Speaker 1: Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
Speaker 1: and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of ways to see Dolores Hayes, and how you see
Speaker 1: her really depends on not just where you're sitting in
Speaker 1: the room, but all of the places you've been and
Speaker 1: experiences you've had before you even enter the room in
Speaker 1: the first place. And you're like, Okay, the metaphor is
Speaker 1: getting a little heavy here, but go with me for
Speaker 1: a second. There's a million ways to see and perceive
Speaker 1: Dolores Hayes. Most are exposed first to the images laid
Speaker 1: out that reference an image that her abuser constructed, whether
Speaker 1: that's in movies or advertisement or pop music. Some of
Speaker 1: us see her through the peaks that the Book of Humbert.
Speaker 1: Humbert gives to her true authentic self in his book,
Speaker 1: Dolores being a better tennis player than Humbert but always
Speaker 1: letting him win anyways. Dolores crying herself to sleep at night,
Speaker 1: Dolores dropping a knife onto her foot upon seeing her
Speaker 1: friend's father genuinely expressing love to his daughter. But no
Speaker 1: matter how you see her, we all see Dolores in
Speaker 1: relation to ourselves just like we see really anything. There's
Speaker 1: a four part series that you can watch for free
Speaker 1: on YouTube called Ways of Seeing, which was originally aired
Speaker 1: on BBC two in nine two, and it's hosted by
Speaker 1: writer John Burger. Maybe you've been taught this in a
Speaker 1: class you've taken before, or maybe you have like an
Speaker 1: exhausting friend that brings it up at parties. But Ways
Speaker 1: of Seeing is all about the ways that modern audiences
Speaker 1: consume mass images and how different image consumption is from
Speaker 1: the centuries of sacred imagery being more difficult to seek
Speaker 1: out before mass production was possible. There's some parts of
Speaker 1: this documentary that are really cool and others that are
Speaker 1: really dated. How you can devote an entire episode on
Speaker 1: how women view themselves by speaking to five white women
Speaker 1: in Britain of the same financial classes like um come on.
Speaker 1: But in the first episode, John Burger conducts a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting experiment that I think uniquely suited to how we
Speaker 1: see Dolores so okay for science picture. The most popular
Speaker 1: image in our culture of Lolita Sue Lion gazing over
Speaker 1: those heart shaped sunglasses in two. Here's what Burger says
Speaker 1: in the first episode of Ways of Seeing as you
Speaker 1: look at them now on your screen. Your wallpaper is
Speaker 1: around them, your window is opposite them, your carpet is
Speaker 1: below them. At the same moment, they are on many
Speaker 1: other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colors, different sounds.
Speaker 1: You are seeing them in the context of your own life.
Speaker 1: They are surrounded not by guilt frames, but by the
Speaker 1: familiarity of the room you are in and the people
Speaker 1: around you. Okay, so let's think about the Sioux Lion
Speaker 1: image in that context. This image has been reproduced countless times,
Speaker 1: whether it's this exact image or later reimagined versions of it,
Speaker 1: but the way that you see it is uniquely connected
Speaker 1: to you, You goddamn snowflake. Whether you like it or not,
Speaker 1: you're gonna see this heart shaped glasses image in the
Speaker 1: context of your own life. So some people are going
Speaker 1: to see a sexually appealing and consenting underage girl. Others
Speaker 1: might see an aspirational image. Wow, I want to look
Speaker 1: like that. Others might recoil from the image. How could
Speaker 1: they make a girl pose like that? She's so young?
Speaker 1: Another person might say, Hey, I've forgot I was going
Speaker 1: to watch that movie. The image exists in a context
Speaker 1: and not just the societal context we've been talking about
Speaker 1: throughout this series, it's also the context of you, how
Speaker 1: this image comes to you and how you interpret it.
Speaker 1: John Burger also speaks to how the meaning of an
Speaker 1: image changes when placed alongside other images. A picture of
Speaker 1: Sue Lion and heart shaped Glasses on its own has
Speaker 1: a different implied meaning than if the heart shaped glasses
Speaker 1: picture is placed beside a photo of Sue Lion when
Speaker 1: she was the years older, or if the heart shaped
Speaker 1: glasses picture is placed next to an image of Stanley
Speaker 1: Kubrick berating a female actor. When placed next to something else,
Speaker 1: the meaning of the original image often changes. I've now
Speaker 1: emphasized the ways in which reproduction makes the meaning of
Speaker 1: works of art ambiguous. This is not as negative as
Speaker 1: it necessarily sounds, if we realize what is happening. What
Speaker 1: it means in theory is reproduction of works of art
Speaker 1: can be used by anybody for their own purposes. Images
Speaker 1: can be used like words, we can talk with them.
Speaker 1: Reproduction should make it easier to connect our experience of
Speaker 1: art directly with other experiences. So, as John Burger is
Speaker 1: describing this, we see a series of very nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: images juxtaposed next to each other for our purposes. Think
Speaker 1: of a bulletin board in a teenager's room where there's
Speaker 1: pictures of celebrities pinned up next to pictures of friends
Speaker 1: and family. Think of vision boards that people made back
Speaker 1: when New Year's resolutions and hope for the future was
Speaker 1: still a thing that we had. And while we're at it,
Speaker 1: let's take that same energy and apply it to the
Speaker 1: wonderful world of online. Think of how images interact with
Speaker 1: each other and change meaning based on what kind of
Speaker 1: Pinterest board they're placed on, Or think of how images
Speaker 1: interact with each other on a Tumblr page. It's a
Speaker 1: full on death battle of esthetics. Each image on its
Speaker 1: own has the original intended meaning from the artist, and
Speaker 1: then that meaning probably changes when it arrives to you,
Speaker 1: And then that meaning can change again when you see
Speaker 1: it placed on a scrollable grid of hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of other images. To quote a late two thousands inscrutable
Speaker 1: Facebook relationship status, it's complicated. In an essay she wrote
Speaker 1: on her own experiences with Lolita in the upcoming collection
Speaker 1: Lolita in the Afterlife, one of my favorite writers, Morgan Jerkins,
Speaker 1: directs us to in a bulk of quote from a
Speaker 1: January four interview with Playboy writer al And Toffler asks
Speaker 1: Nabokov if he ever regretted writing Lolita nearly ten years
Speaker 1: after its original publication. Nabokov replied, no, I shall never
Speaker 1: regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle,
Speaker 1: its composition and its solution at the same time, since
Speaker 1: one is a mirror view of the other depending on
Speaker 1: the way you look the way you look. Dolores exists
Speaker 1: in relation to you, as we've discussed since the first episode,
Speaker 1: and she exists in relation to advertising and commercial images. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about how the image of Dolores
Speaker 1: Hayes has functioned as a community builter, and how the
Speaker 1: reproduction of her image and the discussion of her character
Speaker 1: has been connecting people to each other since the dawn
Speaker 1: of the Internet. Because there is in fact a little
Speaker 1: bit of justice in this world. People who have more
Speaker 1: in common with Doloras Hayes than Humbert. Humbert have found
Speaker 1: and appreciated her over the years and formed communities around
Speaker 1: her image as well learned today, these are pretty widely
Speaker 1: diverse groups of people spanning many races, sexualities, genders, and
Speaker 1: many are survivors of abuse. So that's ideal, right, do
Speaker 1: we do it? Well? Hold on, because if we're building
Speaker 1: a community around the icon and the image of Dolores Hayes,
Speaker 1: we need to remember who has prepared and curated the
Speaker 1: image of Dolores Hayes for us over the last sixty
Speaker 1: five years. Well, mainly advertisers who are translating Humbert Humbert
Speaker 1: the abuser's account of Dolores Hayes basically at face value.
Speaker 1: And while these fan communities can certainly break through a
Speaker 1: lot of this noise by bringing the perspective of their
Speaker 1: own experiences, when an icon is shaped completely by the
Speaker 1: male gaze, and this image of them is perpetuated by
Speaker 1: every movie ad or pop music campaign it can ladge
Speaker 1: onto for over half a century, aren't things bound to
Speaker 1: get messy? Let's find out. Dolores logs in This is
Speaker 1: lowly to Podcast. Hello and welcome back to Lolita Podcast.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jamie Loftus, and today we're taking
Speaker 1: a look at the brief but fascinating history of Lolita
Speaker 1: fan forums. Now, there's no doubt that there's ones that
Speaker 1: I have missed here because, as with all things extremely online,
Speaker 1: these histories are very specific, they're very intense, and they
Speaker 1: can be very difficult to find. I'm going to present
Speaker 1: Lolita forums to you from three points in internet history today,
Speaker 1: one snapshot from the early two thousd s, one from
Speaker 1: the mid two thousand tents, and a look at the
Speaker 1: state of Lolita forums or the nymphet community as it
Speaker 1: was called up until pretty recently today in the twenties.
Speaker 1: And will also be touching on the associated esthetic movement
Speaker 1: non sexual nymphete fashion. So before we get into the
Speaker 1: history here, I wouldn't start this episode by saying that,
Speaker 1: while I think it's important to understand the histories of
Speaker 1: these forums and how they've evolved over the decades, it's
Speaker 1: important to acknowledge that, as many of the members I'll
Speaker 1: be quoting today will tell you, there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of direct and indirect harm done by online communities that
Speaker 1: have at any point glorified predatory relationships and child sex
Speaker 1: abuse in any way, no matter who these communities are
Speaker 1: run by. I've heard from so many listeners on our
Speaker 1: discord and in emails who describe being genuinely fucked up
Speaker 1: by Lolita Tumbler in particular, and I am no exception
Speaker 1: to that rule, particularly when encountering unities that are splashy,
Speaker 1: visually driven and not communicating very much in the way
Speaker 1: of context or nuance. It's been a really commonly relayed
Speaker 1: experience that finding these blogs while still a kid and
Speaker 1: very much in the process of figuring out who you are,
Speaker 1: often looking to online peers for guidance on how to
Speaker 1: be this messaging could be really harmful. I want to
Speaker 1: share two messages I've received on the subject, both anonymously.
Speaker 1: Of course, Tumbler introduced me to the Lolita style, mainly
Speaker 1: through Laana del Ray. I spent most of my time
Speaker 1: after school on tumbler esthetic blogs, which created a very
Speaker 1: rose colored idea of Lolita. I had no context for
Speaker 1: the actual novel and felt uncomfortable and intrigued by a
Speaker 1: lot of the media this was around, and me and
Speaker 1: my best friend were some of the nerdiest girls at
Speaker 1: our school, nonetheless, who would spend lunch hour singing to
Speaker 1: Launa del Ray songs, specifically off to the races in
Speaker 1: my friend's car. Nearly every day when we were home
Speaker 1: from school. We would repost things about the music and
Speaker 1: aesthetic on Tumblr. There's a strange thing for me, since
Speaker 1: at school I was known as the smart girl. Listening
Speaker 1: to the music and engaging with the culture surrounding Lolita
Speaker 1: felt like a way to escape from how it is
Speaker 1: perceived by others. Who says also pre related to my
Speaker 1: transition to almost exclusively crop toss and a skirts for
Speaker 1: a year or so. That ties into a couple other things.
Speaker 1: Though I am now able to see a lot more
Speaker 1: of the flaws within the culture. Let's I've gotten older
Speaker 1: and had more experiences in my life. I was the
Speaker 1: subject of a lot of attention from adult men when
Speaker 1: I was young, and I really engaged with the book
Speaker 1: in the movie, generally not in a healthy way. I
Speaker 1: was on Tumbler when the Lolita aesthetic exploded, and I
Speaker 1: feel like that aesthetic will always be rooted somewhere deep
Speaker 1: in my brain. I truly can't overstate how many messages
Speaker 1: like this I've received from listeners with a wide variety
Speaker 1: of backgrounds, and how much of it is connected to
Speaker 1: Laana del Rey. So to the several listeners who have
Speaker 1: contacted me asking why I'm talking about her so much,
Speaker 1: it's because current Lolita imagery is very connected to her
Speaker 1: early career. From what I've noticed, there's a notable uptick
Speaker 1: in activity in these online communities, first when movie became
Speaker 1: more accessible at the same time the internet did in
Speaker 1: the late nineties early two thousand's, then again in the
Speaker 1: early two thousand tents, when Lana del Rey came into prominence. Okay,
Speaker 1: one last meme, I promise this is from Instagram user
Speaker 1: psyche Delicious three thirty three from just a couple of
Speaker 1: days ago. Here are a few different panels of the memes.
Speaker 1: Those red flags look pretty green when you idolize Laana
Speaker 1: del Rey as a preteen. I would give anything to
Speaker 1: be able to forget all the ship I learned from tumbler. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is over some images of common Lolita tumbler posts.
Speaker 1: Do not trust bitches who post shit like this, worst
Speaker 1: mistake of my life. And then lastly, a picture of
Speaker 1: Lana del Ray with the speech bubble saying this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I romanticized the little lad to aesthetics so much that
Speaker 1: I got hundreds of my underage fans dangerously obsessed with it.
Speaker 1: So what. There is a big reckoning going on right
Speaker 1: now about misinterpretations of the book stemming from Internet culture
Speaker 1: of the two thousand tens, and it's been fascinating to
Speaker 1: watch it unfold. And a lot of comments like this
Speaker 1: cropped up when Lana del Ray's latest scandal involving her
Speaker 1: using very racially charged language to explain how she is
Speaker 1: not racist. But when she did this and every time
Speaker 1: she does this, there is a wave of tweets from
Speaker 1: people who were there for her big moment on Tumbler
Speaker 1: in the early two thousand's and how that has affected
Speaker 1: their image of themselves. There is a great recent Twitter
Speaker 1: threat about this from Jezebel staff writer actually rees from
Speaker 1: this last week on the subject. Here's two of the tweets. Okay,
Speaker 1: but being on Tumbler when Lana was first coming out
Speaker 1: was an experience. Let me tell you. She goes on
Speaker 1: the gift sets, the cultural appropriation arguments, the SNL thing,
Speaker 1: where are my veteran benefits? And she's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: this was a subculture on the Internet from almost ten
Speaker 1: years ago, and it is haunting people. Many of Llama's
Speaker 1: credics have characterized her framing of Lolita, which we discussed
Speaker 1: at length a few episodes ago, as a form of
Speaker 1: paras social grooming and if you're not familiar with the term.
Speaker 1: It consists of two kind of interconnected terms. The first
Speaker 1: is para social, so i'll go lemony snicket mode for
Speaker 1: a second. Paras social is a word which here means
Speaker 1: a psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated
Speaker 1: encounters with performers in the mass media. So this is
Speaker 1: the feeling a consumer gets when they feel like they
Speaker 1: know someone who is a public figure, when of course
Speaker 1: that public figure doesn't know them, Like when I talked
Speaker 1: to like a framed photograph of Rachel Weiss. She cannot
Speaker 1: hear me, she does not know me, but I love
Speaker 1: her performances so much that I feel like she's my friend. Tumbler.
Speaker 1: Users of the Two Thousand Tents didn't know Lana del Rey,
Speaker 1: but they did know her image, and her image and
Speaker 1: music made this young audience often feel like they did
Speaker 1: actually know her and that she was someone to look
Speaker 1: up to. So the second half of that phrase is
Speaker 1: when we've discussed on the podcast before, and that's grooming,
Speaker 1: which means quote when someone builds a relationship, trust and
Speaker 1: emotional connection with a child or young person so they
Speaker 1: can manipulate, exploit, and abuse them unquote The implication of
Speaker 1: para social grooming is basically that a public figure that
Speaker 1: many kids looked up to and felt like they knew,
Speaker 1: made them feel like and made money off of convincing
Speaker 1: underage fans that the dynamic between Humbert Humbert and Lolita
Speaker 1: was romantic and something to aspire to. I mean, after all,
Speaker 1: if it wasn't, why would your para social friend Laana
Speaker 1: del Right be saying it? And why would all your
Speaker 1: online friends be so encouraging and excited about it. This cycle,
Speaker 1: as many have told me, created at times a vortex
Speaker 1: of misinformation and mischaracterization that young users were spreading to
Speaker 1: each other. All this to say, there is no doubt
Speaker 1: that Nymphete and Lolita forums have over the years provided
Speaker 1: both a space for teens to congregate around Dolores Hayes
Speaker 1: and spread a lot of confusion well into the two
Speaker 1: thousand tents that glorified the Humbert Lolita dynamic and perpetuated
Speaker 1: information that really messed with people's heads. And yes, Lana's
Speaker 1: approach to framing Lolita has a lot, a lot, a
Speaker 1: lot to do with where those misconceptions were coming from.
Speaker 1: That said, I think it's really valuable information to know
Speaker 1: a little more about the history of these forums and
Speaker 1: all the nuances that come with them. So let's get started.
Speaker 1: But first, let's rewind the clock about twenty years back
Speaker 1: to the early two thousands. George W. Bush has stolen
Speaker 1: the election. Songs like Oops, I Did It Again and
Speaker 1: Drops of Jupiter are topping that charts. Low Rise Jeans
Speaker 1: are offensively on Trent and the Sex in the City
Speaker 1: and Spice Girls driven girl power. Highly commercialized third wave
Speaker 1: feminism is kind of the best we have to offer
Speaker 1: in the mainstream. Adrian Lines movie was a hit overseas
Speaker 1: in n but in the US was relegated to showtime
Speaker 1: and home video. Not that that stopped teams with access
Speaker 1: to a Blockbuster membership to getting their hands on a copy.
Speaker 1: It's in this era that the first Lolita fan websites
Speaker 1: begin to crop up. Around this time, there weren't many
Speaker 1: centralized places to find conversation around Lolita. It was something
Speaker 1: you had to really look for, predating all the big
Speaker 1: social media giants, and something that's challenging but not impossible
Speaker 1: to find traces of now these days you'll find almost
Speaker 1: exclusively dead links and dead profiles, but here's a summary
Speaker 1: of what remains or is remembered in old blogs and
Speaker 1: reddit posts about these early Lolita message boards and forums,
Speaker 1: a real graveyard of the Internet. So I'll summarize some
Speaker 1: common themes. First, overwhelmingly users identify themselves as teenage girls
Speaker 1: on these forums. The topics they focus on kind of
Speaker 1: very There are conversations about the movie, definitely more so
Speaker 1: than the Stanley kuberc nine sixties one. There are images
Speaker 1: which are half dead links now of mostly young sis
Speaker 1: white girls imitating images from the movie, and some discussion
Speaker 1: of what they thought it meant to be a nymphete,
Speaker 1: with a pretty wide array of responses. Some users think
Speaker 1: that it is about presenting yourself as a cultural Elita,
Speaker 1: as an underaged person who is interested in people who
Speaker 1: are much older. Others are more willing to believe that
Speaker 1: it is an aesthetic or an attitude. Next, there is
Speaker 1: the occasional post or mentioned from dead linked users who
Speaker 1: creeped into these forums who are identifying as hum arts.
Speaker 1: So this is the Internet of the early two thousands, remember,
Speaker 1: so Generally claims of being an older, attractive doctor or
Speaker 1: lawyer are extremely difficult to verify, as they provide no
Speaker 1: photos or last names. These older men are tentatively tolerated
Speaker 1: in these communities, it appears, or at least are not
Speaker 1: asked to leave right away if they gaze from a
Speaker 1: respectful distance without harassing the teenage users. Then the occasional haters.
Speaker 1: There are rogue posts from people who warn these teen
Speaker 1: communities badly edited HTML, dizzying backgrounds and all, that these
Speaker 1: teens don't get Lolita, that it was actually a book
Speaker 1: about abuse, and that by discussing Dolores Hayes or admiring
Speaker 1: images of her in any way, they were inherently misunderstanding
Speaker 1: the texts. These posts are understandably not received very well
Speaker 1: in these communities, but not without reason, because my final
Speaker 1: observation is that even in the two thousands, there is
Speaker 1: a lot of conversation about Dolores Hayes herself, and it's
Speaker 1: clear that these teenagers have read the book. It would
Speaker 1: be an oversimplification to say that teen girls were glorifying
Speaker 1: the message of Lolita. I don't think that's necessarily true
Speaker 1: during this era. At least, it would be more accurate
Speaker 1: to say that they are glorifying the image of Dominique
Speaker 1: Swain as Lolita in a pre Lana del Rey world.
Speaker 1: This is the strongest image there was to pull from,
Speaker 1: along with other nineties era teen seductresses, your Drew Barrymore's,
Speaker 1: your Alicia Silverstones, and this era is generally a push
Speaker 1: and pull between wanting to be the girl Dominique Swain
Speaker 1: plays and genuinely discussing the Dolores Hayes of the book.
Speaker 1: So it's a mix of emulating these very male gaze
Speaker 1: images fed by nineties and early two thousands culture, and
Speaker 1: some pushing back on them. It's not unknown in these
Speaker 1: forums that Dolores was an abused child. The teen girls
Speaker 1: on the forum were not necessarily there to glorify relationships
Speaker 1: with older men. There are some talks about encounters they
Speaker 1: had with older men, but just as much talk about
Speaker 1: being interested in people at their age. For some users,
Speaker 1: and I could relate with this, the desire for someone
Speaker 1: older seemed a little more abstract and more of a
Speaker 1: response to the questionable maturity of teenage boys on offer.
Speaker 1: I mean personally, I definitely remember thinking how much better
Speaker 1: dating an older person would be than the filthy fourteen
Speaker 1: year old boys that I went to eighth grade with.
Speaker 1: So at this time, it's really a mix of different
Speaker 1: approaches to the material, grounded in a common interest in Dolores.
Speaker 1: While the core imagery is very tied into and as
Speaker 1: far as I was able to observe, motivated by interest
Speaker 1: in Adrian Lines adaptation, the users have clearly read the book. Look,
Speaker 1: the core difference I noticed with more contemporary teen users
Speaker 1: is a willingness to tolerate the presence of older men
Speaker 1: observing the forums and a less whole condemnation of the
Speaker 1: power dynamics within the book. What I was surprised by
Speaker 1: and kind of touched by, was that these were, however,
Speaker 1: completely dead now communities. At the time, they were teenagers
Speaker 1: talking to each other about their common experiences, saying that
Speaker 1: you could be a nymphant at any age. It's an attitude,
Speaker 1: it's an aesthetic, and the real commonality was processing their
Speaker 1: experiences through Nabokov's text and often through Adrian Lines movie.
Speaker 1: So the first wave of nymphet forums are clearly motivated
Speaker 1: by the nineties movie and briefly thrive in a pop
Speaker 1: culture landscape that was not shy. As we've discussed in
Speaker 1: many past episodes about eroticizing images of underaged teens, even
Speaker 1: making them at times active threats to older male characters
Speaker 1: rather than the other way around. But these forums die
Speaker 1: down and seem to stay dead as far as I
Speaker 1: could tell, for a while. But in the late two
Speaker 1: thousands and early two thousand tens that changes the work
Speaker 1: of Laana del Rey provides a new generation with a
Speaker 1: massive resurgence in these kinds of communities, with marked differences
Speaker 1: that reflect the changing values of our culture. So what
Speaker 1: I think is important to keep in mind, and something
Speaker 1: I feel is often lost in the discussion of Lolita
Speaker 1: at every point in these communities is this the online
Speaker 1: culture surrounding the book, And as we're about to learn,
Speaker 1: Lana del Rey's relation to it was a formative and
Speaker 1: confusing phase for many of the teens who were active
Speaker 1: within it at literally any point in time you can
Speaker 1: direct to I see discussions about this all the time
Speaker 1: on the Lolita podcast discord and an emails that I
Speaker 1: received from listeners. These online spaces are flawed and leave
Speaker 1: a lot to be wanting in terms of inclusive, civity
Speaker 1: and nuance, and we'll get to that in a bit,
Speaker 1: But they're curiated mainly by teenagers who are figuring ship
Speaker 1: out under constrictive and complicated societal pressures, not unlike Dolorous
Speaker 1: Hayes trying to figure herself out as a young teenager
Speaker 1: under the most traumatic circumstances you could imagine. Back So
Speaker 1: let's move forward. Enter Tumbler, the micro blogging what a
Speaker 1: ridiculous word platform established in two thousand seven and exploded
Speaker 1: in the early to mid two thousand tents. Going back
Speaker 1: into Tumbler for this episode gave me just just flared
Speaker 1: up a little bit of PTSD. Tumblers in the early
Speaker 1: informed my life in a way that I can't even
Speaker 1: fully describe. For for better and for worse, it still
Speaker 1: haunts me. Tumbler is a very visually driven platform, and
Speaker 1: essentially in the early what happens is that the forums
Speaker 1: that keep Elizabeth Russell participated in during the two thousand's
Speaker 1: evolve into nymphete tumb Lers. The main difference is that,
Speaker 1: due to the nature of this platform, these blogs are
Speaker 1: generally more driven by images than text, and the interface
Speaker 1: doesn't really encourage commenting or ongoing conversation in the way
Speaker 1: that Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or even TikTok does.
Speaker 1: That's not to say it's not impossible to have a
Speaker 1: conversation on Tumbler. It's very possible to build a community,
Speaker 1: but it's a visually driven community, and the Wilita Nymphet
Speaker 1: corner of Tumbler came into the analysis space in about fourteen.
Speaker 1: In this section, I'm going to be citing both analysis
Speaker 1: from outside writers looking into the community at the time,
Speaker 1: as well as Nymphet Tumbler historian eighteen year old Nlijah Mesa,
Speaker 1: who has made the most comprehensive history of this community
Speaker 1: on the entire Internet in a YouTube video called the
Speaker 1: Revisionist History of the Nymphet Community. She's our source on
Speaker 1: the inside, and I'm using clips of her video here
Speaker 1: with permission from her. Nalijah got involved on Nimphet Tumbler
Speaker 1: at age twelve back in twenty four teen. I'll let
Speaker 1: her describe how she first learned about it. So for
Speaker 1: some backstory, I am currently eighteen years old um, and
Speaker 1: I've been in the ny fact community since I was twelve.
Speaker 1: I want to say I was there since I joined
Speaker 1: because I had um listened to off to the racist
Speaker 1: by Lando the first time I want to comments to
Speaker 1: mention Lolita and I was like, oh, I wonder what
Speaker 1: it's about because the song that gives me such this
Speaker 1: weird nostalgic feelings that I don't understand. And I found
Speaker 1: out about Lolita that way, and then honestly, I didn't
Speaker 1: watch the movie until later, and then I just slowly
Speaker 1: found out about like the whole num faed thing through
Speaker 1: Tumbler because I saw a picture lived Tyler and I
Speaker 1: thought her ouse it was cute, it was a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. I'm not gonna lie like. I never really
Speaker 1: saw it as myself pretending to be dolors or pretending
Speaker 1: like I was in her situation. I watched the ninety
Speaker 1: seven Lolada, I was like, damn, her outfits are cute,
Speaker 1: and I decided to just like that. A lot of
Speaker 1: people seem to think that the NYMPACT community was filled
Speaker 1: with privileged white girls who had daddy kinks or um
Speaker 1: were sexually abused. It's not necessarily the case. Were some
Speaker 1: of them wealth your white girls, yes, but not a
Speaker 1: majority of them. They're don't like three, no, after there's
Speaker 1: like two, did we all have daddy kings? To know
Speaker 1: that there was a lot of lesbians like something that
Speaker 1: you don't know the NYMPHAC community was full of fucking
Speaker 1: lesbian gays only event. Okay, it was a lot of
Speaker 1: lesbians in the Pampat community, and also there was a
Speaker 1: lot of girls who had questions on people their age, Like,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just people fetishize, like obviously in every community
Speaker 1: there's good and bad. Of course, it was obviously some
Speaker 1: girls in the NYMPACT community who did fetishot as alidable.
Speaker 1: I will tell you what, not the best majority of them.
Speaker 1: It was not the beast jority of them. Because we
Speaker 1: policed within ourselves. We helped each other. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: one person tells you to do this and you do it.
Speaker 1: It was everyone worked together. Like we literally had an
Speaker 1: entire network. It was the NYM fed girl gang where
Speaker 1: we sent in like pedophiles, creeps, everybody would like cop
Speaker 1: in our d m s and we would send them
Speaker 1: to the police. Then after a while they stopped dm
Speaker 1: he goes or stopped controlling the track tag because they
Speaker 1: know they were going to be put on that network
Speaker 1: and then they knew that we were gonna get a
Speaker 1: fucking trouble. Ye, So the communities are very close knit
Speaker 1: and protective of other users. Now, back writers taking a
Speaker 1: look at this community saw it quite differently. Writer Sarah
Speaker 1: Catherine Cleaver wrote a butt nam Feed Tumblers pretty critically
Speaker 1: for the publication Show Studio. She describes the main components
Speaker 1: of the blogs at this time like this. Firstly, and obviously,
Speaker 1: Lolita quotes from the book, stills, memes, and gifts from
Speaker 1: either film. Kubrick two is better stylistically, but Adrian lens
Speaker 1: version is the more popular, probably because it's closer to
Speaker 1: the book, darker, more sexual, and far less perfect. Dominique
Speaker 1: Swan's screen tests from the same film denotes a real
Speaker 1: Lolita buff, as do the deleted scenes found in the DVD.
Speaker 1: Other age gap films seen over and over again include
Speaker 1: Pretty Baby, The Crush, Juna Julie. Then there are vintage signifiers,
Speaker 1: pulp novel covers ranging levels of bad taste, my personal
Speaker 1: favorite Daddy I'm Coming, photographs of vintage underwear, apparition, street photographs.
Speaker 1: There's a personal post I dropped my pen leture today
Speaker 1: and two guys in the lecture went to fetch it
Speaker 1: for me. And is this nymphat power or what hashtag
Speaker 1: nymphat hashtag thoughts. This aligns with Elijah's descriptions of the
Speaker 1: blogs at this time as well. But Cleaver's conclusions on
Speaker 1: what these blogs mean, particularly given how young most of
Speaker 1: the Tumbler creators in question are, comes off pretty harsh.
Speaker 1: The type of femininity these young women and for that matter,
Speaker 1: Lana del Ray have chosen to identify with, is one
Speaker 1: that is doomed from the start. Either Oscar Wilde or
Speaker 1: George Bernard Shaw said, youth is wasted on the young.
Speaker 1: These particular girls are wasting their's fetishizing it, treating youth
Speaker 1: as a theme to be curated, collected, and carefully documented.
Speaker 1: It's this juxtaposition of the Q and gru wish with
Speaker 1: the violence that expresses the core theme of Lolita better
Speaker 1: than any blond team sucking lollipop on numerous book jackets ever.
Speaker 1: Can yeah you tell those twelve year olds? This perspective
Speaker 1: was pushed back on by other writers of this time.
Speaker 1: Writer Miska Housin wrote a piece for literary journal Plowshares
Speaker 1: a couple of years later, in response to Sarah Catherine
Speaker 1: Cleaver that describes the Tumblers a little closer to how
Speaker 1: Kate Elizabeth Russell describes her forum from the two thousands.
Speaker 1: Here's what Husson has to say. I wrote an essay
Speaker 1: about watching Adrian lan adaptation of Lolita, relating to my
Speaker 1: experiences of sexual abuse as an adolescent and the experience
Speaker 1: of reading the novel. A baragraph in the essay was
Speaker 1: quoted on tumbler and found some attraction on the same
Speaker 1: nymphant blogs. And this is where something darker, more complex,
Speaker 1: and more powerful shows itself. The blogs this was shared
Speaker 1: on had this standard nymphant blog fair steals from movies
Speaker 1: with age gap relationships, American Beauty, Leon, The Professional Stealing Beauty,
Speaker 1: and of course Lolita, lines from Lana del Ray songs,
Speaker 1: quotes from the novel straight up d d l G porn,
Speaker 1: but also that quote for clarity. D d l G
Speaker 1: is with an area of kink and a subgenre of
Speaker 1: porn that stands for daddy dom little girl, where generally
Speaker 1: a male partner plays the part of father and the
Speaker 1: woman plays the part of a young girl when done safely.
Speaker 1: My understanding is that d d l G is an
Speaker 1: extension of the b D s M community that involves
Speaker 1: to consenting adults who are completely on board with the
Speaker 1: power dynamic being established. And I'm not here to kink
Speaker 1: shame if it's done safely then whatever. But as far
Speaker 1: as the d d LG images on these communities go,
Speaker 1: it's a little more complicated than that, because as it's
Speaker 1: portrayed in static, cropped and edited tumbler posts, the potential
Speaker 1: safety of the dynamic is not as easy to establish.
Speaker 1: Elijah Maisa and the other prominent nFET culture YouTuber Skylar
Speaker 1: Rain resist association with the kink community pretty strongly in
Speaker 1: order to protect their own communities, both for the safety
Speaker 1: of underage users and the fact that they don't want
Speaker 1: the nymphete aesthetic to be sexualized. Here's Kyler Raine speaking
Speaker 1: to this in a video from two thousand nineteen. Her
Speaker 1: intro to this video says Skylo Raine promoting nymphet fashion
Speaker 1: without kink. There is not only one way to go
Speaker 1: with a fashion. You don't have to be into like
Speaker 1: dada LG. You don't have to like older men, you
Speaker 1: don't have to have some daddy fetish or whatever. So
Speaker 1: I guess my goal was the channel is to show
Speaker 1: that yes, it is okay to like these clothes. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you have any sort of kink. You just
Speaker 1: like a particular style that's inspired from a movie and
Speaker 1: it's okay. She repeats a similar sentiment in a video
Speaker 1: from late Another big point that I want to make
Speaker 1: before we get into the fashion is that nymphet fashion
Speaker 1: is a fashion. It is not a king. Please do
Speaker 1: not try and make it a king. Nimput fashion has
Speaker 1: zero relation with daddy kings or like old man king
Speaker 1: And I don't understand why people try to make it
Speaker 1: that way because like Dolores was never into older guys.
Speaker 1: She was never into like any sort of daddy of fetish.
Speaker 1: And this is essentially where the two thousand fourteen era
Speaker 1: of nymphete tumbler stands. Fast forwarding to a student named
Speaker 1: Rachel E. Davis at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Speaker 1: wrote an honors thesis called tell Me You Own Me,
Speaker 1: Give Me Them Coins post feminist fascination with Lolita, Lana
Speaker 1: del Rey, and sugar culture. This paper examined tumblers from
Speaker 1: into Seen. Davis's takeaways are also really interesting and connects
Speaker 1: the curation of these blogs to the ideas and expectations
Speaker 1: that both post feminism and neo liberalism. Took me six episodes,
Speaker 1: but I said, I said neoliberalism. Sorry, As these words
Speaker 1: are used in Davis's paper, neoliberalism is defined as stay
Speaker 1: with me, We're headed somewhere quote, a form of governance
Speaker 1: that argues that market forces, rather than state intervention, should
Speaker 1: be allowed to drive the economy unquote. Post Feminism is
Speaker 1: defined as quote a fusion between neoliberal subjectivity in a
Speaker 1: feminist politics reimagined through the logic of consumer morism unquote.
Speaker 1: Davis says in her abstract to this paper that in
Speaker 1: the tumblers that she analyzed, there was a prevalence of
Speaker 1: posts expressing depressive, suicidal, and self destructive ideas. Indicates that
Speaker 1: these individuals may experience the failures of neoliberalism and post
Speaker 1: feminism as personal failures. This mention of depressive posts was
Speaker 1: not mentioned in previous work written on nimphet tumblers, but
Speaker 1: it's unfortunately not surprising that these and self harm posts
Speaker 1: would find their way into these communities. Tumbler had and
Speaker 1: has a very complicated history with hosting blogs that promoted
Speaker 1: romanticized and instructive methods of self harm and encouraging eating disorders.
Speaker 1: Take my word for it, and this paper is the
Speaker 1: first mention of these kinds of posts entering the community.
Speaker 1: Davis draws a clear line on how these concepts relate
Speaker 1: to the trends commonly found in these blocks, which extend
Speaker 1: back to the comunities that Kate Elizabeth Russell described. Davis
Speaker 1: describes the work of Adrian Evans and Sarah Riley in
Speaker 1: their teen book Technologies of Sexiness. As Evans and Riley
Speaker 1: pointed out, quote, the constant transformation required by this kind
Speaker 1: of consumerism means that femininity is constituted as a site
Speaker 1: of self surveillance and discipline end quote. The danger of
Speaker 1: this ideology lies in the fact that the cycle of
Speaker 1: consumerism never ends, which quote sets people up to fail
Speaker 1: while encouraging them to locate these failures as their own
Speaker 1: individual failures rather than as failures of the social structure
Speaker 1: or in the logic of neoliberalism itself. End quote. So translated,
Speaker 1: she's presenting the idea that these blogs that primarily feature
Speaker 1: Lolita content as well as sugar baby blogs, replaces of
Speaker 1: self expression as well as an area for self surveillance.
Speaker 1: I will add here quickly in case you don't know
Speaker 1: that a sugar baby is defined mind as a quote.
Speaker 1: Transactional dating practice typically characterized by an older, wealthier person
Speaker 1: and a younger person in need of financial assistant in
Speaker 1: a mutually beneficial relationship unquote. Davis's paper goes on to
Speaker 1: discuss the intersection of the Lolita slash Nymphete and sugar
Speaker 1: Baby tumbler communities, citing blogs with names like Nymphett's Life
Speaker 1: or Dolly del Ray. Lolita blogs of this time skewed
Speaker 1: more fatalistic and oppressive, consisting mostly of movie images and
Speaker 1: deep sadness, whereas the sugar baby blogs were more aspirational,
Speaker 1: featuring luxury goods type, crops of women's bodies, stacks of money,
Speaker 1: girlish lauderie. What these blogs had most in common were
Speaker 1: a preoccupation with Lana del Rey, the problematic, unkillable queen
Speaker 1: of the Internet. And then I Jamie Loftus, host of
Speaker 1: the show Hello, went back into Tumbler in two thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty to find out if nymphete tumblers still existed
Speaker 1: and what they look like now. And so before I
Speaker 1: share my extremely scholarly findings, there are a number of
Speaker 1: important changes that took place on Tumbler between and now.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's just not as popular as it
Speaker 1: used to be. But one of the big reasons people
Speaker 1: fled from the platform was a site wide ban on
Speaker 1: all quote unquote adult content in late This exploded a
Speaker 1: number of communities and boiled down to the Nymphet Tumbler
Speaker 1: community of this time entering a phase of transition and
Speaker 1: a huge schism within the community. I'm going to kick
Speaker 1: it back to Elijah here to explain what was going
Speaker 1: on in the community at this time, which basically boils
Speaker 1: down to Tumbler disempowering the hashtag nymphete tag, as well
Speaker 1: as a number of d d l G kink bloggers
Speaker 1: infiltrating the space that Nymphet Tumbler used to inhabit. This
Speaker 1: drives a wedge into the community that ends up splitting
Speaker 1: it into but well, some of us outgrew it perfectly fine,
Speaker 1: every body else grows aesthetics. Some girls still liked it,
Speaker 1: but the problem was constant harassment by older men. We
Speaker 1: can do ship and eventually the d D O G
Speaker 1: and kingsters moved into the n infant tag and we
Speaker 1: were like, funk it, we gotta go. We gotta go.
Speaker 1: Because when the community ended, a lot of us were
Speaker 1: already following each other on Instagram or we moved to
Speaker 1: follow each other on Instagram because we didn't want to
Speaker 1: lose contact with each other. Because a lot of us
Speaker 1: became friends. I have farmed lifelong friendships through nymphatic community.
Speaker 1: I have three people who I cannot see my life
Speaker 1: without because of that community life. So the community that
Speaker 1: once thrived on the hashtag nymphat page split into two communities,
Speaker 1: one that is far more diverse and race, gender, and sexuality.
Speaker 1: Elijah explained where the split and interest as it pertained
Speaker 1: to Lolita ended up falling between these two communities. New
Speaker 1: Fan and Coquette felt very much like celebrating Dolores as
Speaker 1: first as the fun bubb wee girl she was on
Speaker 1: summer camp with her friends, swimming in the lake, when
Speaker 1: she was with her mom, picnics with her neighbors before
Speaker 1: Humbert even enters the picture. It was about celebrating her
Speaker 1: as a person and as who she was before anything
Speaker 1: happened to her. Is immortalizing the happy child that she was.
Speaker 1: To see that, Billette feels like celebrating crying traumatized Doors
Speaker 1: on the road with Humbert. It feels very much like
Speaker 1: immortalizing the traumatized Lolita instead of the happy Doors. And
Speaker 1: I just cannot sunk with that. This is a fascinating
Speaker 1: split to me, two groups of majority teenagers who are
Speaker 1: fixating on very different points of the same book. Now,
Speaker 1: the spirit of Nymphet Tumbler, so like stills of Alicia
Speaker 1: Silverstone in the Crush, fashion spreads and on and on,
Speaker 1: definitely still exists, but they're evolving. Since Davis's paper was
Speaker 1: published in early a lot has changed. And I think
Speaker 1: it's also worth mentioning that the me too movement that
Speaker 1: began in late has had a clear effect on the community.
Speaker 1: I took a look at a couple of tumblers that
Speaker 1: are still semi regularly posting from July. Here's what a
Speaker 1: post from her dash name dash is dash Dolores dot
Speaker 1: tumbler dot com says, as someone who has sexually assaulted
Speaker 1: as a child, Dolores Hayes means so much to me
Speaker 1: and I will defend her. Hell yeah, this is very
Speaker 1: different from what we hear earlier and lovelidus online history.
Speaker 1: Now in the Nymphet tumblers are fewer in number, but
Speaker 1: the tone is generally less likely to romanticize the relationship
Speaker 1: between Dolores and Humbert and squarely condemn abusers of children,
Speaker 1: specifically abusers of Dolores Hayes. This is done while celebrate
Speaker 1: eating and analyzing Dolores carefully. Current leading blogs with names
Speaker 1: like the Dolores Hayes Network dot tumbler dot com, Coquette
Speaker 1: Dolly dot tumbler dot com, Lolita on the dotted Line
Speaker 1: dot tumbler dot com, starlet Low dot tumbler dot com,
Speaker 1: and on and on. The posts I'm setting here are
Speaker 1: from and the old aesthetics of previous Lolita blogs are
Speaker 1: still present here, but there's now a larger focus on
Speaker 1: discussing how Lolita relates to trauma and survival, about Dolores
Speaker 1: Hayes herself, and a lot of anti child sex abuser memes. Now.
Speaker 1: One of the main interesting new features to Nymphete Tumbler
Speaker 1: are disclaimers that almost seem to anticipate some of the
Speaker 1: criticism the blogs are expecting to receive for existing at all.
Speaker 1: But unlike the early two thousand's, the latest wave of
Speaker 1: Lolita aesthetic blogs firmly distanced themselves from d d l
Speaker 1: G or anything that encourages the sexualization of underrage girls.
Speaker 1: The front page of the Coquett Dolly Tumbler says the following.
Speaker 1: This blog does not condone the relationship between Humfort and Low.
Speaker 1: My Lolita posts are purely for the sake of fashion
Speaker 1: and the Venia aesthetic famine bodies. As I've stated many
Speaker 1: times on this blog and others I run, Dolores Hayes
Speaker 1: is a victim, a fact that tends to be forgotten
Speaker 1: amongst the dark beauty that is Lolita. The Dolorous Hayes
Speaker 1: Networks header reads this, This network slash page is dedicated
Speaker 1: to Dolores Hayes of the novel Lolita. This page does
Speaker 1: not condone or romanticize the contents of said novel, and
Speaker 1: was created as a space for those of us who
Speaker 1: see Low as exactly what she is, a twelve year
Speaker 1: old child. Some of the images presented here may seem
Speaker 1: to be of questionable content, though that is unavoidable because
Speaker 1: of the content of the novel itself. No edits gift
Speaker 1: sets or text posts are meant to show the relationship
Speaker 1: between del Worst and Humbert as loving or romantic, and again,
Speaker 1: these blogs do still have the nymphet Tumbler esthetic going.
Speaker 1: We've got images from Lolita, Pretty Baby, Lana del Rey
Speaker 1: Romeo plus Juliette with Claire Danes, pictures of an underage
Speaker 1: Mula Kunis as Jackie in that seventy show, wearing a
Speaker 1: T shirt that says I am so a virgin, as
Speaker 1: well as gifts of old school nineteen sixties beach blonds.
Speaker 1: So the old aesthetics that have marked these blogs from
Speaker 1: the start are still present, but now they are marked
Speaker 1: with the reminder that the person posting the image understands
Speaker 1: that Lolita is a story of abuse. This is new.
Speaker 1: There's a post from a user called cubitum EMUs I
Speaker 1: butchered that I feel so old. There's a post from
Speaker 1: this user that many nymphet blogs reposted that describes the
Speaker 1: difference between the Lolita aesthetic and the Lolita lifestyle. Lolita
Speaker 1: esthetic pink plaid skirts, cherry cola, dewey grass picnics under
Speaker 1: the bright blue sky, Lolita lifestyle taking an advantage of
Speaker 1: buying an old man being manipulated, pedophiles, daddy issues, lifelong
Speaker 1: trust issues. Other posts comb the text of Nabokov's book
Speaker 1: more carefully than scholars. There's an excited post finding a
Speaker 1: mention of Dolores having freckles that says, quote further descriptions
Speaker 1: of Dolores she has freckles unquote. Other posts site particularly
Speaker 1: manipulative sections of text from Humbert with this commentary. This
Speaker 1: shows that despite having convinced himself of this whole devious
Speaker 1: nym fete sing, he is aware deep down that Dolores
Speaker 1: is just a regular kid. Hell. These tumblers are posting
Speaker 1: excerpts from Ways of Seeing by John Burger, one of
Speaker 1: the most seminal text on aesthetics. These users are pretty
Speaker 1: aware of what they are engaging with, so while the
Speaker 1: fashion and aesthetics of past adaptations are include did the
Speaker 1: main focus is Dolores Hayes herself. Users remember that it's
Speaker 1: mentioned that she's conversational in French, that she was a tomboy,
Speaker 1: that she was bisexual. This was written in all caps
Speaker 1: in a post I saw, and I think it references
Speaker 1: Dolores mentioning that her earliest sexual experience was with kissing
Speaker 1: a girl. Dolores is always the main event in these tumblers.
Speaker 1: There is no mention that Lolita could conceivably be a
Speaker 1: love story. There is no suggestion that Dolores was ever
Speaker 1: interested or welcoming Humbrid's abuse in its place. There is
Speaker 1: just as much, if not more, content like this, and
Speaker 1: just a warning because this is audio only. I do
Speaker 1: now have to do that boomer thing where I like
Speaker 1: to describe a meme to you, so I'm sorry. All
Speaker 1: of these memes are extremely anti child sex abuser. One
Speaker 1: features a repeated image of a girl with brown pigtails
Speaker 1: saying this, my name is not Lolita. Lolita is not
Speaker 1: a love story. I hate Ubert Humbert. I'm literally twelve
Speaker 1: U six fox kill petals protect kids. My trauma isn't
Speaker 1: cute or sexy. I'm a child. I'm not at fault.
Speaker 1: I'm the victim. This has four hundred and forty seven
Speaker 1: notes or tumbler likes, basically. Another post shows an illustration
Speaker 1: of a girl in overalls holding a knife. The text
Speaker 1: says the following, there is no excuse for pedophilia. It's
Speaker 1: not a sexuality, it's not free love. The only rights
Speaker 1: you need is the rights to fucking die. One hundred
Speaker 1: and sixteen thousand, five hundred forty nine notes and that
Speaker 1: is Lolita. Aesthetics and nymphet tumbler in. These users are
Speaker 1: determined to protect Dolores Hayes. It may not be the
Speaker 1: most nuanced discussion on the Internet, but I get a
Speaker 1: hand it to him. These types of spaces didn't exist
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, and looking at them now,
Speaker 1: I know they would have resonated with me at that age.
Speaker 1: The blow that we were discussing earlier, with the heavy
Speaker 1: sexualized imagery back in still very much exist now, but
Speaker 1: there are these new features to them, the fact that
Speaker 1: Lolita has been culturally warped to fit a very particular oversexualized,
Speaker 1: rigid aesthetic. As we've been discussing for this entire series,
Speaker 1: younger fans of the book are actively trying to unlearn
Speaker 1: and resist what the monoculture is serving them, and that's
Speaker 1: really cool. So I think we can see in all
Speaker 1: of the online spaces we've looked at so far, the
Speaker 1: very fact that they are curated and controlled by those
Speaker 1: that have far more in common with Dolora's Hayes than
Speaker 1: Humbert Humbert gives these spaces a uniqueness and a power
Speaker 1: that all of the older male driven adaptations lack. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, these blogs are very informed and
Speaker 1: driven by the visuals of these adaptations. It makes my
Speaker 1: head hurt, but it gives me the smallest bit of
Speaker 1: hope because the way that teenagers are curating their own
Speaker 1: online spaces now is happening around and within cultural conversations
Speaker 1: that just we're not being had twenty years ago, and
Speaker 1: we can see with this example alone that that is
Speaker 1: making a difference. It's tricky because, based on many listeners
Speaker 1: who have contacted me, and pulling from my own experiences
Speaker 1: with lowly to online, I do think that a lot
Speaker 1: of the tumbler culture I experienced as a team funked
Speaker 1: with my head a lot and maybe did not produce
Speaker 1: a net good effect for myself image or for my
Speaker 1: perspective on sexual abuse. But I'm hopeful that that seems
Speaker 1: to be changing, however imperfectly, And what discussion on internet
Speaker 1: culture being released in wouldn't include the tick and the talk.
Speaker 1: TikTok is probably the most relevant social media app for
Speaker 1: young people at the time of this recording. It is
Speaker 1: more focused on comments and algorithm driven engagement, and it
Speaker 1: features short videos for all my boomers out there. It's
Speaker 1: also where Madison Beer, the TikTok star briefly canceled over
Speaker 1: romanticizing Lolita in became famous. So naturally there is a
Speaker 1: pretty healthy discussion about the book Lolita happening over on
Speaker 1: TikTok as well. Like many spaces we've discussed, TikTok is
Speaker 1: about a fifty fifty split of users demanding that people
Speaker 1: stop romanticizing Glalita and the other half is people romanticizing Lolalita.
Speaker 1: The latter type of video is mostly inspired by the movie,
Speaker 1: as was the case on tumbler as well. Examples are
Speaker 1: fan edits of Dominique Swain as Lolita eating a banana
Speaker 1: while Lana del Rey plays lip syncs of girls mouthing
Speaker 1: the line I was a daisy fresh girl and look
Speaker 1: what You've done to me while looking seductively into the
Speaker 1: camera on their phone. On the other end of this
Speaker 1: discussion are mainly young users who have read the book
Speaker 1: and resent romanticizing its legacy. So let's take a listen
Speaker 1: to a couple of those. The first is from a
Speaker 1: user Mr dot White. I'm definitely saying that wrong. Mpakov
Speaker 1: shows you in every way how a predator's brain works.
Speaker 1: He beats you over the head with how bad Humbert
Speaker 1: really is as a human. How do people miss this?
Speaker 1: And that people use the loris and their songs. I'm
Speaker 1: looking at you on the del rey as this sexually
Speaker 1: permiscuous teenager blah blah, she was twelve number was institutionalized
Speaker 1: multiple times. He abused his wife. I don't understand how
Speaker 1: people second is from user of hen good morning. It's
Speaker 1: message is for you stop fromantasizing. Located in nineteen nine seven.
Speaker 1: It's not a good fucking movie. It was made by
Speaker 1: converted white men in Hollywood. It's not a good fucking movie.
Speaker 1: And finally, it's nerdy mixed pan. We'll talk about a
Speaker 1: book that I never thought I'd like this one right
Speaker 1: here before you asked, no, it has enough want to
Speaker 1: do with the Japanese fashion might be saying, Todd, doesn't
Speaker 1: that book glorified pedophiles? And it honestly depends on how
Speaker 1: you read. Now, if you take Humbert, who is the
Speaker 1: titular character, you have to remember this book is written
Speaker 1: as a memoir for his word, then yeah, it does
Speaker 1: glorify predators. Or if you have the nuance of knowing
Speaker 1: that this is written from the monster's perspective, you'll be
Speaker 1: able to see the cracks of reality come through in
Speaker 1: the writing. There are times where Humbert admits that Dolores
Speaker 1: is scared of him, that she cries herself to sleep
Speaker 1: at night, and that he is a terrible human being
Speaker 1: for what he is doing to her. Am I suggesting
Speaker 1: that some of the most pertinent and transformative criticism surrounding
Speaker 1: Lolita is taking place on TikTok and tumbler and not
Speaker 1: in academic journals. Yes, I am, I absolutely am. And
Speaker 1: a lot of this analysis, as you just heard, relates
Speaker 1: directly to Lana del Rey's romanticizing Lolita. And we haven't
Speaker 1: even made it to YouTube yet, m hyah. Lolita content
Speaker 1: on YouTube is all over the place. Most famously, the
Speaker 1: entire movie has been up in its entirety for free
Speaker 1: for nearly a decade, and there's also a lot of
Speaker 1: fan cuts of the movie and the press material surrounding it.
Speaker 1: There's also a fair amount of content analyzing Lolita. The
Speaker 1: best of it, in my opinion, comes from Miss Lola
Speaker 1: or Dolores, who we spoke with a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1: Her content about Lolita not only performs well, it's very nuanced.
Speaker 1: In the hour long we need to talk about Lolita,
Speaker 1: she talks about movie and stage adaptations. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Speaker 1: R Kelly to the grooming and mistreatment of underaged people
Speaker 1: by a famous YouTuber. She's also done a video reviewing
Speaker 1: Lowe's diary and attempt at rewriting the Nabokoff book from
Speaker 1: Dolora This Perspective, and another video about Launa del Rey
Speaker 1: as a problematic faith. I want to share a little
Speaker 1: more of our interview here because nuanced discussion and YouTube
Speaker 1: do not always mesh and I found her approach and
Speaker 1: experiences to be very relevant to the current state of
Speaker 1: Lolita discourse. So here's a little more of our conversation.
Speaker 1: YouTube is a unique platform and that it has like
Speaker 1: exceptionally intense paras social relationships. So I knew if I
Speaker 1: was going to do a video about such a serious topic,
Speaker 1: I wanted to try to use that to my advantage. UM,
Speaker 1: and I think that's the reason why many people felt
Speaker 1: comfortable reaching out to me and opening up. I got
Speaker 1: like a flood of responses. Was it before before the
Speaker 1: Lolita video? After? During what was the what was the
Speaker 1: kind of the process there of reaching out? Well, at
Speaker 1: the end of the video, I had a cult action
Speaker 1: UM where I said, you know, if you're going through
Speaker 1: a situation and you need someone to talk to you
Speaker 1: can reach out to me. UM, And I got like
Speaker 1: dozens at this point, I've received hundreds of letters, a
Speaker 1: whole flurry of conspiracy theories about um, who I knew
Speaker 1: or if I was. You know, it got so it
Speaker 1: got so wild because the first video blew up so
Speaker 1: much that people thought I was like a plant or something,
Speaker 1: as if that's how YouTube works, which it's not. I
Speaker 1: I got so much hate and love and you know,
Speaker 1: but this is the thing is I wouldn't say that
Speaker 1: it's equally taxing. But even though it makes me happy
Speaker 1: that all of these young girls are reaching out, and
Speaker 1: although I'm so glad, and I still keep in touch
Speaker 1: with some of them, you know, or they'll send me
Speaker 1: updates six months later saying, hey, like my mom left
Speaker 1: my stepdad and we're moving to a new state and
Speaker 1: like or um he's getting charged or all of this,
Speaker 1: or like thank you so much. UM, that's wonderful. But
Speaker 1: it is a lot of emotional labor for Like, again,
Speaker 1: I wasn't trained. I did child psychology in school, but um,
Speaker 1: that's not enough. UM. I used to go to bed
Speaker 1: at a reasonable hour. Um, but sometimes at night I
Speaker 1: just lay back and I think about the horrible things
Speaker 1: people have felt safe confessing to me. Um. And again,
Speaker 1: I it's wonderful for the teenage girls, and it's but
Speaker 1: you know the problem with these Paris Thilos relationships is
Speaker 1: when they're not really listening to you, when they just
Speaker 1: like hear someone talking about a thing that they like. Um.
Speaker 1: They these these men who think you understand me, and
Speaker 1: it's like, no, I don't understand you. I understand my
Speaker 1: abuser because I've gone to therapy. Uh. It's it's the
Speaker 1: kind of project that I honestly thought I would I
Speaker 1: would want to like, I would want to undertake. But
Speaker 1: after that initial video, UM, it took me almost a
Speaker 1: year to release another video on Lolita because I was
Speaker 1: just so overwhelm and and it's you know, it's every
Speaker 1: time I released a video on Lolita, I get another
Speaker 1: slew of emails. Thank you so much again to Dolores
Speaker 1: and remember to check out her channel linked below. Finally,
Speaker 1: I wanted to touch on the fashion subculture called non
Speaker 1: sexual nymphete fashion that I referenced at the beginning discussion
Speaker 1: of this community primarily exists on YouTube. I learned about
Speaker 1: it pretty early into my research process, and like Lolita
Speaker 1: tumbler in the twenties. It may not be what you expect,
Speaker 1: so we touched on this at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: episode as well, But to reiterate what is the difference
Speaker 1: between Japanese Lolita fashion and nymphete fashion. Lolita fashion is
Speaker 1: a fashion subculture that again in Japan in the seventies ish.
Speaker 1: The history of this community is kind of hard to
Speaker 1: trace and revolves around cute aesthetics. It's defined by voluminous
Speaker 1: crinoline skirts, puffy sleeves. You know, not imagery really associated
Speaker 1: with Lolita, the book or the movies at all. It's
Speaker 1: an extremely popular fashion movement and was created as a
Speaker 1: reaction to the rigid gender expectations and aesthetics in Japan,
Speaker 1: and it's now become a prominent movement worldwide. Designer Naoto
Speaker 1: Haruka explains Lolita fashion like this back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight in The Japan Times. One of the salient
Speaker 1: points about Lolita is that it is really a fashion
Speaker 1: that is not intended to attract men. The women are
Speaker 1: creating their own world into which they can get away
Speaker 1: from the pressures of the larger society. Lolita fashion also
Speaker 1: pulls inspiration from French Rococo Aesthetics and Alice in Wonderland.
Speaker 1: Remember Lewis Carroll from episode one. You can go back
Speaker 1: if you like. So it's not related to Lolita or
Speaker 1: Nymphete fashion. So I'm just gonna stop talking about it now. So,
Speaker 1: Dolores Hayes has spawned a hyper feminine fashion movement that
Speaker 1: exists alongside and in direct conversation with Nymphete, Tumbler and
Speaker 1: current nymphet online communities, which is why it's generally just
Speaker 1: called nymphet fashion. You're about to hear Skyler rain Again,
Speaker 1: a twenty something prominent American member of the nympet fashion
Speaker 1: community on YouTube, Instagram, Tumbler, other places I probably haven't
Speaker 1: heard of, who ironically first got interested by dabbling in
Speaker 1: Japanese lovely to fashion years ago. Here's a bit from
Speaker 1: Skyler's video. Watch this before you get into nymphet fashion
Speaker 1: from you understand that Dolores Hayes was twelve years old
Speaker 1: and Humbard Humbard was like thirty seven. Don't try and
Speaker 1: make that golos. That's not aesthetic. The nimfet aesthetic is
Speaker 1: like it's Cherry's, it's getting them, it's picnics. It's like
Speaker 1: lots of greenery and butterflies, flowers, daisys, all of that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that's like the perfect nymphetiessthetic kind of
Speaker 1: isn't aesthetic. Don't try to make it for my Skyler
Speaker 1: started making these videos in her early twenties after getting
Speaker 1: interested in the fashion of the Seven movie, and started
Speaker 1: getting actively engaged in Nymphat Fashion her freshman year of college.
Speaker 1: Her channel has now been active for over four years
Speaker 1: and has a small but mighty subscriber base of around
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand subscribers, with even more on Instagram, um and Tumblr.
Speaker 1: Skyler's main objective is to legitimize ninfant fashion as something
Speaker 1: that can exist independent of kink or sex and instead
Speaker 1: exist on its own merits as nineties Lolita the book
Speaker 1: inspired fashion, and for her younger audience, Skylar is pretty
Speaker 1: clear where she stands on the fetishizing of the low
Speaker 1: vida Humbard relationship, speaking to that here in a video
Speaker 1: called criticism for Ninfant Fashion and the Community in May.
Speaker 1: One thing I want to bring up is to all
Speaker 1: of my younger audience, because I know that there are
Speaker 1: some younger people who watch me don't try to go
Speaker 1: after old guys. That's not what nimfant fashion is. That's
Speaker 1: what the fetishizers do, which is something I don't support.
Speaker 1: It's extremely dangerous. I can guarantee you, guys, if you
Speaker 1: read the book Lolita a k a. The actual story
Speaker 1: of Lolita, not the movie adaptations that had to be
Speaker 1: censored in order to not be banned everywhere because it
Speaker 1: would be too controversial. If you would actually read the
Speaker 1: book and see all of this suffering, that will lead
Speaker 1: a went through how horrible and mean, how Umbert was.
Speaker 1: Because what you guys are seeing in the movie was
Speaker 1: just a movie adaptation of Lolita. You're not getting the
Speaker 1: actual Elita because lots of things are different in the book.
Speaker 1: The idea of an old guy treating you like a
Speaker 1: princess or something, get that out of your head. Get
Speaker 1: that out of your head because that's not what Humberd did.
Speaker 1: What humber did was groom her. And that's what these
Speaker 1: old predator guys would do to you. So don't contact them.
Speaker 1: If they come to you, block them, don't interact with
Speaker 1: them more. All the stories. Stay away from old guys,
Speaker 1: because I promise you it's not going to be our
Speaker 1: romantic ending. So the majority of her videos are fashion focused,
Speaker 1: but Skyler is also using her platform to meaningfully engage
Speaker 1: with the text that the fashion movement is pulling from,
Speaker 1: and this goes for the entire community. In her video
Speaker 1: are You a Nymphete? The original meaning of nymphete, Skyler
Speaker 1: goes in deep on the origin of the term nymphet
Speaker 1: from Humbered Humbered buying a buck off and how that
Speaker 1: relates to her community. I'm going to explain in why
Speaker 1: the Google definition slash what's it called Merriam Webster definition
Speaker 1: of nymphete is wrong if we're talking about it in
Speaker 1: the original sense. So Google said that a nymphete is
Speaker 1: an attractive and sexually mature young girl. Then Miriam Webster
Speaker 1: said a sexually pre precocious girl barely in our teens.
Speaker 1: Also a sexually attractive young woman. Personal news of namphitt
Speaker 1: n they're saying that in the novel, this is the
Speaker 1: way nymphete was used. So like, that's that's weird. And
Speaker 1: Nabokov had his own words to say about exactly these definitions.
Speaker 1: The interviewer asked Nabokov, like, what connection does his interest
Speaker 1: in butterflies have and this is what Nabokov said. I
Speaker 1: have reworked the classification of various groups of butterflies, have
Speaker 1: described and figured several species on subspecies. My name's for
Speaker 1: the microsoftic organs that I have been the first to
Speaker 1: second portray have safely found their ways into biological dictionary.
Speaker 1: Compare this to the wretched entry under nymphete and Webster's
Speaker 1: latest addition. From this we can see that Nabokov wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly happy from the Webster edition and Nabokov trash talking
Speaker 1: Webster doesn't even stuff there. And another interview, he goes on,
Speaker 1: I think that the harmful judges who defined to day
Speaker 1: in popular dictionaries the word nymphete as a very young
Speaker 1: but sexually attractive girl without any additional comment or reference
Speaker 1: should have their knuckles wrapped. So um, can we agree
Speaker 1: that the Google definition is uh not correct? I think
Speaker 1: everyone should be going to Nabokov when we're trying to say,
Speaker 1: like what the original definition of nimphete is. And now
Speaker 1: for my last interview I have with Naboka fair out
Speaker 1: of Mr Humbert's manic gaze, there's no nympheta. The Nymphet
Speaker 1: only exists through the obsession that destroys Humbert. This is
Speaker 1: an essential aspect of a singular book that has been
Speaker 1: falsified by an artificial popularity. This is probably the most
Speaker 1: important of the interviews that I mentioned throughout this whole thing,
Speaker 1: so the pull from the Altar Tumbler Lolita community. Skylar
Speaker 1: Rain dedicates a lot of time to the aesthetics, but
Speaker 1: she's also releasing twenty minute videos doing deep dives on
Speaker 1: the book, the authorship of the book, and story specifics.
Speaker 1: I literally sent this video to the book of his biographer,
Speaker 1: Brian Boyd, who I spoke with back in episode two,
Speaker 1: and he was really impressed by it. Skylar suggests the
Speaker 1: following for people hoping to get into an infant fashion
Speaker 1: who want to engage with the community and be a
Speaker 1: quote unquote good representative of this community. In her most
Speaker 1: recent video, she encourages the nymphet community to educate newcomers
Speaker 1: on the anti child sex abuse stance of the community,
Speaker 1: as well as providing context for the abuse that takes
Speaker 1: place in the book. She encourages people to use the
Speaker 1: hashtag no King nymphette here she is speaking to that
Speaker 1: in watch this before you get into nymphet fashion. I
Speaker 1: started a tag that you can use on Instagram or
Speaker 1: Tumbler or whatever. The tag is just no King Nimpette.
Speaker 1: But with this tag, I wanted to be able to
Speaker 1: bring together all the people within the nifut fashion community
Speaker 1: who are very much so against the sexualization of nimfut
Speaker 1: fashion or the Lada. They just simply like the fashion.
Speaker 1: The theme that runs through all these communities is present
Speaker 1: in Skylar's ninfant fashion videos as well advice and support
Speaker 1: for other people looking to join the community. She warns
Speaker 1: newcomers of likely bad faith retaliation from others in comment sections.
Speaker 1: In the same video, Skylar pushes against the body normativity
Speaker 1: of n infant fashion. While she is a thin, white
Speaker 1: passing woman herself, I don't know what her exact background is.
Speaker 1: She tells her viewers that it's fashion, it's close, it's
Speaker 1: an aesthetic, and therefore it for everybody. I don't need
Speaker 1: to tell you this, but teenagers are a source of
Speaker 1: infinite ridicule. When I was one, I actively tried to
Speaker 1: distance myself from things that were popular, and then enjoyed
Speaker 1: most of those same things. In secret in an effort
Speaker 1: to display that I wasn't like other girls, when in
Speaker 1: fact I was exactly like other girls when I was
Speaker 1: in high school and then a little bit older on Tumbler.
Speaker 1: Reading Lolita at all was a botched attempt at assuring
Speaker 1: the people around me, and more importantly, reassuring myself that
Speaker 1: I was not like other girls. Other girls were reading
Speaker 1: Twilight and Sarah Desson, which I also read, but only
Speaker 1: in the privacy of my own home, with the intimacy
Speaker 1: of a library book that had already been page through
Speaker 1: by fifty other teenagers before me, in varying shrounds of secrecy,
Speaker 1: which is why I approached the online culture surrounding Lolita
Speaker 1: misguided as some of it is, with some overprotectiveness. While
Speaker 1: these communities have overcome a lot of the male yeahs
Speaker 1: abuser centric narratives that adaptations and references to Lolita have
Speaker 1: had over the years, looking at these blogs also compounded
Speaker 1: my frustration with the Adrian Line adaptation of Nabokov's book,
Speaker 1: as well as Lana del Rey's musical messaging, because these
Speaker 1: two are unquestionably the visual backbones of these communities, and
Speaker 1: both are narratives designed about child sex abuse by grown
Speaker 1: adults who are pushing that marketable, consenting narrative and doing
Speaker 1: it in a very visually appealing way. Scrolling through these
Speaker 1: images now, it just strikes me how it's very possible
Speaker 1: to make an image of Dolores Hayes that is beautiful
Speaker 1: and meaningful without selling her story out. But no one's
Speaker 1: really done that on a large scale. And this community
Speaker 1: loves Dolores Hayes, and so they work with what they have,
Speaker 1: even though most of what they're given by pop culture
Speaker 1: is deeply flawed, as in those Tumbler disclaimers that we
Speaker 1: read earlier. These communities have to constantly be working through
Speaker 1: this cognitive dissonance. I know she's being abused. I know
Speaker 1: Humbert can't be trusted. It's just that the only image
Speaker 1: is available serve Humbert's narrative. What else are you supposed
Speaker 1: to do? There need to be better options for this community.
Speaker 1: There needs to be a better adaptation of this story.
Speaker 1: So I hope this episode was helpful in contextualizing how
Speaker 1: we see Dolores, whether that means how we see her
Speaker 1: from across a bookstore while we're being marketed to how
Speaker 1: we see her scrolling through a timeline online and for
Speaker 1: young people who strongly connect to her, how people see
Speaker 1: themselves within her. It's aesthetically driven, absolutely, but based on
Speaker 1: what I know of the internet communities, it has a
Speaker 1: whole lot to do with the content of the story
Speaker 1: as well. And as usual, the culture at large underestimates
Speaker 1: teenagers constantly. They are reading the book, and while the
Speaker 1: way that it's interpreted certainly ranges quite a bit, it's
Speaker 1: disingenuous to say that the people in these communities are
Speaker 1: incapable of doing a new one's to read of the book,
Speaker 1: particularly right now, they seem to be reading it in
Speaker 1: a pretty radical way. So I'm not saying that nymphet
Speaker 1: online culture is above criticism. It isn't. It has at
Speaker 1: different times included wild misreads and includes a lot of
Speaker 1: romanticizing prepared situated by popular movie adaptations, and how pop
Speaker 1: culture has swallowed dolorous Hayes whole and includes a lot
Speaker 1: of romanticizing perpetuated by popular movie adaptations. Elijah Maisa explains
Speaker 1: in her recent video why black girlhood is not valued
Speaker 1: in the Dolet community. There is a need to stop
Speaker 1: centering whiteness and rigid femininity with appreciating Dolorous Hayes. She
Speaker 1: speaks about it here, so I want to include a
Speaker 1: little bit of that video as well, and I did
Speaker 1: some editing for clarity. I just wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: black girl home and why I feel like within the
Speaker 1: community specifically, black girlhood is not viewed with the same
Speaker 1: grace that white girlhood is. I think it's unfair that
Speaker 1: black girls are hyper sexualized already. And if a black
Speaker 1: girl wants to do something that is normal to her,
Speaker 1: she wearing a denomni script with the baby fat too
Speaker 1: top and bamboo ear rings, why is she not viewed
Speaker 1: under the same numphat aesthetic lens as say a white girl,
Speaker 1: and you know, listening a typical nymphat clothing with the
Speaker 1: bardo top and the sailor shorts speaks Fundamentally, they're the
Speaker 1: same outfit a tube slash crop top and a mini
Speaker 1: skirt or short shorts, but one is viewed under the
Speaker 1: num fat lens, but the others are viewed as more
Speaker 1: adult or she is over bisexual, even though she's just
Speaker 1: wearing clothes and fundamentally fit the same pattern as a
Speaker 1: white girl does. Where we can be in the most
Speaker 1: frelly pink baby ish outfits and still be coded as
Speaker 1: hyper aggressive and hyper sexual and white room that's never
Speaker 1: really seemed to understand the fact that they did not
Speaker 1: see us as well the numbers of communities subliminally. And
Speaker 1: the thing is nymphat aesthetic at his heart is about
Speaker 1: for claiming girlhood and not necessarily innocence ex something you
Speaker 1: have to be an innocent person to reclaiming girl and
Speaker 1: I think purity like complexes and purity politics are just
Speaker 1: not helpful. But it's just abouid claiming your own girlhood
Speaker 1: and your self in a way that feels comfortable with you.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to say femininity either, because I
Speaker 1: think feminity is very different for everyone, and I think
Speaker 1: that is an unfair box to put people in, especially
Speaker 1: when you consider like the amount of non binary no
Speaker 1: as there were, or like trans and beds and fall less.
Speaker 1: So I think like femininities and the gild were either.
Speaker 1: It's not really about the reclaiming femininity is more about
Speaker 1: claiming the way you grew up. So that's why I
Speaker 1: said girlhood for shorthands, but I guess you could say
Speaker 1: a childhood too. Reclaiming girlhood as Malaijah describes it is
Speaker 1: a better description of the goals of deliveracities online than
Speaker 1: I've read in any scholars paper and requires that the
Speaker 1: community to be inclusive of what that means for everybody.
Speaker 1: Dolores Hayes as a character whose experiences have spoken to
Speaker 1: a wide array of people, to nymphettes who present more
Speaker 1: feminine and fun let's who present more masculine, to young
Speaker 1: people of all genders and races, and that is absolutely
Speaker 1: a fact that needs to be taken into consideration in
Speaker 1: future adaptations. Do Laura's is seen, like we've been talking
Speaker 1: about in relation to you, and the power that sort
Speaker 1: of icon has shouldn't be underestimated or squandered. Do Laura's
Speaker 1: feels more present in these communities than she does on
Speaker 1: most of the covers of Lolita, or, for that matter,
Speaker 1: in most of the movies, because it's mostly kids her
Speaker 1: age processing her experiences. And I'm just going to throw
Speaker 1: in one final God damn it, Lana del Rey. Next week,
Speaker 1: in our penultimate episode of Lolita Podcast, we speak to
Speaker 1: some of the women behind these images, the young actors
Speaker 1: who have played Lolita over the years, through interviews and
Speaker 1: archival looks. At their lives. We'll take a look at
Speaker 1: the challenges, emotional stressors and lack of protection afforded to
Speaker 1: these actors, all while their respective Humbert's continued onto happy careers.
Speaker 1: Why is that talented actors treated as images for consumption?
Speaker 1: Next week on Lolita Podcast. Lolita Podcast is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. It is written and hosted by me
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus, produced by Sophie Lichtman, Beth and Marco Luso,
Speaker 1: Miles Gray and Jack O'Brien. It is edited by the
Speaker 1: wonderful Isaac Taylor. Music is from Zoe Blade. Theme music
Speaker 1: is from Brad Diggert and My guest voices this week
Speaker 1: are Robert Evans, Caitlin Derante, Melissa Lozada, Oliva, Maggie Mayfish
Speaker 1: and Daniel Goodman. See you next week when I Well