history.
Now in the Nymphet tumblers are fewer in number, but

(41:47):
the tone is generally less likely to romanticize the relationship
between Dolores and Humbert and squarely condemn abusers of children,
specifically abusers of Dolores Hayes. This is done while celebrate
eating and analyzing Dolores carefully. Current leading blogs with names
like the Dolores Hayes Network dot tumbler dot com, Coquette

(42:08):
Dolly dot tumbler dot com, Lolita on the dotted Line
dot tumbler dot com, starlet Low dot tumbler dot com,
and on and on. The posts I'm setting here are
from and the old aesthetics of previous Lolita blogs are
still present here, but there's now a larger focus on
discussing how Lolita relates to trauma and survival, about Dolores

(42:29):
Hayes herself, and a lot of anti child sex abuser memes. Now.
One of the main interesting new features to Nymphete Tumbler
are disclaimers that almost seem to anticipate some of the
criticism the blogs are expecting to receive for existing at all.
But unlike the early two thousand's, the latest wave of
Lolita aesthetic blogs firmly distanced themselves from d d l

(42:53):
G or anything that encourages the sexualization of underrage girls.
The front page of the Coquett Dolly Tumbler says the following.
This blog does not condone the relationship between Humfort and Low.
My Lolita posts are purely for the sake of fashion
and the Venia aesthetic famine bodies. As I've stated many

(43:15):
times on this blog and others I run, Dolores Hayes
is a victim, a fact that tends to be forgotten
amongst the dark beauty that is Lolita. The Dolorous Hayes
Networks header reads this, This network slash page is dedicated
to Dolores Hayes of the novel Lolita. This page does
not condone or romanticize the contents of said novel, and

(43:39):
was created as a space for those of us who
see Low as exactly what she is, a twelve year
old child. Some of the images presented here may seem
to be of questionable content, though that is unavoidable because
of the content of the novel itself. No edits gift
sets or text posts are meant to show the relationship
between del Worst and Humbert as loving or romantic, and again,

(44:04):
these blogs do still have the nymphet Tumbler esthetic going.
We've got images from Lolita, Pretty Baby, Lana del Rey
Romeo plus Juliette with Claire Danes, pictures of an underage
Mula Kunis as Jackie in that seventy show, wearing a
T shirt that says I am so a virgin, as
well as gifts of old school nineteen sixties beach blonds.

(44:26):
So the old aesthetics that have marked these blogs from
the start are still present, but now they are marked
with the reminder that the person posting the image understands
that Lolita is a story of abuse. This is new.
There's a post from a user called cubitum EMUs I
butchered that I feel so old. There's a post from

(44:47):
this user that many nymphet blogs reposted that describes the
difference between the Lolita aesthetic and the Lolita lifestyle. Lolita
esthetic pink plaid skirts, cherry cola, dewey grass picnics under
the bright blue sky, Lolita lifestyle taking an advantage of

(45:08):
buying an old man being manipulated, pedophiles, daddy issues, lifelong
trust issues. Other posts comb the text of Nabokov's book
more carefully than scholars. There's an excited post finding a
mention of Dolores having freckles that says, quote further descriptions
of Dolores she has freckles unquote. Other posts site particularly

(45:30):
manipulative sections of text from Humbert with this commentary. This
shows that despite having convinced himself of this whole devious
nym fete sing, he is aware deep down that Dolores
is just a regular kid. Hell. These tumblers are posting
excerpts from Ways of Seeing by John Burger, one of

(45:50):
the most seminal text on aesthetics. These users are pretty
aware of what they are engaging with, so while the
fashion and aesthetics of past adaptations are include did the
main focus is Dolores Hayes herself. Users remember that it's
mentioned that she's conversational in French, that she was a tomboy,
that she was bisexual. This was written in all caps

(46:12):
in a post I saw, and I think it references
Dolores mentioning that her earliest sexual experience was with kissing
a girl. Dolores is always the main event in these tumblers.
There is no mention that Lolita could conceivably be a
love story. There is no suggestion that Dolores was ever
interested or welcoming Humbrid's abuse in its place. There is

(46:34):
just as much, if not more, content like this, and
just a warning because this is audio only. I do
now have to do that boomer thing where I like
to describe a meme to you, so I'm sorry. All
of these memes are extremely anti child sex abuser. One
features a repeated image of a girl with brown pigtails
saying this, my name is not Lolita. Lolita is not

(46:58):
a love story. I hate Ubert Humbert. I'm literally twelve
U six fox kill petals protect kids. My trauma isn't
cute or sexy. I'm a child. I'm not at fault.
I'm the victim. This has four hundred and forty seven
notes or tumbler likes, basically. Another post shows an illustration

(47:19):
of a girl in overalls holding a knife. The text
says the following, there is no excuse for pedophilia. It's
not a sexuality, it's not free love. The only rights
you need is the rights to fucking die. One hundred
and sixteen thousand, five hundred forty nine notes and that

(47:40):
is Lolita. Aesthetics and nymphet tumbler in. These users are
determined to protect Dolores Hayes. It may not be the
most nuanced discussion on the Internet, but I get a
hand it to him. These types of spaces didn't exist
when I was a kid, and looking at them now,
I know they would have resonated with me at that age.
The blow that we were discussing earlier, with the heavy

(48:03):
sexualized imagery back in still very much exist now, but
there are these new features to them, the fact that
Lolita has been culturally warped to fit a very particular oversexualized,
rigid aesthetic. As we've been discussing for this entire series,
younger fans of the book are actively trying to unlearn

(48:25):
and resist what the monoculture is serving them, and that's
really cool. So I think we can see in all
of the online spaces we've looked at so far, the
very fact that they are curated and controlled by those
that have far more in common with Dolora's Hayes than
Humbert Humbert gives these spaces a uniqueness and a power

(48:45):
that all of the older male driven adaptations lack. But
at the same time, these blogs are very informed and
driven by the visuals of these adaptations. It makes my
head hurt, but it gives me the smallest bit of
hope because the way that teenagers are curating their own
online spaces now is happening around and within cultural conversations

(49:06):
that just we're not being had twenty years ago, and
we can see with this example alone that that is
making a difference. It's tricky because, based on many listeners
who have contacted me, and pulling from my own experiences
with lowly to online, I do think that a lot
of the tumbler culture I experienced as a team funked
with my head a lot and maybe did not produce

(49:27):
a net good effect for myself image or for my
perspective on sexual abuse. But I'm hopeful that that seems
to be changing, however imperfectly, And what discussion on internet
culture being released in wouldn't include the tick and the talk.
TikTok is probably the most relevant social media app for

(49:49):
young people at the time of this recording. It is
more focused on comments and algorithm driven engagement, and it
features short videos for all my boomers out there. It's
also where Madison Beer, the TikTok star briefly canceled over
romanticizing Lolita in became famous. So naturally there is a
pretty healthy discussion about the book Lolita happening over on

(50:12):
TikTok as well. Like many spaces we've discussed, TikTok is
about a fifty fifty split of users demanding that people
stop romanticizing Glalita and the other half is people romanticizing Lolalita.
The latter type of video is mostly inspired by the movie,
as was the case on tumbler as well. Examples are

(50:34):
fan edits of Dominique Swain as Lolita eating a banana
while Lana del Rey plays lip syncs of girls mouthing
the line I was a daisy fresh girl and look
what You've done to me while looking seductively into the
camera on their phone. On the other end of this
discussion are mainly young users who have read the book
and resent romanticizing its legacy. So let's take a listen

(50:56):
to a couple of those. The first is from a
user Mr dot White. I'm definitely saying that wrong. Mpakov
shows you in every way how a predator's brain works.
He beats you over the head with how bad Humbert
really is as a human. How do people miss this?
And that people use the loris and their songs. I'm

(51:19):
looking at you on the del rey as this sexually
permiscuous teenager blah blah, she was twelve number was institutionalized
multiple times. He abused his wife. I don't understand how
people second is from user of hen good morning. It's

(51:39):
message is for you stop fromantasizing. Located in nineteen nine seven.
It's not a good fucking movie. It was made by
converted white men in Hollywood. It's not a good fucking movie.
And finally, it's nerdy mixed pan. We'll talk about a
book that I never thought I'd like this one right
here before you asked, no, it has enough want to

(52:00):
do with the Japanese fashion might be saying, Todd, doesn't
that book glorified pedophiles? And it honestly depends on how
you read. Now, if you take Humbert, who is the
titular character, you have to remember this book is written
as a memoir for his word, then yeah, it does
glorify predators. Or if you have the nuance of knowing
that this is written from the monster's perspective, you'll be

(52:21):
able to see the cracks of reality come through in
the writing. There are times where Humbert admits that Dolores
is scared of him, that she cries herself to sleep
at night, and that he is a terrible human being
for what he is doing to her. Am I suggesting
that some of the most pertinent and transformative criticism surrounding
Lolita is taking place on TikTok and tumbler and not

(52:42):
in academic journals. Yes, I am, I absolutely am. And
a lot of this analysis, as you just heard, relates
directly to Lana del Rey's romanticizing Lolita. And we haven't
even made it to YouTube yet, m hyah. Lolita content

(53:13):
on YouTube is all over the place. Most famously, the
entire movie has been up in its entirety for free
for nearly a decade, and there's also a lot of
fan cuts of the movie and the press material surrounding it.
There's also a fair amount of content analyzing Lolita. The
best of it, in my opinion, comes from Miss Lola

(53:35):
or Dolores, who we spoke with a couple of weeks ago.
Her content about Lolita not only performs well, it's very nuanced.
In the hour long we need to talk about Lolita,
she talks about movie and stage adaptations. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
R Kelly to the grooming and mistreatment of underaged people
by a famous YouTuber. She's also done a video reviewing

(53:56):
Lowe's diary and attempt at rewriting the Nabokoff book from
Dolora This Perspective, and another video about Launa del Rey
as a problematic faith. I want to share a little
more of our interview here because nuanced discussion and YouTube
do not always mesh and I found her approach and
experiences to be very relevant to the current state of
Lolita discourse. So here's a little more of our conversation.

(54:20):
YouTube is a unique platform and that it has like
exceptionally intense paras social relationships. So I knew if I
was going to do a video about such a serious topic,
I wanted to try to use that to my advantage. UM,
and I think that's the reason why many people felt
comfortable reaching out to me and opening up. I got

(54:42):
like a flood of responses. Was it before before the
Lolita video? After? During what was the what was the
kind of the process there of reaching out? Well, at
the end of the video, I had a cult action
UM where I said, you know, if you're going through
a situation and you need someone to talk to you
can reach out to me. UM, And I got like

(55:06):
dozens at this point, I've received hundreds of letters, a
whole flurry of conspiracy theories about um, who I knew
or if I was. You know, it got so it
got so wild because the first video blew up so
much that people thought I was like a plant or something,
as if that's how YouTube works, which it's not. I
I got so much hate and love and you know,

(55:28):
but this is the thing is I wouldn't say that
it's equally taxing. But even though it makes me happy
that all of these young girls are reaching out, and
although I'm so glad, and I still keep in touch
with some of them, you know, or they'll send me
updates six months later saying, hey, like my mom left
my stepdad and we're moving to a new state and
like or um he's getting charged or all of this,

(55:51):
or like thank you so much. UM, that's wonderful. But
it is a lot of emotional labor for Like, again,
I wasn't trained. I did child psychology in school, but um,
that's not enough. UM. I used to go to bed
at a reasonable hour. Um, but sometimes at night I
just lay back and I think about the horrible things

(56:12):
people have felt safe confessing to me. Um. And again,
I it's wonderful for the teenage girls, and it's but
you know the problem with these Paris Thilos relationships is
when they're not really listening to you, when they just
like hear someone talking about a thing that they like. Um.
They these these men who think you understand me, and

(56:36):
it's like, no, I don't understand you. I understand my
abuser because I've gone to therapy. Uh. It's it's the
kind of project that I honestly thought I would I
would want to like, I would want to undertake. But
after that initial video, UM, it took me almost a
year to release another video on Lolita because I was
just so overwhelm and and it's you know, it's every

(56:59):
time I released a video on Lolita, I get another
slew of emails. Thank you so much again to Dolores
and remember to check out her channel linked below. Finally,
I wanted to touch on the fashion subculture called non
sexual nymphete fashion that I referenced at the beginning discussion
of this community primarily exists on YouTube. I learned about

(57:22):
it pretty early into my research process, and like Lolita
tumbler in the twenties. It may not be what you expect,
so we touched on this at the beginning of the
episode as well, But to reiterate what is the difference
between Japanese Lolita fashion and nymphete fashion. Lolita fashion is
a fashion subculture that again in Japan in the seventies ish.

(57:44):
The history of this community is kind of hard to
trace and revolves around cute aesthetics. It's defined by voluminous
crinoline skirts, puffy sleeves. You know, not imagery really associated
with Lolita, the book or the movies at all. It's
an extremely popular fashion movement and was created as a
reaction to the rigid gender expectations and aesthetics in Japan,

(58:06):
and it's now become a prominent movement worldwide. Designer Naoto
Haruka explains Lolita fashion like this back in two thousand
and eight in The Japan Times. One of the salient
points about Lolita is that it is really a fashion
that is not intended to attract men. The women are
creating their own world into which they can get away

(58:26):
from the pressures of the larger society. Lolita fashion also
pulls inspiration from French Rococo Aesthetics and Alice in Wonderland.
Remember Lewis Carroll from episode one. You can go back
if you like. So it's not related to Lolita or
Nymphete fashion. So I'm just gonna stop talking about it now. So,
Dolores Hayes has spawned a hyper feminine fashion movement that

(58:48):
exists alongside and in direct conversation with Nymphete, Tumbler and
current nymphet online communities, which is why it's generally just
called nymphet fashion. You're about to hear Skyler rain Again,
a twenty something prominent American member of the nympet fashion
community on YouTube, Instagram, Tumbler, other places I probably haven't
heard of, who ironically first got interested by dabbling in

(59:11):
Japanese lovely to fashion years ago. Here's a bit from
Skyler's video. Watch this before you get into nymphet fashion
from you understand that Dolores Hayes was twelve years old
and Humbard Humbard was like thirty seven. Don't try and
make that golos. That's not aesthetic. The nimfet aesthetic is
like it's Cherry's, it's getting them, it's picnics. It's like
lots of greenery and butterflies, flowers, daisys, all of that

(59:34):
kind of stuff that's like the perfect nymphetiessthetic kind of
isn't aesthetic. Don't try to make it for my Skyler
started making these videos in her early twenties after getting
interested in the fashion of the Seven movie, and started
getting actively engaged in Nymphat Fashion her freshman year of college.
Her channel has now been active for over four years

(59:54):
and has a small but mighty subscriber base of around
thirteen thousand subscribers, with even more on Instagram, um and Tumblr.
Skyler's main objective is to legitimize ninfant fashion as something
that can exist independent of kink or sex and instead
exist on its own merits as nineties Lolita the book
inspired fashion, and for her younger audience, Skylar is pretty

(01:00:16):
clear where she stands on the fetishizing of the low
vida Humbard relationship, speaking to that here in a video
called criticism for Ninfant Fashion and the Community in May.
One thing I want to bring up is to all
of my younger audience, because I know that there are
some younger people who watch me don't try to go
after old guys. That's not what nimfant fashion is. That's

(01:00:38):
what the fetishizers do, which is something I don't support.
It's extremely dangerous. I can guarantee you, guys, if you
read the book Lolita a k a. The actual story
of Lolita, not the movie adaptations that had to be
censored in order to not be banned everywhere because it
would be too controversial. If you would actually read the
book and see all of this suffering, that will lead
a went through how horrible and mean, how Umbert was.

(01:01:00):
Because what you guys are seeing in the movie was
just a movie adaptation of Lolita. You're not getting the
actual Elita because lots of things are different in the book.
The idea of an old guy treating you like a
princess or something, get that out of your head. Get
that out of your head because that's not what Humberd did.
What humber did was groom her. And that's what these

(01:01:22):
old predator guys would do to you. So don't contact them.
If they come to you, block them, don't interact with
them more. All the stories. Stay away from old guys,
because I promise you it's not going to be our
romantic ending. So the majority of her videos are fashion focused,
but Skyler is also using her platform to meaningfully engage
with the text that the fashion movement is pulling from,

(01:01:43):
and this goes for the entire community. In her video
are You a Nymphete? The original meaning of nymphete, Skyler
goes in deep on the origin of the term nymphet
from Humbered Humbered buying a buck off and how that
relates to her community. I'm going to explain in why
the Google definition slash what's it called Merriam Webster definition

(01:02:05):
of nymphete is wrong if we're talking about it in
the original sense. So Google said that a nymphete is
an attractive and sexually mature young girl. Then Miriam Webster
said a sexually pre precocious girl barely in our teens.
Also a sexually attractive young woman. Personal news of namphitt
n they're saying that in the novel, this is the

(01:02:28):
way nymphete was used. So like, that's that's weird. And
Nabokov had his own words to say about exactly these definitions.
The interviewer asked Nabokov, like, what connection does his interest
in butterflies have and this is what Nabokov said. I
have reworked the classification of various groups of butterflies, have

(01:02:50):
described and figured several species on subspecies. My name's for
the microsoftic organs that I have been the first to
second portray have safely found their ways into biological dictionary.
Compare this to the wretched entry under nymphete and Webster's
latest addition. From this we can see that Nabokov wasn't
exactly happy from the Webster edition and Nabokov trash talking

(01:03:10):
Webster doesn't even stuff there. And another interview, he goes on,
I think that the harmful judges who defined to day
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. So um, can we agree
that the Google definition is uh not correct? I think
everyone should be going to Nabokov when we're trying to say,

(01:03:34):
like what the original definition of nimphete is. And now
for my last interview I have with Naboka fair out
of Mr Humbert's manic gaze, there's no nympheta. The Nymphet
only exists through the obsession that destroys Humbert. This is
an essential aspect of a singular book that has been
falsified by an artificial popularity. This is probably the most

(01:03:55):
important of the interviews that I mentioned throughout this whole thing,
so the pull from the Altar Tumbler Lolita community. Skylar
Rain dedicates a lot of time to the aesthetics, but
she's also releasing twenty minute videos doing deep dives on
the book, the authorship of the book, and story specifics.
I literally sent this video to the book of his biographer,

(01:04:18):
Brian Boyd, who I spoke with back in episode two,
and he was really impressed by it. Skylar suggests the
following for people hoping to get into an infant fashion
who want to engage with the community and be a
quote unquote good representative of this community. In her most
recent video, she encourages the nymphet community to educate newcomers
on the anti child sex abuse stance of the community,

(01:04:41):
as well as providing context for the abuse that takes
place in the book. She encourages people to use the
hashtag no King nymphette here she is speaking to that
in watch this before you get into nymphet fashion. I
started a tag that you can use on Instagram or
Tumbler or whatever. The tag is just no King Nimpette.
But with this tag, I wanted to be able to

(01:05:01):
bring together all the people within the nifut fashion community
who are very much so against the sexualization of nimfut
fashion or the Lada. They just simply like the fashion.
The theme that runs through all these communities is present
in Skylar's ninfant fashion videos as well advice and support
for other people looking to join the community. She warns

(01:05:22):
newcomers of likely bad faith retaliation from others in comment sections.
In the same video, Skylar pushes against the body normativity
of n infant fashion. While she is a thin, white
passing woman herself, I don't know what her exact background is.
She tells her viewers that it's fashion, it's close, it's
an aesthetic, and therefore it for everybody. I don't need

(01:05:44):
to tell you this, but teenagers are a source of
infinite ridicule. When I was one, I actively tried to
distance myself from things that were popular, and then enjoyed
most of those same things. In secret in an effort
to display that I wasn't like other girls, when in
fact I was exactly like other girls when I was

(01:06:05):
in high school and then a little bit older on Tumbler.
Reading Lolita at all was a botched attempt at assuring
the people around me, and more importantly, reassuring myself that
I was not like other girls. Other girls were reading
Twilight and Sarah Desson, which I also read, but only
in the privacy of my own home, with the intimacy

(01:06:27):
of a library book that had already been page through
by fifty other teenagers before me, in varying shrounds of secrecy,
which is why I approached the online culture surrounding Lolita
misguided as some of it is, with some overprotectiveness. While
these communities have overcome a lot of the male yeahs
abuser centric narratives that adaptations and references to Lolita have

(01:06:49):
had over the years, looking at these blogs also compounded
my frustration with the Adrian Line adaptation of Nabokov's book,
as well as Lana del Rey's musical messaging, because these
two are unquestionably the visual backbones of these communities, and
both are narratives designed about child sex abuse by grown

(01:07:09):
adults who are pushing that marketable, consenting narrative and doing
it in a very visually appealing way. Scrolling through these
images now, it just strikes me how it's very possible
to make an image of Dolores Hayes that is beautiful
and meaningful without selling her story out. But no one's
really done that on a large scale. And this community

(01:07:31):
loves Dolores Hayes, and so they work with what they have,
even though most of what they're given by pop culture
is deeply flawed, as in those Tumbler disclaimers that we
read earlier. These communities have to constantly be working through
this cognitive dissonance. I know she's being abused. I know
Humbert can't be trusted. It's just that the only image
is available serve Humbert's narrative. What else are you supposed

(01:07:54):
to do? There need to be better options for this community.
There needs to be a better adaptation of this story.
So I hope this episode was helpful in contextualizing how
we see Dolores, whether that means how we see her
from across a bookstore while we're being marketed to how
we see her scrolling through a timeline online and for

(01:08:14):
young people who strongly connect to her, how people see
themselves within her. It's aesthetically driven, absolutely, but based on
what I know of the internet communities, it has a
whole lot to do with the content of the story
as well. And as usual, the culture at large underestimates
teenagers constantly. They are reading the book, and while the

(01:08:35):
way that it's interpreted certainly ranges quite a bit, it's
disingenuous to say that the people in these communities are
incapable of doing a new one's to read of the book,
particularly right now, they seem to be reading it in
a pretty radical way. So I'm not saying that nymphet
online culture is above criticism. It isn't. It has at
different times included wild misreads and includes a lot of

(01:08:58):
romanticizing prepared situated by popular movie adaptations, and how pop
culture has swallowed dolorous Hayes whole and includes a lot
of romanticizing perpetuated by popular movie adaptations. Elijah Maisa explains
in her recent video why black girlhood is not valued
in the Dolet community. There is a need to stop
centering whiteness and rigid femininity with appreciating Dolorous Hayes. She

(01:09:23):
speaks about it here, so I want to include a
little bit of that video as well, and I did
some editing for clarity. I just wanted to talk about
black girl home and why I feel like within the
community specifically, black girlhood is not viewed with the same

(01:09:43):
grace that white girlhood is. I think it's unfair that
black girls are hyper sexualized already. And if a black
girl wants to do something that is normal to her,
she wearing a denomni script with the baby fat too
top and bamboo ear rings, why is she not viewed

(01:10:04):
under the same numphat aesthetic lens as say a white girl,
and you know, listening a typical nymphat clothing with the
bardo top and the sailor shorts speaks Fundamentally, they're the
same outfit a tube slash crop top and a mini
skirt or short shorts, but one is viewed under the

(01:10:27):
num fat lens, but the others are viewed as more
adult or she is over bisexual, even though she's just
wearing clothes and fundamentally fit the same pattern as a
white girl does. Where we can be in the most
frelly pink baby ish outfits and still be coded as
hyper aggressive and hyper sexual and white room that's never

(01:10:49):
really seemed to understand the fact that they did not
see us as well the numbers of communities subliminally. And
the thing is nymphat aesthetic at his heart is about
for claiming girlhood and not necessarily innocence ex something you
have to be an innocent person to reclaiming girl and
I think purity like complexes and purity politics are just

(01:11:10):
not helpful. But it's just abouid claiming your own girlhood
and your self in a way that feels comfortable with you.
And I don't want to say femininity either, because I
think feminity is very different for everyone, and I think
that is an unfair box to put people in, especially
when you consider like the amount of non binary no

(01:11:33):
as there were, or like trans and beds and fall less.
So I think like femininities and the gild were either.
It's not really about the reclaiming femininity is more about
claiming the way you grew up. So that's why I
said girlhood for shorthands, but I guess you could say
a childhood too. Reclaiming girlhood as Malaijah describes it is
a better description of the goals of deliveracities online than

(01:11:55):
I've read in any scholars paper and requires that the
community to be inclusive of what that means for everybody.
Dolores Hayes as a character whose experiences have spoken to
a wide array of people, to nymphettes who present more
feminine and fun let's who present more masculine, to young

(01:12:16):
people of all genders and races, and that is absolutely
a fact that needs to be taken into consideration in
future adaptations. Do Laura's is seen, like we've been talking
about in relation to you, and the power that sort
of icon has shouldn't be underestimated or squandered. Do Laura's
feels more present in these communities than she does on

(01:12:39):
most of the covers of Lolita, or, for that matter,
in most of the movies, because it's mostly kids her
age processing her experiences. And I'm just going to throw
in one final God damn it, Lana del Rey. Next week,
in our penultimate episode of Lolita Podcast, we speak to
some of the women behind these images, the young actors

(01:13:01):
who have played Lolita over the years, through interviews and
archival looks. At their lives. We'll take a look at
the challenges, emotional stressors and lack of protection afforded to
these actors, all while their respective Humbert's continued onto happy careers.
Why is that talented actors treated as images for consumption?

(01:13:22):
Next week on Lolita Podcast. Lolita Podcast is an I
Heart Radio production. It is written and hosted by me
Jamie Loftus, produced by Sophie Lichtman, Beth and Marco Luso,
Miles Gray and Jack O'Brien. It is edited by the
wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoe Blade. Theme music
is from Brad Diggert and My guest voices this week

(01:13:44):
are Robert Evans, Caitlin Derante, Melissa Lozada, Oliva, Maggie Mayfish
and Daniel Goodman. See you next week when I Well

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8: Dolores Logs In

1. Stuff You Should Know