Re: Hollywood Lolita: The Nymphet Syndrome ..

"Changing Morays" sounds like eels trading shifts watching over Ariel's undersea palace :)

While the premise sounds interesting, the excerpts seem to play on the same titillation/condemnation cycle which feeds Fox news. Gee Whizzies, the illustrations alone plumb the vaults of Hollywood for Images long forgotten by many. And while no author should be judged by their own jacket-copy, the back cover blurb decries all of this as dark and sordid.

Of course, most of what it is, is irrelevant. To presume that sexuality is purely the provence of adulthood, and that therefore the iconography of adulthood is what confers sexuality is the usual cant. For those whose senses are so dulled and their libidos so circumscribed, of course the notion of Pedophilia can be reduced to some adult salivating over a child wearing enough make-up to make Tammy-Faye apply the cold-creme. They forget the one essential element, that the ChildLover loves the child, not the prospect of forcing her into drag.

And neither Hollywood, nor the author has gotten beyond reading Nabokov's piece of satire as if it were non-fiction. Perhaps we should count our blessings that they're still chasing figments and phantoms. But geeze, if they're gonna try to market child sexuality; they could try unblinkering their eyes. Sometimes it seems that only European filmmakers can bear to gaze upon the beauty of a child without filtering it through presumptions about why sex is bad, children aren't people and childhood sexuality is double-unh-unh-wrong. Oftentimes the strongest voices in such cinema are female; Diane Kourys, Lucille Hadzihalilovic &tc. They're in the best position to refute the idea that girls are asexual creatures.

Unfortunately in the States, it seems that the old-boys network and the sex-negative "feminists" have crowded the sex-positive feminists out of the marketplace. Truth-telling and empowerment have no place in this mythology.

Through the "Lolita" lens, Jodie Foster was at her most sexualized in Taxi Driver. But for the rest of us, The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane was closer to a realistic statement.

Dante