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Speaker 1: Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse

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Speaker 1: and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. In ninety eight, Sally

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Speaker 1: Horner was a fifth grader in Camden, New Jersey, who

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Speaker 1: tried to shoplift a notebook from a corner store on

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Speaker 1: a dare. She took the notebook, got to the door,

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Speaker 1: and then felt a hand on her arm. This was

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Speaker 1: the hand of a grown man who said he was

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Speaker 1: an FBI officer and that she could get in big

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Speaker 1: trouble and be sent to a reform school for doing

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Speaker 1: something like that. He said he'd let her off this time,

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Speaker 1: but he'd always be watching. Sally's mother was a widow.

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Speaker 1: Her father had died by suicide when Sally was only six,

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Speaker 1: something they never discussed in the household. The family was poor,

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Speaker 1: but Sally was a bright and kind young girl, and

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Speaker 1: she didn't see the man who said he was an

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Speaker 1: FBI agent for months after that, But then he turned

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Speaker 1: up again in June. He reminded her of what she'd done,

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Speaker 1: the crime of stealing a notebook, and then said that

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Speaker 1: the government insisted that she go to Atlantic City with him.

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Speaker 1: She was eleven and confused, and this is long before

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Speaker 1: stranger danger, ever, becomes a popular conversation in schools, so

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Speaker 1: she agrees. She promises not to tell her mother the

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Speaker 1: real nature of why she's leaving. The man said that

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Speaker 1: he would call Sally's mom, Ella, saying that he was

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Speaker 1: the father of a classmate of hers and all Sally

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Speaker 1: had to do was not correct him. Ella would later

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Speaker 1: say that she was concerned about the offer, but was

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Speaker 1: happy that Sally might get a chance to have a vacation,

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Speaker 1: something that her mother wasn't able to provide. So on

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Speaker 1: June four, Ella brought Sally to the bus station to

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Speaker 1: go to Atlantic City, sitting next to a man who

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Speaker 1: Ellen never met personally. She would not see her daughter

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Speaker 1: for twenty one months because the man Sally went with

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Speaker 1: was not an FBI agent. He was a man named

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Speaker 1: Frank Losal, a fifty year old mechanic who had just

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Speaker 1: been released from prison six months before and had a

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Speaker 1: marked history of molesting girls between the ages of eleven

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Speaker 1: and fourteen. Sally wrote to her mother and called from

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Speaker 1: Atlantic City for the week she was scheduled to be there,

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Speaker 1: then asked her mother if she could stay longer. After

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Speaker 1: three weeks, Sally stopped contacting her mother until the end

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Speaker 1: of July, at which point Sally said she was going

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Speaker 1: to Baltimore with the man who called himself Mr. Warner.

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Speaker 1: She told Ella she wouldn't be contacting her anymore. Frank

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Speaker 1: Lassal brought Sally Horner to Baltimore from there, raping her

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Speaker 1: regularly and ensuring her silence by saying that she would

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Speaker 1: be found out for shoplifting if she didn't do what

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Speaker 1: he wanted. Ella reported Sally missing back in New Jersey,

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Speaker 1: and the story made waves locally, but lost steam after

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Speaker 1: several months with no developments. I didn't know about Sally's

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Speaker 1: story until pretty recently. It was written about in detail

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Speaker 1: in the book The Real Lolita, A Lost Girl, A

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Speaker 1: salacious crime, and a scandalous masterpiece by writer Sarah Winman,

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Speaker 1: who's written about Lolita quite a bit over the years,

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Speaker 1: and who will be interviewing in this episode. I don't

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Speaker 1: believe that Lauras and Sally are one and the same

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Speaker 1: by any stretch, but given that Sally Horners lived experiences

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Speaker 1: took place around the exact same time that the fictional

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Speaker 1: Dolores He was abducted by Humbert Humbert, I think her

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Speaker 1: story is very relevant here in Baltimore, LaSalle entered Sally

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Speaker 1: into a Catholic school under a different name, and they

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Speaker 1: stayed there for six months as he continued to intimidate

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Speaker 1: and assault her. By early Camden police had figured out

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Speaker 1: who LaSalle was, charged him with kidnapping, and LaSalle took

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Speaker 1: Sally and fled to Dallas, Texas. At this point, Sally

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Speaker 1: still believed LaSalle was an FBI agent and was terrified

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Speaker 1: of him. They moved to a trailer park and Sally

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Speaker 1: was enrolled in a different Catholic school, befriending the kids

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Speaker 1: and eventually the mother of a family living in a

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Speaker 1: nearby trailer. The mother's name is Ruth. Sally doesn't reveal

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Speaker 1: anything about her relationship to the man she was instructed

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Speaker 1: to call her father, but Ruth was suspicious. So when

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Speaker 1: Ruth's family moved to San Jose, California, Ruth wrote to

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Speaker 1: LaSalle and told him that he could get some work

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Speaker 1: there in the hopes that she could keep an eye

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Speaker 1: on Sally. Sally confessed how LaSalle had sex with her

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Speaker 1: regularly to a classmate, and her classmate said that they

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Speaker 1: should stop. This, of course, was rape, but Sally didn't

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Speaker 1: have the tools to understand that at this time. Sally

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Speaker 1: went on to tell an investigator later that she quote

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Speaker 1: began to reject his advances after that unquote. In early

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty, Sally is still missing and LaSalle brings her

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Speaker 1: to San Jose, California, where they reconnect with Ruth's family.

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Speaker 1: Sally comes clean, telling Ruth about LaSalle's criminal behavior. According

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Speaker 1: to Wineman's book, Ruth too was a complicated figure, a

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Speaker 1: hero in Sally's life, but was emotionally abusive to her

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Speaker 1: own children. Ruth has Sally call her older sister back

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Speaker 1: in New Jersey. Sally has taken to a children's center,

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Speaker 1: and LaSalle, in spite of the fact that he continued

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Speaker 1: to insist he was Sally's biological father for years, was

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Speaker 1: a rested, but Sally couldn't go home to her mother

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Speaker 1: until she had been questioned by the police. She wasn't

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Speaker 1: comfortable discussing how LaSalle sexually abused her at first, but

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Speaker 1: eventually said that it had happened countless times. Finally, a

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Speaker 1: few weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Sally has returned home.

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Speaker 1: Twenty one months later, LaSalle was convicted under the Man

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Speaker 1: Act or the White Slave Traffic Act, sworn into law

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Speaker 1: in nineteen By the nineteen forties, it's more popularly called

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Speaker 1: the Man Act, likely because referring to it by Man

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Speaker 1: after politician James Robert Mann, who introduced the Act on

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Speaker 1: the Senate floor, avoids facing the implications of its alternate

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Speaker 1: name and the laws often racist application of it. So

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Speaker 1: a quick but important digression here. We've referenced this law

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Speaker 1: in early episodes since Humbert Humbert invokes the name of

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Speaker 1: the Man Act as well, So a brief note on

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Speaker 1: its history here. Well. The law itself detailed that it

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Speaker 1: was a quote for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery,

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Speaker 1: or for any other immoral purpose unquote. While it was

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Speaker 1: used to prosecute kidnappers, it was equally used to punish

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Speaker 1: sex workers and to criminalize interracial relationships of any kind,

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Speaker 1: with the Act being deployed to punish black men in particular.

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Speaker 1: While this law worked in favor of Sally Horner receiving justice,

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Speaker 1: it certainly did not mean that for everyone. Early in

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Speaker 1: the law's history, in nine twelve, a man named Jack Johnson,

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Speaker 1: who was the first black American to hold the heavyweight title,

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Speaker 1: was said to have violated the Man Attack for kidnapping

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Speaker 1: heavy quotes here a white woman whom he had married,

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Speaker 1: named Lucille Cameron. Given the fact that this was a

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Speaker 1: very consensual relationship, Cameron refused to cooperate, and Johnson was

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Speaker 1: brought to court under the Man Act again in nineteen

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Speaker 1: for involvement with a white sex worker, and this time

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Speaker 1: he was convicted under an all white jury, later serving

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Speaker 1: a year in prison. He wasn't hardened until over seventy

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Speaker 1: years after his death in Now there's a lot more

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Speaker 1: to say with that example alone, But all of this

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Speaker 1: to say, some have been taken to court over the

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Speaker 1: Man Act over legitimate abuse of women and children. But

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Speaker 1: it was a law conceived during the nonsense white slavery

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Speaker 1: panic of the early twentieth century and has been used

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Speaker 1: for prejudiced and revenge based instances extensively as well. The

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Speaker 1: Man Act is still in law today, was part of

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Speaker 1: the reason that Elizabeth Smart's captor was put in jail

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Speaker 1: and was last amended under George W. Bush. For more

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Speaker 1: in the troubling history of this law, I will link

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Speaker 1: a piece to the notes of this episode. There's definitely

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Speaker 1: more to learn. Okay, let's get back to Sally Horner's story.

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Speaker 1: Frank Lassalle pleads guilty and turns down any legal defense,

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Speaker 1: although he would later appeal. But we're talking about Sally here.

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Speaker 1: She and her family were offered the chance to leave Camden,

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Speaker 1: New Jersey and live under assumed names somewhere else, but

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Speaker 1: Ellie refuses. Sally just wanted to return to her life.

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Speaker 1: But doing this isn't so easy because once Sally is discovered,

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Speaker 1: the details of her case are made national and the

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Speaker 1: fact that she was sexually abused is on the front

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Speaker 1: page of newspapers. So Sally, going back to the same

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Speaker 1: school she went to prior to being abducted, struggles. The

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Speaker 1: family barely speaks of the incident. She receives limited to

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Speaker 1: no mental health care, and experiences bullying from her peers,

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Speaker 1: but Sally pulls through. She makes a close friend, and

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Speaker 1: in August ninety two, at age fifteen, she goes to

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Speaker 1: the Jersey Shore with her friend for the weekend, and

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Speaker 1: it's here that she meets an older boy twenty years old,

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Speaker 1: and Sally lies about her age, saying that she's seventeen.

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Speaker 1: It's all pretty innocent, and he offers her a ride

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Speaker 1: home at night and On the way home, they get

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Speaker 1: into a car crash that kills Sally Horner at age fifteen.

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Speaker 1: Losal goes on to live in prison for over ten

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Speaker 1: years afterward. Once a media sensation, the Associated Press had

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Speaker 1: little to say about Sally upon her death. Florence Sally Horner,

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Speaker 1: a fifteen year old Camden, New Jersey girl who spent

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Speaker 1: twenty one months as the captive of a middle aged

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Speaker 1: morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a

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Speaker 1: highway accident when the car in which she was riding

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Speaker 1: plowed into the rear of a parked truck. Starting the

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Speaker 1: same year, Sally Horner was abducted by Frank LaSalle. Vladimir

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Speaker 1: Nabokov begins work on what would become his most famous novel, Lolita.

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Speaker 1: He writes a first draft of the novel out on

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Speaker 1: large note cards, along with notes, reference points, and ideas

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Speaker 1: for future drafts in the corner of one card. This

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Speaker 1: is found August nineteen fifty two, Woodbine, New Jersey. Sally Horner,

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Speaker 1: fifteen year old Camden, New Jersey girl who spent twenty

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Speaker 1: one months as the captive of a middle aged morals

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Speaker 1: offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway

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Speaker 1: mishap early Monday. Sally vanished from her Camden home in

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight and wasn't heard from again until nineteen fifty,

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Speaker 1: when she told a harrowing story of spending twenty one

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Speaker 1: months as the cross country slave of Frank less Alto Lasal,

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Speaker 1: a mechanic, was arrested in San Jose, California. He pleaded

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Speaker 1: guilty to two charges of kidnapping and was sentenced to

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Speaker 1: thirty to thirty five years in prison. He was branded

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Speaker 1: as a moral leper by the sentencing judge, and in

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Speaker 1: the published draft of Lolita, Chapter thirty three, Part two,

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Speaker 1: Humbert Humbert says, this had I done to Dolly, perhaps

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Speaker 1: what Frank LaSalle, a fifty year old mechanic, had done

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Speaker 1: to eleven year old Sally Horner. In Sally Horner and

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Speaker 1: Dolores Hayes are not the same person. And we know

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Speaker 1: Nabukof never intended this because he had been trying to

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Speaker 1: write a story with a plot like Lolita for over

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Speaker 1: ten years before Sally was ever abducted. But we know

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Speaker 1: that she was on his mind, and that she dies

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Speaker 1: sixteen months before the manuscript is ever finished. This is

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Speaker 1: Lolita Podcast. M H. Welcome back to Lolita Podcast. I

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Speaker 1: am your host, Jamie Loftus, and in this episode, we're

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Speaker 1: going to take a closer look not only at some

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Speaker 1: of the real life cases of abduction and abuse that

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Speaker 1: Nabokov pulled from to write Lolita, but how the world

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Speaker 1: viewed these crimes at the time, where psychoanalysis was at

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Speaker 1: the time of Lolita's publication, and where professionals are today

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Speaker 1: in terms of treating survivors of the kind of abuse

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Speaker 1: suffered by Sally Horner and by Dolores Hayes in the

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Speaker 1: pages of Lolita. Quick note here, I know there's an

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Speaker 1: ongoing discussion on the myriad words used to describe those

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Speaker 1: who have experienced abuse. I'm aware of this dialogue. I'm

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Speaker 1: going to use the word survivor in this series because

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Speaker 1: that's what I've used in my own personal experience, but

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Speaker 1: it is an ongoing dialogue that we should be paying

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Speaker 1: attention to. We're also going to be speaking to those

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Speaker 1: who have experienced abuse while under age and their complicated

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Speaker 1: relationships with this text and of course with these issues.

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Speaker 1: This was a heavy, challenging episode to put together, and

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Speaker 1: I really, really really appreciate the time and care to

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Speaker 1: those I interviewed in answering my questions. Dolores Hayes, while

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Speaker 1: a fictional character, has an experienced reflective of a lot

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Speaker 1: of real life people, and they deserve the space in

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Speaker 1: this discourse. They always have, and I think Nabakov would

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Speaker 1: agree on that. But we see it so rarely discussed

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Speaker 1: and never discussed in our popular culture. So this week

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Speaker 1: I'd like to listen more than talk, because there's a

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Speaker 1: lot to unpack here. While I'm a survivor of sexual

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Speaker 1: abuse myself, I'm very lucky to not have been subjected

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Speaker 1: to abuse as a child, and we're going to spend

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Speaker 1: this episode talking to readers of Lolita who have experienced

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Speaker 1: and survived abuse and the professionals who have dedicated their

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Speaker 1: careers to working with survivors in a responsible way. Within

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Speaker 1: these conversations are some cases for reclaiming Lolita as a

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Speaker 1: text that is useful for those who have been sexually

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Speaker 1: abused and those looking for insight into what abuse at

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Speaker 1: the hands of someone who is supposed to be caring

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Speaker 1: for you can be like, as well as a case

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Speaker 1: for the opposite. But first, let's talk a little more

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Speaker 1: about Sally Horner. She wasn't the sole inspiration for Dolores Hayes.

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Speaker 1: We know that Nabulkov was interested in exploring this topic

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Speaker 1: and fiction as early as before Sally was even born.

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Speaker 1: There are strong indicators that the tragedies that befell Sally

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Speaker 1: down to her tragic death at the age of fifteen,

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Speaker 1: three years to the day before Lolita was published, had

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Speaker 1: an influence on certain points in the book. And here's

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Speaker 1: why that matters. This is a bit of my conversation

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Speaker 1: with the author of the Real Alita, the kidnapping of

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Speaker 1: Sally Horner and the novel that scandalized the world, Sarah Winman.

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Speaker 1: So I remember looking at this note card in Nabokov's files,

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Speaker 1: and it had a list of music from nineteen fifty

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Speaker 1: that um Dolores would be listening to, and it was

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Speaker 1: very funny. It's like Peggy Lee and so I think

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Speaker 1: maybe Perry Como was on there, and Tony Bennett was

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Speaker 1: definitely on there. And it's so funny because that's seventy

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Speaker 1: years ago. So we think that that's such old these music,

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Speaker 1: but at the time it was fresh and contemporary. And

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Speaker 1: it's this idea of the making of the American teenager.

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Speaker 1: There are also some similarities in terms of some of

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Speaker 1: the details that I think at one point Humbered references

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Speaker 1: a case that's very similar to the actual happenings of

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Speaker 1: Sally's kidnapping, but transposed to some of the ages and

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Speaker 1: talks about a nine year old girl who was abducted,

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Speaker 1: and obviously just mentioning the fact like Frank's name and

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Speaker 1: that he was a mechanic. It's right there the news

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Speaker 1: media of this time, at the time of Sally Horner's disappearance.

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Speaker 1: I would love to dig into that a little bit more.

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Speaker 1: How does that get to how we cover comparable cases

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Speaker 1: now but at this time, at the time of our disappearance,

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Speaker 1: how is it covered in the media Later on after

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Speaker 1: her rescue, when the coverage would be much more extensive,

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Speaker 1: there were these whispers that, well, why did Ella let

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Speaker 1: Sally go off and then didn't notice anything for several weeks.

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Speaker 1: And the thing that I tried to impress and my

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Speaker 1: retelling of the story is that Ella was poor. She

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Speaker 1: had bet a lot of baggage of her own secrets

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Speaker 1: that she was keeping. She could barely keep the lights on,

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Speaker 1: she had trouble holding onto a job, and for Sally

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Speaker 1: the idea that a week's vacation in Atlantic City that

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Speaker 1: was more than Ella could ever offer. So I can see,

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Speaker 1: or I can try to understand and empathize why she

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Speaker 1: made what is clearly a poor decision. And so because

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Speaker 1: she had been speaking with the sheriff and he had

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Speaker 1: asked her if she had had sex with Frank Glassel,

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Speaker 1: they wouldn't have used the term rape um whether even

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Speaker 1: though it is accurate. I think it's just important to

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Speaker 1: clarify that when you're dealing with history, going by the

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Speaker 1: phrasing that they use and then contextualizing it is super important.

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Speaker 1: And the sheriff had asked, and at first she denied it,

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Speaker 1: but then she admitted it after some careful, gentle coaxing.

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Speaker 1: And this statement was reprinted on the front page of

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Speaker 1: the Career Post, above the fold, and it was essentially

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Speaker 1: Sally's testimony. So on the one hand it was really jarring,

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Speaker 1: But on the other hand, it was the only time that,

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Speaker 1: with a couple of exceptions, where I had Sally's voice,

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Speaker 1: even though it was in the sort of official mode.

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Speaker 1: So the fact that she said in the statement, I

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Speaker 1: want to come home as soon as I can like

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Speaker 1: that was just so it just like got me right

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Speaker 1: in the heart, and I knew that if it got me,

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Speaker 1: it would also get readers as well. So I think

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Speaker 1: that ultimately the coverage was as good as it was

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Speaker 1: going to get. But I think that with our very

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Speaker 1: careful and practiced eye, there are a lot of grounds

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Speaker 1: for criticism and for how it could have been better.

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Speaker 1: I mean, you didn't have a lot of television, you

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Speaker 1: had some radio, you had a lot more newspapers, so

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Speaker 1: as a result, you didn't have this wall to wall

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Speaker 1: twenty four, our cable madness, and now with social media

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Speaker 1: it just feels like all we do is consume media.

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Speaker 1: But seven years ago, the whole point was you picked

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Speaker 1: up a paper, you listen to radio, you talked, You

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Speaker 1: talked to the people in town. So, if anything, the

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Speaker 1: coverage of Sally's rescue was a lot better than how

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Speaker 1: the people of Camden viewed Sally, and that's why she

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Speaker 1: had such a tough time sort of re orienting herself.

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Speaker 1: So they stayed in the same house, Sally went back

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Speaker 1: to the same school with the same people, all of

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Speaker 1: whom had read the coverage and knew exactly what happened

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Speaker 1: to her. And arrived at the conclusion that instead of

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Speaker 1: being a victim of sexual assault abuse, that she had

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Speaker 1: willingly given up her virginity to a much older man.

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Speaker 1: And were there any mental health services or counseling made

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Speaker 1: available to her. Even if there had been, I don't

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Speaker 1: think that it would ever have occurred to Ella to

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Speaker 1: pursue that. For Sally, it just wasn't done. And I

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Speaker 1: remember talking with al Pinero, her brother in law, when

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Speaker 1: he was still alive, and Diana Jamingo, who was Sally's niece,

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Speaker 1: who was born only a couple of months after Sally's abduction,

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Speaker 1: so she was just about two when Sally came back

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Speaker 1: and I asked her, was like, was there any was

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Speaker 1: therapy a thing that your family did? And she shook

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Speaker 1: her head and said, no, just you never talked about it.

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Speaker 1: She didn't even find out the whole truth of what

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Speaker 1: happened to Sally until well into her teens, So it

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Speaker 1: just wasn't discussed. Their world was smaller, not necessarily limited,

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Speaker 1: but just smaller than the worlds that we have at

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Speaker 1: our disposal. Post traumatic stress disorder wasn't even a term

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Speaker 1: in ninety and so what is your hope? What what

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Speaker 1: do you hope that people take away for knowing Sally

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Speaker 1: Horner's story. I think it just it comes back to

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Speaker 1: knowing Sally Horner's story not only gives context for this

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Speaker 1: iconic and to my mind, yes, one of the great

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Speaker 1: American novels of the twentieth century, but it also gives

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Speaker 1: context for how we understand how trauma works and what

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Speaker 1: value all of our lives have, and that we shouldn't

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Speaker 1: necessarily brush people aside just because they don't fit particular

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Speaker 1: modes of victimhood that we think that. I think the

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Speaker 1: last few years in particular have really shown that. I

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Speaker 1: hope that we have expanded our ability to understand that

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Speaker 1: processing trauma is a complicated endeavor. It's a symmetrical it

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Speaker 1: doesn't happen in a linear form. It doesn't happen on

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Speaker 1: a schedule that you want. It's very, to my mind,

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Speaker 1: very correlated with grief and the sort of like stop

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Speaker 1: start feeling that that happens. And it's just mostly I

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Speaker 1: just want people to feel like Sally's was an interesting person,

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Speaker 1: and by interesting person, just that her very existence was

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Speaker 1: interesting and that was really important to me that Sally

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Speaker 1: partner her life mattered as her life, but also as

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Speaker 1: maybe not a stand in per se, but just that

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Speaker 1: it was, you know, I just I wanted her to

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Speaker 1: be immortal. I guess that's kind of what any writer

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Speaker 1: is doing when they're reviving interest in someone who has

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Speaker 1: overlooked and neglected. I think one thing that was really

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Speaker 1: important to me for Sally's part of the book was

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Speaker 1: I kept running into all sorts of complicated women. Between

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Speaker 1: Ella and Ruth Janish, the woman who engineered her rescue

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Speaker 1: as one of her children told me she she did

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Speaker 1: the best that she knew how with what she had,

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Speaker 1: And I think that's really important and understanding why unfortunately

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Speaker 1: people abuse their own children. It's because it's a model

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Speaker 1: that they have learned, perhaps from their own family. And

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Speaker 1: it can be really, really difficult to undo what you've

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Speaker 1: known as a child, and it's like encoded into your

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Speaker 1: body and your brain, and you have to work so

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Speaker 1: hard to get past that, and many people are able

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Speaker 1: to do it, and many people are not. And I

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Speaker 1: think we just have to give people the emotional and

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Speaker 1: psychological tools to break cycles. And it's really important that

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Speaker 1: the more of these stories that are out there, the

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Speaker 1: more we can expand our understanding It might be a

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Speaker 1: difficult thing to say right now, and the country is

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Speaker 1: so polarized, but I'm enough of an optimist to think

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Speaker 1: that there are ways to expand and bridge our ability

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Speaker 1: to understand one another. Thank you so much to Sarah

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Speaker 1: Wineman for her time, and you can check out The

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Speaker 1: Real Lolita wherever books are sold. I also highly recommend

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Speaker 1: for writing about Sue Lyon that was published earlier this year.

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Speaker 1: We discussed that last week and will continue to in

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Speaker 1: a future episode. So as deeply painful as it can be,

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Speaker 1: I think that discussing comparable real life cases to Lolita

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Speaker 1: is critical to understanding the text itself, and so is

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Speaker 1: understanding how the conversations around this topic have changed over

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Speaker 1: the years. As a starting point, abduction cases as they

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Speaker 1: were covered in Sally Horner and Dolores Hayes's time centers

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Speaker 1: abused girls and women who are white almost exclusively, an

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Speaker 1: instance of cultural and media driven racism that's still with

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Speaker 1: us now. Look at a list of Dateline episodes, look

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Speaker 1: at iconic true crime stories that we give space to,

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Speaker 1: look at the cult stories that we elect to cover

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Speaker 1: in depth. It doesn't make the abuse any less scarring,

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Speaker 1: but there are wide swaths of stories concerning the sexual

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Speaker 1: abuse of non white people with an emphasis on black, brown,

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Speaker 1: and Indigenous people that are discussed less or not at

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Speaker 1: all in a larger cultural way. I highly recommend a

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Speaker 1: piece from The Appeal called The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of

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Speaker 1: True Crime by Elon Green as a start. Another thing

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Speaker 1: to keep in mind is that the study of childhood

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Speaker 1: sexual trauma is still relatively young, even now, having come

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Speaker 1: into the public consciousness in the early nineteen hundreds with

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Speaker 1: the work of doctor Sigmund Freud. Before we talk about

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Speaker 1: more modern approaches to addressing not just lowly to the text,

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Speaker 1: but how we discussed the abuse and sexualization of children

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Speaker 1: and young women. I wanted to clearly contextualize the popular

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Speaker 1: psychology that Sally Horner and Dolores Hayes would have been

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Speaker 1: growing up around. Popular psychology that Nabokov attempts to demonstrate

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Speaker 1: was pretty easy for Humbert Humbert to twist to his advantage.

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Speaker 1: So it brings me no pleasure to inform you that

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Speaker 1: we're going to talk briefly here about Sigmund Freud, and

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Speaker 1: to be clear, for all the freud Heads in the chat,

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Speaker 1: this is kind of my introduction to him as well.

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Speaker 1: The controversies surrounding his research and publication, combine mind with

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Speaker 1: the impossible to overestimate influence it's had on our culture

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Speaker 1: is enough to fill thousands and thousands of pages hours

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Speaker 1: of broadcast, just way more time than we have here.

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Speaker 1: But it's necessary to address because, to remind you, Nabukov

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Speaker 1: had a marked dislike and outward antagonism of the work

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Speaker 1: of both Freud and sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and to be honest,

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Speaker 1: I wasn't completely sure what his reasons. We're going to

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Speaker 1: be going into the research process for this show, and

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Speaker 1: maybe you're well acquainted with the controversies already, but it's

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Speaker 1: definitely not a common discussion for Normans like myself, so

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Speaker 1: we're going to get into it because after learning more

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Speaker 1: about Freud's life and work, I am far more in

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Speaker 1: the Nabokov camp at this point. Freud's conclusions are, for

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Speaker 1: my money, mostly a broad oversimplification of a series of

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Speaker 1: complicated problems that warrant close and specific examination without bias,

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00:25:57,320 --> 00:26:00,320
Speaker 1: And for Nabukof it would appear that his first station

430
00:26:00,400 --> 00:26:04,399
Speaker 1: with Freud was also connected to Freud's methods of researching

431
00:26:04,480 --> 00:26:08,240
Speaker 1: child sexuality, which I only became familiar with recently. This

432
00:26:08,280 --> 00:26:12,920
Speaker 1: section was originally much longer and touched on Freud's myriad

433
00:26:13,040 --> 00:26:17,119
Speaker 1: issues on queerness, the absence of race or religion or

434
00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:21,239
Speaker 1: class from his work, his complicated but close relationship with

435
00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:26,600
Speaker 1: his unapologetically gay daughter, his propensity for cocaine. But it

436
00:26:26,760 --> 00:26:30,720
Speaker 1: just it got unwieldy. My producers were like, you have

437
00:26:30,880 --> 00:26:33,840
Speaker 1: you have to stop. But if you're interested in these topics,

438
00:26:34,040 --> 00:26:35,919
Speaker 1: I will leave some places to get started in the

439
00:26:35,960 --> 00:26:39,320
Speaker 1: show notes. This is obviously a very dense area of study,

440
00:26:39,359 --> 00:26:41,359
Speaker 1: and a lot of it was new to me. So

441
00:26:41,640 --> 00:26:45,080
Speaker 1: for brevity, we're going to stay focused on Freud as

442
00:26:45,119 --> 00:26:49,040
Speaker 1: it pertains to child sexual development and his views on

443
00:26:49,080 --> 00:26:52,840
Speaker 1: sex and women in particular. Nabokov seems to take issue

444
00:26:52,880 --> 00:26:56,919
Speaker 1: with Freud's child sexual development rhetoric, which has an interesting history,

445
00:26:57,080 --> 00:26:59,720
Speaker 1: as Freud continued to flip flop on his views on

446
00:26:59,760 --> 00:27:02,920
Speaker 1: serve vivers of child sexual abuse as his career went on.

447
00:27:03,480 --> 00:27:07,920
Speaker 1: So in culture today, Freud's work regarding child psycho sexual

448
00:27:07,960 --> 00:27:11,520
Speaker 1: development is everywhere, and there's a lot of his popular

449
00:27:11,600 --> 00:27:15,080
Speaker 1: theories that have kind of embedded themselves into our world.

450
00:27:15,240 --> 00:27:19,879
Speaker 1: As fact, the formative personality concept of the id, the ego,

451
00:27:19,960 --> 00:27:24,720
Speaker 1: and the super ego, life and death instincts mechanisms of defense.

452
00:27:25,160 --> 00:27:28,240
Speaker 1: So one of Freud's greatest hits is the psycho sexual

453
00:27:28,320 --> 00:27:32,440
Speaker 1: stages of development. This might sound familiar. Freud's separated five

454
00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:37,560
Speaker 1: stages of development here by age and quote unquote oerrogenous

455
00:27:37,720 --> 00:27:40,840
Speaker 1: zone or the body part that people of this age

456
00:27:40,960 --> 00:27:46,240
Speaker 1: tend to fixate on. These consist of the oral stage

457
00:27:46,440 --> 00:27:49,480
Speaker 1: from birth to a year. The oroginous zone here is

458
00:27:49,520 --> 00:27:53,040
Speaker 1: the mouth, the anal stage of ages one to three.

459
00:27:53,440 --> 00:27:57,200
Speaker 1: The oroginous zone is the bowels and the bladder phallic

460
00:27:57,359 --> 00:28:00,800
Speaker 1: stage ages three to six. Era in a zone are

461
00:28:00,960 --> 00:28:06,760
Speaker 1: the genitals latent stage ages six to puberty no orogenous

462
00:28:06,840 --> 00:28:13,600
Speaker 1: zone blubeto is inactive, and the genital stage puberty into adulthood.

463
00:28:14,760 --> 00:28:19,440
Speaker 1: There's also Freud's theories surrounding sexuality and childhood, which brought

464
00:28:19,560 --> 00:28:24,840
Speaker 1: us familiar hits like penis envy and castration anxiety, which

465
00:28:24,880 --> 00:28:28,040
Speaker 1: is a fancy way of saying oedipus complex, which is

466
00:28:28,160 --> 00:28:31,760
Speaker 1: a fancy way of saying, quote the fear of loss

467
00:28:31,880 --> 00:28:35,600
Speaker 1: or of damage to the genital organ as punishment for

468
00:28:35,680 --> 00:28:39,880
Speaker 1: incestuous wishes towards the mother, and murderous fantasies toward the

469
00:28:40,000 --> 00:28:48,760
Speaker 1: rival father unquote, normal stuff. Freud grounds a lot of

470
00:28:48,800 --> 00:28:53,080
Speaker 1: these theories in mythology, which is interesting because mythology is

471
00:28:53,240 --> 00:28:56,360
Speaker 1: famously completely made up. It reminds me of when my

472
00:28:56,440 --> 00:28:59,800
Speaker 1: uncle told me his favorite comedian was Deadpool. It's like,

473
00:29:00,040 --> 00:29:03,560
Speaker 1: first of all, that's not possible, Deadpool is not a

474
00:29:03,640 --> 00:29:07,160
Speaker 1: real man, and second of all, that's hurtful because I

475
00:29:07,160 --> 00:29:10,160
Speaker 1: am a comedian. Although if you asked Freud why I

476
00:29:10,240 --> 00:29:13,040
Speaker 1: was frustrated by my uncle saying this, he'd probably just

477
00:29:13,080 --> 00:29:17,120
Speaker 1: say I subconsciously wanted to steal his painess. Sorry. There's

478
00:29:17,160 --> 00:29:20,640
Speaker 1: also the concept of the Freudian slip, where, for example,

479
00:29:20,760 --> 00:29:23,840
Speaker 1: you would say a perfect ass instead of a perfect

480
00:29:24,040 --> 00:29:27,800
Speaker 1: assessment when you're talking to your crush in sociology in college,

481
00:29:27,800 --> 00:29:30,760
Speaker 1: pulling that example out of thin air. And then there

482
00:29:30,960 --> 00:29:34,680
Speaker 1: is seduction theory, and in all seriousness, my uncle's favorite

483
00:29:34,720 --> 00:29:38,800
Speaker 1: comedian Deadpool aside. Freud's seduction theory needs a lot of

484
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:41,920
Speaker 1: unpacking as well. But to understand how this theory develops,

485
00:29:42,080 --> 00:29:44,360
Speaker 1: you've got to know a little more about Freud's career

486
00:29:44,760 --> 00:29:47,680
Speaker 1: and his use of his own experience and views to

487
00:29:47,800 --> 00:29:51,680
Speaker 1: shape the ideas of early psychoanalysis. So Freud is the

488
00:29:51,760 --> 00:29:54,960
Speaker 1: father of psycho analysis. Most will tell you again, I'm

489
00:29:54,960 --> 00:29:57,720
Speaker 1: sure there's a million counterpoints to this, but we're one

490
00:29:57,720 --> 00:30:00,080
Speaker 1: on wanting it here. He was born in eighteenth de

491
00:30:00,160 --> 00:30:03,120
Speaker 1: sexts to a poor Jewish family in Austria, and went

492
00:30:03,160 --> 00:30:05,959
Speaker 1: on to become at first a neurologist and then in

493
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:10,040
Speaker 1: his thirties began to experiment with what would become psychoanalysis.

494
00:30:10,160 --> 00:30:12,719
Speaker 1: And it's around this time, in the eighteen nineties that

495
00:30:12,760 --> 00:30:15,840
Speaker 1: Freud releases details of the case that will serve as

496
00:30:15,880 --> 00:30:19,240
Speaker 1: the foundation for his legacy. This regards a case with

497
00:30:19,360 --> 00:30:22,680
Speaker 1: a subject called Anna Oh, who he claimed to have

498
00:30:22,800 --> 00:30:27,880
Speaker 1: cured of quote hysteria unquote, a fun Victorian diagnosis for

499
00:30:27,920 --> 00:30:31,880
Speaker 1: women feeling emotions and then expressing it. He first hypnotizes

500
00:30:31,880 --> 00:30:34,840
Speaker 1: her and then encourages her to talk about her symptoms,

501
00:30:34,920 --> 00:30:38,040
Speaker 1: then eventually stops hypnotizing her and just has her talk

502
00:30:38,120 --> 00:30:41,720
Speaker 1: to him in confidence and analyzes the content of her dreams.

503
00:30:42,040 --> 00:30:46,480
Speaker 1: Hysteria cured. But as messy as a lot of these

504
00:30:46,520 --> 00:30:49,680
Speaker 1: practices is, this is the basis for talk therapy. As

505
00:30:49,680 --> 00:30:53,240
Speaker 1: we know it today. There is a generalization that Freud

506
00:30:53,320 --> 00:30:57,160
Speaker 1: begins to develop around this time, and that's assuming that

507
00:30:57,240 --> 00:31:02,520
Speaker 1: all adult hysteria is automatic connected to childhood sexual trauma.

508
00:31:02,760 --> 00:31:05,520
Speaker 1: This is an assumption that is potentially harmful to project

509
00:31:05,560 --> 00:31:08,720
Speaker 1: onto a patient that hasn't experienced this and serves to

510
00:31:08,840 --> 00:31:12,440
Speaker 1: further harm and muddy and take away from the recovery

511
00:31:12,600 --> 00:31:16,000
Speaker 1: of patients who are seeking treatment because they have experienced it.

512
00:31:16,280 --> 00:31:19,560
Speaker 1: But the anna O case kicks off Sigmund Freud's career

513
00:31:19,800 --> 00:31:22,840
Speaker 1: and Freud starts to tell on himself in regards to

514
00:31:22,920 --> 00:31:25,920
Speaker 1: his lack of insight into women in his own work.

515
00:31:26,200 --> 00:31:29,040
Speaker 1: Pretty early on later in his career, he says, this,

516
00:31:29,920 --> 00:31:34,360
Speaker 1: the great question that has never been answered, and which

517
00:31:34,680 --> 00:31:40,480
Speaker 1: I have not yet been able to answer despite my

518
00:31:40,760 --> 00:31:47,600
Speaker 1: third years of research into the feminine soul, is what

519
00:31:47,720 --> 00:31:54,160
Speaker 1: does a woman who? I mean? Anyways, after the success

520
00:31:54,240 --> 00:31:57,400
Speaker 1: of the anna O case, Freud continued to treat others

521
00:31:57,640 --> 00:32:00,760
Speaker 1: and also turned his tactics in on him self. He

522
00:32:00,880 --> 00:32:04,479
Speaker 1: began self analyzing, and around this time he also started

523
00:32:04,520 --> 00:32:08,680
Speaker 1: to form his ideas around childhood sexual trauma, which changed

524
00:32:08,720 --> 00:32:14,440
Speaker 1: throughout his career, which brings us to seduction theory. Seduction theory,

525
00:32:14,680 --> 00:32:19,280
Speaker 1: put briefly, is what Freud thought the origin of hysteria was,

526
00:32:19,640 --> 00:32:23,920
Speaker 1: which he believed was repressed memories or unconscious memories of

527
00:32:24,040 --> 00:32:28,360
Speaker 1: child sexual abuse. This was first presented in public on

528
00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:32,880
Speaker 1: April one, eighteen ninety six, when Freud presented a paper

529
00:32:32,920 --> 00:32:36,360
Speaker 1: to his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology

530
00:32:36,440 --> 00:32:41,000
Speaker 1: in Vienna, and it's called the Atology of Hysteria. The

531
00:32:41,040 --> 00:32:44,480
Speaker 1: paper is built on Freud's experience with eighteen subjects of

532
00:32:44,520 --> 00:32:47,880
Speaker 1: all genders, all of whom he had concluded had trauma

533
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:50,560
Speaker 1: due to the fact that they've been victims of sexual

534
00:32:50,640 --> 00:32:54,200
Speaker 1: assault by parents or trusted adults in their lives. That

535
00:32:54,360 --> 00:32:57,760
Speaker 1: is to say, he had traced a number of psychological

536
00:32:57,880 --> 00:33:02,800
Speaker 1: issues back to childhood. This paper doesn't blow up necessarily,

537
00:33:03,080 --> 00:33:05,920
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's some evidence that his colleagues at

538
00:33:05,920 --> 00:33:08,200
Speaker 1: the time did not approve of how he had arrived

539
00:33:08,200 --> 00:33:11,720
Speaker 1: at these conclusions, but Freud continues on a similar course

540
00:33:11,720 --> 00:33:15,840
Speaker 1: of study moving forward. Another major league controversial issue at

541
00:33:15,880 --> 00:33:19,800
Speaker 1: hand here is how did Freud safely and ethically conduct

542
00:33:19,920 --> 00:33:23,880
Speaker 1: this research on child sexual development and how was it verified.

543
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:27,600
Speaker 1: Freud's explanations on how he arrived at these conclusions about

544
00:33:27,720 --> 00:33:31,880
Speaker 1: children is asking you to take his word for it.

545
00:33:32,320 --> 00:33:35,640
Speaker 1: He never that I was able to find, presents specific

546
00:33:35,720 --> 00:33:38,960
Speaker 1: evidence regarding this study, only what he had taken away

547
00:33:38,960 --> 00:33:42,680
Speaker 1: from having interacted with these patients. His reason for doing this,

548
00:33:42,840 --> 00:33:47,400
Speaker 1: according to J. M. Masson's paper The Assault on Truth,

549
00:33:47,640 --> 00:33:51,280
Speaker 1: Freud's suppression of the seduction theory was because he thought

550
00:33:51,360 --> 00:33:54,840
Speaker 1: his community couldn't handle the severity of the clinical case

551
00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:58,720
Speaker 1: stories about sexual abuse that he described. Per Freud, he

552
00:33:58,760 --> 00:34:01,600
Speaker 1: didn't want to describe the in detail before the seduction

553
00:34:01,640 --> 00:34:06,760
Speaker 1: theory had been more widely accepted, which what I understand

554
00:34:06,840 --> 00:34:09,799
Speaker 1: that attitude as it pertains to the general public. But

555
00:34:09,840 --> 00:34:13,239
Speaker 1: it does strike me and struck many in Freud's community

556
00:34:13,600 --> 00:34:17,320
Speaker 1: as extremely dodgy to not provide proof to some extremely

557
00:34:17,360 --> 00:34:20,560
Speaker 1: heavy theories on the basis that he assumed they couldn't

558
00:34:20,600 --> 00:34:23,200
Speaker 1: handle it. He promised at least two other times to

559
00:34:23,360 --> 00:34:27,200
Speaker 1: present precise evidence, but never actually did so. Since so

560
00:34:27,280 --> 00:34:30,720
Speaker 1: much of his studies involved his own interpretation of dreams,

561
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:34,320
Speaker 1: A lot of present day psychologists dispute whether this research

562
00:34:34,400 --> 00:34:38,359
Speaker 1: actually existed in documentation, since Freud never produced it and

563
00:34:38,520 --> 00:34:41,319
Speaker 1: it was very dependent on his opinion in the case

564
00:34:41,320 --> 00:34:43,880
Speaker 1: of a patient. He did report his experiences with a

565
00:34:43,920 --> 00:34:47,600
Speaker 1: patient he called Little Hans. Later, in nineteen o nine,

566
00:34:47,680 --> 00:34:50,920
Speaker 1: Freud attempted to relate a five year old boy's fear

567
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:54,920
Speaker 1: of horses with his fear of his father, with next

568
00:34:54,920 --> 00:35:01,080
Speaker 1: to no evidence, which Freud admitted saying this m hands

569
00:35:01,520 --> 00:35:05,760
Speaker 1: whatever had to be told, many things that he could

570
00:35:05,760 --> 00:35:11,040
Speaker 1: not say himself. He had to be presented with thoughts

571
00:35:11,560 --> 00:35:16,960
Speaker 1: which she had so far show no signs of possessing.

572
00:35:18,600 --> 00:35:22,000
Speaker 1: So when Freud does provide evidence, it strongly suggests that

573
00:35:22,080 --> 00:35:24,879
Speaker 1: a lot of the conclusions are more of a hymn thing.

574
00:35:25,280 --> 00:35:27,920
Speaker 1: Here's what changes in his seduction theory down the line.

575
00:35:28,360 --> 00:35:31,440
Speaker 1: Just a year after seduction theory is first presented in

576
00:35:32,560 --> 00:35:35,640
Speaker 1: Freud back pedals on the theory significantly, and he admits

577
00:35:35,680 --> 00:35:38,200
Speaker 1: a few holes in the theory as well, that in

578
00:35:38,280 --> 00:35:40,719
Speaker 1: order for it to work in the way he described it,

579
00:35:40,840 --> 00:35:43,600
Speaker 1: nearly always would have needed to be the father as

580
00:35:43,640 --> 00:35:49,759
Speaker 1: perpetrator across the board, which Freud said triggered a realization

581
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:57,680
Speaker 1: of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, whereas surely such widespread

582
00:35:57,760 --> 00:36:05,040
Speaker 1: perversions against children are not very probable. Furthermore, he says

583
00:36:05,080 --> 00:36:07,759
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety seven that the unconscious mind that he

584
00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:10,840
Speaker 1: claims to have extracted these memories from were not always

585
00:36:10,880 --> 00:36:15,560
Speaker 1: able to distinguish fact from fiction, which would discredit the

586
00:36:15,600 --> 00:36:19,480
Speaker 1: majority of Freud's work up until this point. This abandonment

587
00:36:19,560 --> 00:36:23,040
Speaker 1: of seduction theory led to Freud's new and improved damaging

588
00:36:23,080 --> 00:36:28,680
Speaker 1: theory called infantile sexuality, the penis envy, and the castration anxiety, that,

589
00:36:29,040 --> 00:36:31,359
Speaker 1: while causing quite a bit of discussion in their day,

590
00:36:31,480 --> 00:36:34,640
Speaker 1: ultimately made it easier for adults drinking the Freud kool

591
00:36:34,680 --> 00:36:38,920
Speaker 1: aid to ignore when children reported very real sexual abuse

592
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:41,560
Speaker 1: to them. It made it all the easier to dismiss

593
00:36:41,640 --> 00:36:45,600
Speaker 1: a real child's concern as some kind of repressed Freudian

594
00:36:45,640 --> 00:36:48,400
Speaker 1: desire rather than a crime that they were brave to

595
00:36:48,400 --> 00:36:51,239
Speaker 1: come to another person about. In the end, of all

596
00:36:51,239 --> 00:36:54,520
Speaker 1: the tools that authorities and adults already had to ignore

597
00:36:54,560 --> 00:36:57,399
Speaker 1: the serious concerns of a child, Freud only gave them

598
00:36:57,440 --> 00:37:00,320
Speaker 1: a new weapon. Will be speaking to her later in

599
00:37:00,360 --> 00:37:03,799
Speaker 1: the episode, but I think Dr Luccio Williams summed up

600
00:37:03,840 --> 00:37:07,719
Speaker 1: this switch very concisely in her essay reading Lolita To

601
00:37:07,880 --> 00:37:13,440
Speaker 1: Understand Child Abuse, She says this quote Nabulkov was intuitively right,

602
00:37:13,600 --> 00:37:16,799
Speaker 1: even in his antipathy for Siegmund Freud, who could have

603
00:37:16,840 --> 00:37:19,840
Speaker 1: advanced knowledge on the impact of child sexual abuse and

604
00:37:19,920 --> 00:37:23,760
Speaker 1: human development and did not. Freud came back from Paris

605
00:37:23,880 --> 00:37:27,360
Speaker 1: shocked with the maltreated children he saw, examined by child

606
00:37:27,400 --> 00:37:33,560
Speaker 1: abuse pioneer Ambrogiotardi, a French pathologist and expert in forensic medicine.

607
00:37:34,200 --> 00:37:38,279
Speaker 1: In his Assault on Truth, Jeffrey M. Masson describes how

608
00:37:38,280 --> 00:37:42,480
Speaker 1: Freud was forced by Viennese society to abandon his proposed

609
00:37:42,560 --> 00:37:46,480
Speaker 1: seduction theory, in which hysteria occurred as a result of

610
00:37:46,560 --> 00:37:50,799
Speaker 1: premature sexual experiences, as no one could believe that so

611
00:37:50,840 --> 00:37:55,760
Speaker 1: many respectable gentlemen could indeed sexually abuse their own daughters.

612
00:37:56,000 --> 00:37:59,560
Speaker 1: As a result, Freud abandoned his theory and started defending

613
00:37:59,680 --> 00:38:03,840
Speaker 1: that patient report was a mere fabrication based on underlying

614
00:38:03,880 --> 00:38:08,520
Speaker 1: repressed sexual urges unquote. And in spite of the fact

615
00:38:08,600 --> 00:38:11,520
Speaker 1: that his opinions did change over time, for it remained

616
00:38:11,600 --> 00:38:17,160
Speaker 1: pretty resistant to criticism from guess It's women. Psychoanalyst Karen

617
00:38:17,200 --> 00:38:20,719
Speaker 1: Horney came for the concept of penis envy, countering it

618
00:38:20,760 --> 00:38:24,040
Speaker 1: with the idea that perhaps men have womb envy for

619
00:38:24,120 --> 00:38:28,120
Speaker 1: being unable to bear children. Freud replies with this, we

620
00:38:28,400 --> 00:38:33,799
Speaker 1: shall not be very greatly surprised if a woman analyst

621
00:38:34,400 --> 00:38:39,520
Speaker 1: who has not been sufficiently convinced of the intensity of

622
00:38:39,600 --> 00:38:44,759
Speaker 1: own wish for a penis also fails to attach proper

623
00:38:44,920 --> 00:38:50,920
Speaker 1: importance to that factor and her patience. I hope it

624
00:38:50,960 --> 00:38:52,920
Speaker 1: will not surprise you to hear there is a lot

625
00:38:52,960 --> 00:38:55,960
Speaker 1: of criticism and pushback on Freud's work in the area

626
00:38:56,120 --> 00:38:59,400
Speaker 1: of child psychology and as it pertains to women, whether

627
00:38:59,440 --> 00:39:02,840
Speaker 1: he liked it or not. One of the more comprehensive

628
00:39:03,040 --> 00:39:06,320
Speaker 1: arguments was made by social worker Florence Rush in the

629
00:39:06,400 --> 00:39:10,280
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, long after Freud had died, called the Freudian

630
00:39:10,360 --> 00:39:14,600
Speaker 1: cover up, so as it pertains to Dolores Hayes. Once

631
00:39:14,640 --> 00:39:17,800
Speaker 1: you have the context of Freud's history of not sharing

632
00:39:17,880 --> 00:39:22,640
Speaker 1: research approaches, potentially forcing and projecting false memories on patients,

633
00:39:23,040 --> 00:39:26,200
Speaker 1: as well as the whole hysteria and rigid gender and

634
00:39:26,280 --> 00:39:30,520
Speaker 1: patriarchal anxiety narratives he was so passionate about, it's hard

635
00:39:30,560 --> 00:39:33,160
Speaker 1: to take this work for gospel. A quick word on

636
00:39:33,280 --> 00:39:37,040
Speaker 1: Kinsey's research on child sexuality here as well. While he's

637
00:39:37,080 --> 00:39:41,840
Speaker 1: remembered now as a then controversial now somewhat accepted sexologist

638
00:39:41,960 --> 00:39:44,720
Speaker 1: who was played by Liam Neeson an a socio movie

639
00:39:44,760 --> 00:39:46,919
Speaker 1: in the early two thousands. There are some things worth

640
00:39:46,960 --> 00:39:50,080
Speaker 1: mentioning about Alfred Kinsey as well. We see a lot

641
00:39:50,120 --> 00:39:54,560
Speaker 1: of flat out unethical tactics in publishing information about child abuse.

642
00:39:54,760 --> 00:39:57,719
Speaker 1: Another content warning here, and I am pulling from a

643
00:39:57,760 --> 00:40:00,440
Speaker 1: two thousand for New York Times piece by Kyle Crane

644
00:40:00,719 --> 00:40:04,520
Speaker 1: examining Kinsey's legacy. Around the time of the biopic release

645
00:40:06,600 --> 00:40:09,960
Speaker 1: Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, Kinsey claims to have

646
00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:14,960
Speaker 1: spoken with nine adult male child sex abusers about their experiences.

647
00:40:15,239 --> 00:40:18,000
Speaker 1: Is intent as it was framed then and is now,

648
00:40:18,239 --> 00:40:22,799
Speaker 1: is presenting this as strictly scientific data. Over forty years later,

649
00:40:23,080 --> 00:40:27,960
Speaker 1: following Kinsey's death, an independent researcher named Judith Riceman revisited

650
00:40:28,040 --> 00:40:31,760
Speaker 1: Kinsey's original work and found that all the experiences included

651
00:40:31,800 --> 00:40:35,920
Speaker 1: in his publication came from one person, not nine, which

652
00:40:35,960 --> 00:40:39,480
Speaker 1: proves very little about the nature of child sex abusers

653
00:40:39,520 --> 00:40:44,040
Speaker 1: Beyond this one specific person, who Kinsey had actively encouraged

654
00:40:44,080 --> 00:40:48,279
Speaker 1: in correspondence to continue sending account and has been interpreted

655
00:40:48,320 --> 00:40:52,719
Speaker 1: by Reisman and other critics as greatly exploitative and as

656
00:40:52,800 --> 00:40:55,080
Speaker 1: false data. And so at this point in my research,

657
00:40:55,239 --> 00:40:58,280
Speaker 1: my brain is just leaking out of my ears, because

658
00:40:58,480 --> 00:41:02,560
Speaker 1: how could these studies conducted in these unethical ways by

659
00:41:02,560 --> 00:41:06,279
Speaker 1: professionals like Freud and Kinsey, with these massive holes in

660
00:41:06,320 --> 00:41:10,000
Speaker 1: their approaches and failing to verify really much of anything

661
00:41:10,120 --> 00:41:12,920
Speaker 1: of what they're claiming is true, continue to shape the

662
00:41:12,920 --> 00:41:16,360
Speaker 1: way children are taught to view their own sexuality. And

663
00:41:16,400 --> 00:41:19,879
Speaker 1: that's the rhetorical question. We know that this happens. Why

664
00:41:19,920 --> 00:41:23,520
Speaker 1: did Lolita become a story about a child inviting their

665
00:41:23,520 --> 00:41:27,480
Speaker 1: own abuse according to the society presenting it? Because that

666
00:41:27,719 --> 00:41:31,120
Speaker 1: is what our culture does. And this is Nabokov's problem

667
00:41:31,200 --> 00:41:34,760
Speaker 1: with Freud, honing in particularly on his and Kinsey's research

668
00:41:34,760 --> 00:41:38,640
Speaker 1: practices as reason enough to discredit their entire body of work.

669
00:41:38,800 --> 00:41:42,040
Speaker 1: He criticizes them in part through the overblown narrative style

670
00:41:42,160 --> 00:41:46,239
Speaker 1: of Lolita's fictional prologue by John Ray Jr. Saying this

671
00:41:46,440 --> 00:41:50,680
Speaker 1: of him later, after doing my impersonation of suave John Ray,

672
00:41:50,800 --> 00:41:53,720
Speaker 1: the character and Lolita who pins the forward, any comments

673
00:41:53,760 --> 00:41:56,080
Speaker 1: coming straight from me may strike one, may strike me

674
00:41:56,200 --> 00:41:59,720
Speaker 1: in fact, as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about

675
00:41:59,760 --> 00:42:03,040
Speaker 1: his own book. A few points, however, have to be discussed,

676
00:42:03,239 --> 00:42:06,640
Speaker 1: and the autobiographic device may induce mimic and model to blend.

677
00:42:07,239 --> 00:42:10,120
Speaker 1: Teachers of literature are apt to think up such problems

678
00:42:10,160 --> 00:42:13,480
Speaker 1: as what is the author's purpose? Or still worse, what

679
00:42:13,719 --> 00:42:18,239
Speaker 1: is the guy trying to say? Okay, he's attacking me,

680
00:42:18,600 --> 00:42:21,440
Speaker 1: but he does go on to say this, I am

681
00:42:21,480 --> 00:42:24,680
Speaker 1: neither a reader nor writer of didactic fiction. And despite

682
00:42:24,719 --> 00:42:29,640
Speaker 1: John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow and Humbert,

683
00:42:29,719 --> 00:42:33,880
Speaker 1: Humbert in the book takes place in is well aware

684
00:42:34,000 --> 00:42:36,680
Speaker 1: of the theories of the day and spewed them out

685
00:42:36,719 --> 00:42:40,480
Speaker 1: to professionals to give a false positive, playing it to

686
00:42:40,560 --> 00:42:44,200
Speaker 1: his advantage and wasting the mental health professionals time. Note

687
00:42:44,239 --> 00:42:47,800
Speaker 1: passages like this in the book, I discovered there was

688
00:42:47,840 --> 00:42:52,160
Speaker 1: an endless source of robust enjoyment and trifling with psychiatrists,

689
00:42:52,960 --> 00:42:55,920
Speaker 1: cunningly leading them on, never letting them see that you

690
00:42:55,960 --> 00:42:59,080
Speaker 1: know all the tricks of the trade, inventing for them

691
00:42:59,239 --> 00:43:03,319
Speaker 1: elaborate dreams and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of

692
00:43:03,360 --> 00:43:08,200
Speaker 1: one's real sexual predicament, and while taking advantage of the

693
00:43:08,280 --> 00:43:11,600
Speaker 1: leeway that Freud's work inherently provides him. He also comes

694
00:43:11,600 --> 00:43:14,080
Speaker 1: to the table with a dismissal of psychology of the

695
00:43:14,160 --> 00:43:18,720
Speaker 1: day that's not dissimilar to Nabokov. Again, Humbert is never

696
00:43:18,880 --> 00:43:21,560
Speaker 1: to be trusted here, and I don't even agree with

697
00:43:21,600 --> 00:43:25,120
Speaker 1: this blanket statement on mental health. But in regards to

698
00:43:25,160 --> 00:43:29,280
Speaker 1: the specific type of prescriptive pop psychology of this era,

699
00:43:29,760 --> 00:43:34,640
Speaker 1: Freud and Kinsey were absolutely Nabokov's targets. You can also

700
00:43:34,840 --> 00:43:37,839
Speaker 1: reference this moment where Humbert talks about his stays at

701
00:43:37,880 --> 00:43:42,200
Speaker 1: sanatoriums prior to meeting Dolora's Hayes the child therapist in

702
00:43:42,280 --> 00:43:44,640
Speaker 1: me a fake as most of them are, but no

703
00:43:44,680 --> 00:43:48,840
Speaker 1: matter regurgitated neo Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming

704
00:43:48,880 --> 00:43:53,160
Speaker 1: and exaggerated Dolly in the latency period of Girlhood and

705
00:43:53,160 --> 00:43:55,600
Speaker 1: there are a lot of references and jokes made at

706
00:43:55,640 --> 00:43:59,200
Speaker 1: Freud's expense and the adaptations as well. He's referenced at

707
00:43:59,239 --> 00:44:03,040
Speaker 1: least once in every adaptation, and the Peter Seller's Quilty

708
00:44:03,200 --> 00:44:06,120
Speaker 1: does a full on Freud impression in the nineteen sixty

709
00:44:06,120 --> 00:44:11,680
Speaker 1: two kubric adaptation. Here's Nabokov in on a book entitled Lolita,

710
00:44:12,880 --> 00:44:16,439
Speaker 1: although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories,

711
00:44:16,480 --> 00:44:18,800
Speaker 1: which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian

712
00:44:18,880 --> 00:44:22,200
Speaker 1: voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by

713
00:44:22,239 --> 00:44:26,840
Speaker 1: literary mythists and sociologists. An otherwise intelligent reader who flipped

714
00:44:26,840 --> 00:44:29,960
Speaker 1: through the first part described Lolita as old Europe debauching

715
00:44:30,040 --> 00:44:33,560
Speaker 1: Young America, while another flipper saw in it Young America

716
00:44:33,719 --> 00:44:40,520
Speaker 1: debauching old Europe. I first read Nabokov's skepticism towards psychology

717
00:44:40,560 --> 00:44:44,040
Speaker 1: of his day to be potentially harmful, because, after all,

718
00:44:44,160 --> 00:44:46,520
Speaker 1: as it exists at present, that may have been able

719
00:44:46,560 --> 00:44:49,600
Speaker 1: to help Dolora's hayes and survivors like her. But in

720
00:44:49,600 --> 00:44:53,320
Speaker 1: the context of pop psychology of his day, this aversion

721
00:44:53,360 --> 00:44:56,239
Speaker 1: makes a lot more sense to me, because, after all,

722
00:44:56,760 --> 00:45:00,759
Speaker 1: Dr Freud's opinions about women, children, and sexual y would

723
00:45:00,800 --> 00:45:04,319
Speaker 1: have posed a fairly large threat to Dolores. On top

724
00:45:04,360 --> 00:45:06,360
Speaker 1: of the fact that she very well may not have

725
00:45:06,440 --> 00:45:10,080
Speaker 1: been believed. It's just as possible her reality could have

726
00:45:10,120 --> 00:45:13,520
Speaker 1: been dismissed as a Freudian fantasy and a lust for

727
00:45:13,640 --> 00:45:17,160
Speaker 1: something that in reality she was subjected to because he

728
00:45:17,239 --> 00:45:21,000
Speaker 1: specialized in finding ways to connect real trauma to a

729
00:45:21,120 --> 00:45:25,920
Speaker 1: patriarchal structure that he was personally fixated on and finding

730
00:45:25,960 --> 00:45:29,960
Speaker 1: ways to make it the victim's fault. And as prominent

731
00:45:30,040 --> 00:45:33,360
Speaker 1: as the criticism around Freud was at different points, the

732
00:45:33,400 --> 00:45:38,160
Speaker 1: assumptions made by his work remain very potent in popular entertainment,

733
00:45:38,360 --> 00:45:40,840
Speaker 1: to the point that there's cinematic tropes that are built

734
00:45:40,840 --> 00:45:44,080
Speaker 1: around his work. So it's unfortunately safe to say that

735
00:45:44,200 --> 00:45:48,840
Speaker 1: the dated psychoanalysis techniques likely would have worked against Dolores

736
00:45:48,880 --> 00:45:52,600
Speaker 1: Hayes and Sally Horner's best interests. So where has the

737
00:45:52,640 --> 00:45:56,960
Speaker 1: study of sexual abuse of children landed today? To begin

738
00:45:57,040 --> 00:45:59,480
Speaker 1: answering that, I'd like to share a little bit of

739
00:45:59,520 --> 00:46:02,640
Speaker 1: an interview you I did with Lucia Williams, whose work

740
00:46:02,719 --> 00:46:06,200
Speaker 1: in treating survivors of abuse has been greatly influential in

741
00:46:06,239 --> 00:46:09,160
Speaker 1: the last few decades. She is a specialist in working

742
00:46:09,160 --> 00:46:12,680
Speaker 1: with victims like Dolores, who argues that Lolita, the book,

743
00:46:12,960 --> 00:46:16,200
Speaker 1: not the Adaptations, is a very useful text to exist

744
00:46:16,480 --> 00:46:18,960
Speaker 1: both as a work of art and as a fairly

745
00:46:19,040 --> 00:46:23,000
Speaker 1: comprehensive insight into how victims of sexual abuse as children

746
00:46:23,080 --> 00:46:26,840
Speaker 1: can repress and react to trauma in real time. She

747
00:46:26,960 --> 00:46:30,920
Speaker 1: is a former professor of psychology at the Universidade Federal

748
00:46:31,080 --> 00:46:34,800
Speaker 1: days Al Carlos in Brazil, where she coordinated la PREV,

749
00:46:35,080 --> 00:46:39,880
Speaker 1: the Laboratory of Violence Analysis and Prevention. Her paper titled

750
00:46:40,080 --> 00:46:44,640
Speaker 1: Reading Lolita to Understand Child Sexual Abuse argues that Lolita

751
00:46:44,800 --> 00:46:48,480
Speaker 1: is an effectively written story that illustrates both a convincing

752
00:46:48,560 --> 00:46:53,120
Speaker 1: child sexual abusers tactics towards entrapping a child victim and

753
00:46:53,600 --> 00:46:56,239
Speaker 1: a convincing victim of his abuse in the behavior we

754
00:46:56,320 --> 00:47:00,480
Speaker 1: see Dolores Hayes display as she struggles to escape humbered control.

755
00:47:00,600 --> 00:47:03,600
Speaker 1: I talked to Lucia about the common myths around abuse

756
00:47:03,719 --> 00:47:06,120
Speaker 1: that in a book of tackles or attempts to tackle,

757
00:47:06,360 --> 00:47:10,920
Speaker 1: and her experience in the field. Here's our interview. I

758
00:47:11,040 --> 00:47:14,840
Speaker 1: once got a Cambridge fellowship and I could do whatever

759
00:47:14,880 --> 00:47:18,400
Speaker 1: I wanted, as I'm just gonna work on Lolita. So

760
00:47:18,640 --> 00:47:23,640
Speaker 1: and then I used that analysis that I did to

761
00:47:23,920 --> 00:47:30,160
Speaker 1: teach psych students an intro on psych abuse, psychological abuse

762
00:47:30,280 --> 00:47:34,600
Speaker 1: and and and sech foo abuse because when I asked

763
00:47:34,640 --> 00:47:39,839
Speaker 1: my students who read Lolita, maybe one person out of

764
00:47:39,880 --> 00:47:42,640
Speaker 1: the whole class would have read it, which is for me,

765
00:47:42,719 --> 00:47:46,040
Speaker 1: a tradition what a classic is right, everybody has heard

766
00:47:46,040 --> 00:47:49,279
Speaker 1: about it, but nobody, hardly anybody has read it. But

767
00:47:50,160 --> 00:47:54,279
Speaker 1: when when people read it, sometimes they didn't make the

768
00:47:54,360 --> 00:48:01,160
Speaker 1: connection that that was such an important book. From your standpoint, Um,

769
00:48:01,280 --> 00:48:05,600
Speaker 1: what does he get right about? Um? I guess we'll

770
00:48:05,600 --> 00:48:08,200
Speaker 1: start with what does he get right about the character

771
00:48:08,280 --> 00:48:12,759
Speaker 1: of Dolores. Dolores? First of all, her name right, her

772
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:16,919
Speaker 1: name means pain in Spanish, So he for anybody who

773
00:48:16,960 --> 00:48:20,600
Speaker 1: thinks that he's defending, he is making an apology. He

774
00:48:20,719 --> 00:48:23,640
Speaker 1: starts with a very painful name, which is, you know,

775
00:48:23,680 --> 00:48:27,759
Speaker 1: an important metaphor. But what he gets it right? She

776
00:48:28,040 --> 00:48:33,280
Speaker 1: is a twelve year old kid. And Hollywood and other

777
00:48:34,560 --> 00:48:39,439
Speaker 1: you know media, they you know, there's this I don't

778
00:48:39,440 --> 00:48:41,760
Speaker 1: know how to describe it, but there is this movement

779
00:48:41,800 --> 00:48:47,280
Speaker 1: that Lolita was a very forward teenager and very uh

780
00:48:47,520 --> 00:48:52,400
Speaker 1: mature sexually, you know, and very a cidectress type type

781
00:48:52,440 --> 00:48:55,359
Speaker 1: of person. And she was just a kid. She was

782
00:48:55,400 --> 00:49:00,879
Speaker 1: a twelve year old kid. It's so complex, x, isn't it?

783
00:49:01,040 --> 00:49:04,880
Speaker 1: Because you know, when you little kids, when they're growing

784
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:09,799
Speaker 1: up in general, they think that sex is gross, you know,

785
00:49:09,960 --> 00:49:12,799
Speaker 1: and that's they're not ready. They are not mature enough

786
00:49:12,840 --> 00:49:15,919
Speaker 1: to understand and to enjoy it. Of course, they're very

787
00:49:15,960 --> 00:49:19,920
Speaker 1: curious and we're sexualized being from the minute we're born.

788
00:49:20,480 --> 00:49:24,680
Speaker 1: But it takes it goes slowly, you know, it takes

789
00:49:24,719 --> 00:49:29,040
Speaker 1: a while, and that's why it's so wrong, because it's

790
00:49:29,080 --> 00:49:34,120
Speaker 1: a break, it's a transruption in power. An adult is

791
00:49:34,440 --> 00:49:39,520
Speaker 1: a mature, sexually mature person and this little kid is

792
00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:44,280
Speaker 1: not ready for all this massive information that's coming along,

793
00:49:44,440 --> 00:49:48,560
Speaker 1: and it comes along with guilt, depression, with fear. He

794
00:49:48,719 --> 00:49:55,759
Speaker 1: does a very good job describing a possible man with pedophilia,

795
00:49:55,920 --> 00:49:59,960
Speaker 1: which is a very very serious type of mental illness.

796
00:50:00,880 --> 00:50:05,799
Speaker 1: But anyways, for example, he disconstructs the myth that it's

797
00:50:05,840 --> 00:50:09,080
Speaker 1: always a disgusting person. You know, somebody you would see

798
00:50:09,160 --> 00:50:12,720
Speaker 1: in a dark alley and you would be scared. Most

799
00:50:12,800 --> 00:50:17,160
Speaker 1: of these guys are you know, they could be anybody.

800
00:50:17,280 --> 00:50:22,080
Speaker 1: So Humber is somebody who is very smart. Well be

801
00:50:22,280 --> 00:50:27,080
Speaker 1: it's light to people in general. He's very um eloquent,

802
00:50:27,600 --> 00:50:31,640
Speaker 1: he's fun to talk to. His humors, right, So that's

803
00:50:31,680 --> 00:50:35,560
Speaker 1: an important point because you know, he breaks the stereotype,

804
00:50:35,640 --> 00:50:38,320
Speaker 1: you know, don't look for somebody is not going to

805
00:50:38,480 --> 00:50:41,520
Speaker 1: be necessarily somebody that you're going to be afraid with.

806
00:50:43,520 --> 00:50:47,200
Speaker 1: And then why why do you going off that? Why

807
00:50:47,440 --> 00:50:52,600
Speaker 1: is it so often confused as a love story? Because

808
00:50:52,640 --> 00:50:58,600
Speaker 1: I think that people don't understand about child sexual abuse enough.

809
00:50:59,200 --> 00:51:02,680
Speaker 1: For example, they think that it's rare, they think that

810
00:51:02,760 --> 00:51:07,480
Speaker 1: it's hardly ever happens, and it's very very very common.

811
00:51:07,920 --> 00:51:12,399
Speaker 1: Right of course, there's different degrees. You know, it could

812
00:51:12,400 --> 00:51:15,200
Speaker 1: be something very mild, it could be something that was

813
00:51:15,360 --> 00:51:18,480
Speaker 1: very intense and lasted for years like in her case.

814
00:51:19,680 --> 00:51:23,800
Speaker 1: So and that they don't understand the complexity the dynamics,

815
00:51:24,200 --> 00:51:28,160
Speaker 1: how hard it is for the child to speak, you know,

816
00:51:28,600 --> 00:51:32,560
Speaker 1: how hard it is for the judicial system to deal

817
00:51:32,640 --> 00:51:35,239
Speaker 1: with a crime like that. That you have the witness

818
00:51:35,280 --> 00:51:39,640
Speaker 1: who is a little child and uh, and you have

819
00:51:39,719 --> 00:51:43,799
Speaker 1: an adult who is very powerful. I closed out our

820
00:51:43,840 --> 00:51:47,040
Speaker 1: talk by speaking with Luccia briefly on what she feels

821
00:51:47,120 --> 00:51:49,720
Speaker 1: needs to be done to prevent abuse of this nature.

822
00:51:49,800 --> 00:51:53,799
Speaker 1: And her answer was both simple and complicated. Talk about it,

823
00:51:54,280 --> 00:51:58,120
Speaker 1: she says this, there's so much to be done. I mean,

824
00:51:58,160 --> 00:52:04,120
Speaker 1: you know, um, working for example, with professionals, if that's

825
00:52:04,160 --> 00:52:08,200
Speaker 1: a great way to do prevation, working with judges, working

826
00:52:08,239 --> 00:52:12,400
Speaker 1: with lawyers, so you need to to to work, you know,

827
00:52:12,480 --> 00:52:15,880
Speaker 1: and then with society in general. And also we have

828
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:19,480
Speaker 1: to dismistified and tell parents that, you know, they've got

829
00:52:19,480 --> 00:52:23,640
Speaker 1: to talk about to about that with their kids. And

830
00:52:23,719 --> 00:52:28,600
Speaker 1: it's it's difficult because parents are scared. Thank you so

831
00:52:28,680 --> 00:52:32,000
Speaker 1: much to Lucia Williams for her time and insights. And

832
00:52:32,120 --> 00:52:35,560
Speaker 1: these views are echoed by another writer, Socna Fall in

833
00:52:35,680 --> 00:52:39,200
Speaker 1: her paper from Humbert and Lolita the other as prey.

834
00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:41,760
Speaker 1: And for the record, this paper was written in French

835
00:52:41,880 --> 00:52:45,480
Speaker 1: and I used Google translates, so if there's any clinky wording,

836
00:52:45,920 --> 00:52:50,520
Speaker 1: blame me and Google. Too many readers or rather non readers,

837
00:52:50,920 --> 00:52:54,280
Speaker 1: continue to make come there the prey of Lolita exactly

838
00:52:54,320 --> 00:52:59,240
Speaker 1: like too many parents and police professionals, magistrate shrinks the less.

839
00:52:59,320 --> 00:53:02,279
Speaker 1: Even social workers want to believe that it is the

840
00:53:02,360 --> 00:53:06,360
Speaker 1: complainant with her t shirt and her tanned forms who

841
00:53:06,400 --> 00:53:09,880
Speaker 1: make the adult her prey. Like the fallacious pleadings of

842
00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:14,600
Speaker 1: the sexual assailants, humber self centered discourse succeeds in establishing

843
00:53:14,640 --> 00:53:18,840
Speaker 1: itself as the discourse of reality. Alita is no longer

844
00:53:18,880 --> 00:53:23,520
Speaker 1: listening to for what she says quote disgusting things, nor

845
00:53:23,600 --> 00:53:28,800
Speaker 1: understood for what she experiences, and a quote and those

846
00:53:28,920 --> 00:53:32,240
Speaker 1: sobs at night, every night, as soon as I pretend

847
00:53:32,320 --> 00:53:35,600
Speaker 1: to be asleep. Nor is she seen for what she is,

848
00:53:36,239 --> 00:53:40,440
Speaker 1: a teenage girl deprived of love, but once again as

849
00:53:40,480 --> 00:53:44,680
Speaker 1: an object prey of speech, this time and never as

850
00:53:44,680 --> 00:53:49,800
Speaker 1: a subject. Luccia Williams references falls work and her own essay,

851
00:53:49,880 --> 00:53:52,000
Speaker 1: and a lot of what Luccia and I talked about

852
00:53:52,360 --> 00:53:55,400
Speaker 1: is connected to what Nabakov gets right in his text.

853
00:53:55,680 --> 00:53:59,640
Speaker 1: But she's just as adamant about acknowledging the common misreadings

854
00:53:59,680 --> 00:54:02,600
Speaker 1: of the book and the potential harm that that can wield.

855
00:54:02,760 --> 00:54:05,880
Speaker 1: Here's what she had to say about it. One of

856
00:54:05,920 --> 00:54:09,800
Speaker 1: the issues that perhaps people get confused, and I've seen

857
00:54:11,160 --> 00:54:16,760
Speaker 1: very young modern writers talking about this, saying, oh, she's

858
00:54:16,840 --> 00:54:19,920
Speaker 1: the one who seduced and she wasn't even a virgin.

859
00:54:21,640 --> 00:54:24,799
Speaker 1: And it's true. One of the reasons that Lolita the

860
00:54:24,840 --> 00:54:28,399
Speaker 1: book remains such a controversial text is because of how

861
00:54:28,440 --> 00:54:31,400
Speaker 1: it's been weaponized by those doing bad faith readings of

862
00:54:31,480 --> 00:54:35,160
Speaker 1: it and perpetuating those bad reads in order to harm others,

863
00:54:35,400 --> 00:54:39,920
Speaker 1: particularly young girls and women. As this horrible cycle tends

864
00:54:39,960 --> 00:54:42,800
Speaker 1: to go. I got an email from a listener whose

865
00:54:42,840 --> 00:54:46,279
Speaker 1: identity will of course be protected here, and what they

866
00:54:46,320 --> 00:54:49,480
Speaker 1: describe about their experience with the text of Lolita is

867
00:54:49,719 --> 00:54:54,160
Speaker 1: unfortunately not uncommon. It involves a teacher who claims to

868
00:54:54,160 --> 00:54:57,080
Speaker 1: be teaching the book of text, who not only frames

869
00:54:57,080 --> 00:55:00,400
Speaker 1: it as a love story, but leverages this misinterpre rotation

870
00:55:00,640 --> 00:55:03,839
Speaker 1: to groom a young or underage student, done by an

871
00:55:03,920 --> 00:55:07,520
Speaker 1: instructor whose career in life were unaffected by doing this

872
00:55:07,840 --> 00:55:12,239
Speaker 1: deeply scarred the listener who contacted me, and understandably, even

873
00:55:12,239 --> 00:55:15,399
Speaker 1: a mention of the text is a huge trigger for them.

874
00:55:15,640 --> 00:55:17,839
Speaker 1: And of course it is a lot of feedback I've

875
00:55:17,840 --> 00:55:20,680
Speaker 1: gotten in regards to stories like this is that if

876
00:55:20,800 --> 00:55:24,520
Speaker 1: Nabokov's work can be so easily twisted to harm the

877
00:55:24,600 --> 00:55:27,160
Speaker 1: young girls and women that it appears he was trying

878
00:55:27,160 --> 00:55:31,800
Speaker 1: to draw attention to, is it worth examining. Still there's

879
00:55:31,840 --> 00:55:35,760
Speaker 1: no one answer to this. The conversation is still going. Again,

880
00:55:35,800 --> 00:55:39,000
Speaker 1: A lot of readers avoid Lolita altogether due to their

881
00:55:39,040 --> 00:55:44,160
Speaker 1: own experiences with sexual abuse. That is extremely valid. You

882
00:55:44,200 --> 00:55:46,000
Speaker 1: don't need me to tell you that, but I will

883
00:55:46,120 --> 00:55:49,560
Speaker 1: reinforce it, and I'm in no way condoning giving this

884
00:55:49,640 --> 00:55:53,520
Speaker 1: book to children. I don't think Lolita by Nabokov should be.

885
00:55:53,680 --> 00:55:57,200
Speaker 1: But in a world where children don't always have these conversations,

886
00:55:57,520 --> 00:56:02,320
Speaker 1: and not doing so has demonstrable harm, Lolita has assumed

887
00:56:02,360 --> 00:56:04,759
Speaker 1: a role for better and for worse. I'm going to

888
00:56:04,840 --> 00:56:09,000
Speaker 1: be sharing two interviews with you now. Both unfortunately involve

889
00:56:09,160 --> 00:56:11,920
Speaker 1: the concept of grooming, so I wanted to define what

890
00:56:12,040 --> 00:56:15,239
Speaker 1: that is. Clearly trigger warning being placed here again for

891
00:56:15,320 --> 00:56:19,480
Speaker 1: abuse with grooming in particular. According to the National Society

892
00:56:19,520 --> 00:56:23,040
Speaker 1: for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, grooming is defined

893
00:56:23,160 --> 00:56:28,600
Speaker 1: as such, quote Grooming is when someone builds a relationship, trust,

894
00:56:28,719 --> 00:56:32,000
Speaker 1: an emotional connection with a child or young person so

895
00:56:32,080 --> 00:56:36,800
Speaker 1: they can manipulate, exploit, and abuse them unquote. They expand

896
00:56:36,840 --> 00:56:40,839
Speaker 1: on this definition, saying, quote, children and young people can

897
00:56:40,880 --> 00:56:43,319
Speaker 1: be groomed online or in the real world by a

898
00:56:43,360 --> 00:56:47,040
Speaker 1: stranger or by someone they know. This can mean a

899
00:56:47,080 --> 00:56:51,440
Speaker 1: family member, an adult in a child's community, or a teacher.

900
00:56:51,920 --> 00:56:54,919
Speaker 1: And it's not extremely surprising that bad faith actors who

901
00:56:54,920 --> 00:56:59,120
Speaker 1: are intentionally reading Humbert's account to validate their own abuse

902
00:56:59,160 --> 00:57:04,520
Speaker 1: of children have often used Lolita to intentionally victimized children. First,

903
00:57:04,719 --> 00:57:07,799
Speaker 1: an account that involves grooming where Lolita was framed so

904
00:57:07,960 --> 00:57:11,480
Speaker 1: disingenuously that the subject of that abuse didn't want to

905
00:57:11,520 --> 00:57:14,239
Speaker 1: engage with the book at all for some time. I mean,

906
00:57:14,360 --> 00:57:17,000
Speaker 1: who would. My first talk is with the writer of

907
00:57:17,040 --> 00:57:20,280
Speaker 1: one of the most insightful, personal and difficult reads that

908
00:57:20,400 --> 00:57:23,520
Speaker 1: tackles this topic. Her name is Alison Wood, and her

909
00:57:23,560 --> 00:57:27,680
Speaker 1: memoir being Lolita, came out in It's an account that

910
00:57:27,840 --> 00:57:31,680
Speaker 1: reflects this listener's email and the accounts of others. A

911
00:57:31,760 --> 00:57:35,120
Speaker 1: high school teacher used the romanticized Humbert in a way

912
00:57:35,280 --> 00:57:38,680
Speaker 1: that is unchallenging of how deceitful and criminal he is

913
00:57:39,040 --> 00:57:42,400
Speaker 1: in order to groom her into a relationship among other

914
00:57:42,480 --> 00:57:46,880
Speaker 1: predatory writers like Lewis Carroll. Alison woods memoir tracks this

915
00:57:47,000 --> 00:57:50,360
Speaker 1: relationship and how Lolita factored into it, and she was

916
00:57:50,440 --> 00:57:52,360
Speaker 1: kind enough to take the time to speak with me

917
00:57:52,560 --> 00:57:56,200
Speaker 1: about her memoir and what this means for Lolita. Here's

918
00:57:56,200 --> 00:58:00,360
Speaker 1: some of our interview. I was introduced to Lolita when

919
00:58:00,440 --> 00:58:02,920
Speaker 1: I was seventeen years old. I was a senior in

920
00:58:03,000 --> 00:58:06,760
Speaker 1: high school and an English teacher in my high school

921
00:58:06,920 --> 00:58:12,080
Speaker 1: who was supposed to be mentoring me and giving me

922
00:58:12,240 --> 00:58:16,120
Speaker 1: extra support in my writing. My creative writing teacher thought

923
00:58:16,120 --> 00:58:20,040
Speaker 1: that I was talented. Um, So she asked another teacher

924
00:58:20,560 --> 00:58:23,240
Speaker 1: to meet with me after school and just sort of

925
00:58:23,280 --> 00:58:28,560
Speaker 1: give you some extra attention. So he gave me a

926
00:58:28,600 --> 00:58:32,080
Speaker 1: copy of Lolita. He told me it was a beautiful

927
00:58:32,120 --> 00:58:38,400
Speaker 1: story about love. And by then our after school mentoring

928
00:58:38,640 --> 00:58:47,480
Speaker 1: had already begun escalating into something far more nefarious and

929
00:58:47,800 --> 00:58:54,800
Speaker 1: complicated and uh not appropriate. By the time he gave

930
00:58:54,840 --> 00:58:58,520
Speaker 1: me a Littlita, we were already meeting secretly at night

931
00:58:58,560 --> 00:59:01,200
Speaker 1: in a diner in an in the next town over,

932
00:59:02,000 --> 00:59:07,320
Speaker 1: and the book Lolita was part of that. He told

933
00:59:07,320 --> 00:59:09,520
Speaker 1: me that it was a story about our love, this

934
00:59:09,600 --> 00:59:14,560
Speaker 1: sort of star crossed lovers, younger girl, older man, that

935
00:59:14,680 --> 00:59:19,520
Speaker 1: it was just the height of romance. And I was

936
00:59:19,560 --> 00:59:23,320
Speaker 1: seventeen and didn't know any better. So I believed my

937
00:59:23,400 --> 00:59:27,800
Speaker 1: teacher wasn't the only one who argues that Lolita is

938
00:59:27,800 --> 00:59:30,080
Speaker 1: a story about love. I mean one of the original

939
00:59:30,840 --> 00:59:33,720
Speaker 1: one of the original reviews of the book from Vanity

940
00:59:33,760 --> 00:59:38,840
Speaker 1: Fair called it the only convincing love story of our century,

941
00:59:39,960 --> 00:59:46,280
Speaker 1: like what, I'm sorry, Lolita. My understanding of Lolita began

942
00:59:46,320 --> 00:59:51,480
Speaker 1: to shift as I got older, and basically, as I

943
00:59:51,520 --> 00:59:56,320
Speaker 1: began to learn about things outside of the teacher's purview.

944
00:59:57,000 --> 01:00:02,520
Speaker 1: And when I went to college and him, that was

945
01:00:02,520 --> 01:00:05,400
Speaker 1: when I began to understand the Lita on my own terms.

946
01:00:05,720 --> 01:00:08,800
Speaker 1: So I went to class expecting that I knew exactly

947
01:00:08,800 --> 01:00:11,760
Speaker 1: how this conversation, how this lecture would go. And then

948
01:00:11,800 --> 01:00:16,960
Speaker 1: my teacher I started talking about the book by writing

949
01:00:16,960 --> 01:00:21,840
Speaker 1: on the chalkboard Who's seducing who, and talked about Lolita

950
01:00:21,960 --> 01:00:28,240
Speaker 1: as this book about obsession and rape and kidnapping and murder.

951
01:00:29,160 --> 01:00:35,040
Speaker 1: And she gave this example as a way to talk

952
01:00:35,080 --> 01:00:39,680
Speaker 1: about Lolita and her Sorry, she always called her Dolores Hayes.

953
01:00:39,800 --> 01:00:43,720
Speaker 1: Her actual name is Dolora's Hayes. Her name is not Lolita.

954
01:00:43,840 --> 01:00:47,880
Speaker 1: That's how Humbert views her, and that's how Humbert shapes

955
01:00:47,960 --> 01:00:50,320
Speaker 1: her in the book. But her actual name is Dolores.

956
01:00:51,040 --> 01:00:54,120
Speaker 1: And my professor made a point to always call her

957
01:00:54,160 --> 01:00:59,600
Speaker 1: Dolores because basically, as a culture, we have taken on

958
01:01:00,040 --> 01:01:04,600
Speaker 1: Umbert's point of view of tourist by calling by thinking

959
01:01:04,640 --> 01:01:08,840
Speaker 1: of her as Lolita and then Lolita in this iconography

960
01:01:08,880 --> 01:01:13,800
Speaker 1: way of it's a doctress, the Jezebel, the dangerous young girl,

961
01:01:15,320 --> 01:01:19,160
Speaker 1: and none of that is true. None of that is true.

962
01:01:19,640 --> 01:01:22,280
Speaker 1: She was a victim, and she was a teenage girl.

963
01:01:22,720 --> 01:01:25,280
Speaker 1: I feel like in the literary world there's this really

964
01:01:25,320 --> 01:01:29,360
Speaker 1: like strong divide between Lolita is bad, Lolita is good,

965
01:01:29,400 --> 01:01:34,160
Speaker 1: like and never the Twain shall meet, you know, um

966
01:01:34,200 --> 01:01:41,360
Speaker 1: and their Nabokov has a lot lot of defenders. Um.

967
01:01:41,480 --> 01:01:45,920
Speaker 1: People make excuses, People talk about how he's a genius.

968
01:01:46,040 --> 01:01:50,320
Speaker 1: Their entire graduate level seminars dedicated to him. I mean,

969
01:01:51,520 --> 01:01:56,080
Speaker 1: in particular, straight white guys I think are very into Nabokov,

970
01:01:56,440 --> 01:02:00,600
Speaker 1: which is fine. I take a more complicated look. I

971
01:02:00,640 --> 01:02:02,800
Speaker 1: think at Lolita, and this is not just from a

972
01:02:02,880 --> 01:02:07,600
Speaker 1: personal standpoint. I think the books too long. So when

973
01:02:07,680 --> 01:02:10,320
Speaker 1: I teach Lolita, and this is how to say, I

974
01:02:10,400 --> 01:02:13,480
Speaker 1: do not think that Lolita should not be read or taught.

975
01:02:14,080 --> 01:02:19,120
Speaker 1: I absolutely believe that even bad books, and I'm using

976
01:02:19,160 --> 01:02:21,760
Speaker 1: bad isn't like not badly written, but you know, like complicated,

977
01:02:22,240 --> 01:02:25,440
Speaker 1: problematic books should still be read. But they need to

978
01:02:25,480 --> 01:02:30,240
Speaker 1: be read with a context, right. They cannot just read

979
01:02:30,280 --> 01:02:34,880
Speaker 1: these books in this vacuum of genius like no, no,

980
01:02:35,240 --> 01:02:39,000
Speaker 1: we we we don't do that anymore. We don't do

981
01:02:39,080 --> 01:02:46,120
Speaker 1: that anymore. There. I I reject the uh, the overwhelming

982
01:02:46,200 --> 01:02:50,160
Speaker 1: nature of the white western male cannon. I think that's

983
01:02:50,160 --> 01:02:54,720
Speaker 1: a bunch of bullshit, and I think all work should

984
01:02:54,720 --> 01:02:57,400
Speaker 1: be criticized, and I think that's fair, and I think

985
01:02:57,440 --> 01:03:01,000
Speaker 1: it's long past time for us to be discussions about

986
01:03:01,000 --> 01:03:07,160
Speaker 1: books like these where women are objectified and sexualized. And

987
01:03:07,280 --> 01:03:09,840
Speaker 1: Lolita is not really a person in this book. She

988
01:03:10,080 --> 01:03:13,920
Speaker 1: is Dolores is not a person. There's only Lolita. But

989
01:03:14,040 --> 01:03:16,880
Speaker 1: so we read Lolita at the end of my course,

990
01:03:17,120 --> 01:03:20,600
Speaker 1: and in my course, whenever I teach creative writing, we

991
01:03:20,680 --> 01:03:25,520
Speaker 1: almost exclusively read women and non binary folks and women

992
01:03:25,560 --> 01:03:29,760
Speaker 1: of color and queer women. And that's that's the cannon

993
01:03:29,800 --> 01:03:32,240
Speaker 1: that I create for us. So by the time we

994
01:03:32,280 --> 01:03:34,560
Speaker 1: read Lolita, which is the last thing that we read,

995
01:03:35,680 --> 01:03:40,840
Speaker 1: my students have all have a really strong understanding of

996
01:03:41,640 --> 01:03:47,959
Speaker 1: how a perspective a book like this is different. Right

997
01:03:48,120 --> 01:03:51,960
Speaker 1: because with like, if I was teaching Lolita, Lolita was

998
01:03:51,960 --> 01:03:53,360
Speaker 1: one of the first things that I taught, I have

999
01:03:53,480 --> 01:03:59,520
Speaker 1: no idea. I mean I have uh, I have uh.

1000
01:03:59,640 --> 01:04:02,560
Speaker 1: I'm certain if Lolita was the first book that I taught,

1001
01:04:02,600 --> 01:04:06,160
Speaker 1: I'm certain that there would be a lot of defenders

1002
01:04:06,400 --> 01:04:09,240
Speaker 1: and a lot of my students would not fully understand

1003
01:04:09,840 --> 01:04:12,840
Speaker 1: what is happening on the page, and how the prose

1004
01:04:13,160 --> 01:04:16,040
Speaker 1: is manipulating the reader. I would not be confident that

1005
01:04:16,040 --> 01:04:19,320
Speaker 1: my students would have the ability to critique, to see

1006
01:04:19,320 --> 01:04:22,240
Speaker 1: through the language, to understand, but by the end of

1007
01:04:22,240 --> 01:04:25,960
Speaker 1: my course they do. Like That's what the three months

1008
01:04:26,000 --> 01:04:28,920
Speaker 1: have been about. How do you meet a piece of

1009
01:04:29,240 --> 01:04:34,480
Speaker 1: art and have the tools to ask questions about it

1010
01:04:34,640 --> 01:04:39,560
Speaker 1: and to engage with it. Lolita is a cultural myth.

1011
01:04:39,760 --> 01:04:47,640
Speaker 1: Lolita is a touchstone. Lolita means things, and sure, okay,

1012
01:04:47,720 --> 01:04:50,200
Speaker 1: I think I think the book does deserve to be,

1013
01:04:51,640 --> 01:04:54,440
Speaker 1: you know, understood and treated with respect as a piece

1014
01:04:54,440 --> 01:05:01,800
Speaker 1: of art. But to think that these other things don't matter, like,

1015
01:05:02,520 --> 01:05:06,400
Speaker 1: what kind of privilege is that? Because also, I mean,

1016
01:05:06,960 --> 01:05:09,800
Speaker 1: let's be real, like the white the white man is

1017
01:05:09,840 --> 01:05:14,560
Speaker 1: the hero of Lolita. Thank you again to Alison Wood

1018
01:05:14,600 --> 01:05:17,880
Speaker 1: and definitely check out her memoir Being Lolita for more.

1019
01:05:18,280 --> 01:05:21,760
Speaker 1: I love her approach to teaching Lolita. It's a challenging

1020
01:05:22,040 --> 01:05:26,560
Speaker 1: and modern approach that doesn't just address Humbard's narrative unreliability

1021
01:05:26,840 --> 01:05:30,600
Speaker 1: very concisely, but centers Dolores and has a lot to

1022
01:05:30,640 --> 01:05:34,280
Speaker 1: teach us about how biased narratives are written and developing

1023
01:05:34,320 --> 01:05:50,880
Speaker 1: reading skills that are very conscious of This bind bons

1024
01:05:50,960 --> 01:05:54,720
Speaker 1: Enough as another writer who was introduced to Lolita through grooming,

1025
01:05:54,840 --> 01:05:57,800
Speaker 1: but had a different experience in using Dolores as a

1026
01:05:57,840 --> 01:06:01,240
Speaker 1: guide to navigate through trauma. She wrote beautifully about this

1027
01:06:01,320 --> 01:06:04,280
Speaker 1: time in her life, which was originally during high school,

1028
01:06:04,360 --> 01:06:07,600
Speaker 1: in a New York Times Modern Love column. Back into

1029
01:06:07,600 --> 01:06:10,800
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, she was given a copy of Lolita by

1030
01:06:10,840 --> 01:06:15,040
Speaker 1: her uncle, a close family friend not biological, who encouraged

1031
01:06:15,080 --> 01:06:17,800
Speaker 1: her to not tell her parents that he had done so.

1032
01:06:18,000 --> 01:06:21,200
Speaker 1: She writes this, I wanted to read Lolita because I

1033
01:06:21,240 --> 01:06:24,960
Speaker 1: believed it would mitigate my sexual shame. The similarity between

1034
01:06:24,960 --> 01:06:26,920
Speaker 1: the novels plot and my day to day life had

1035
01:06:26,920 --> 01:06:29,320
Speaker 1: sent me on a Google search, where I read excerpts

1036
01:06:29,360 --> 01:06:33,480
Speaker 1: and watched trailers of both film adaptations categorized under crime, drama,

1037
01:06:33,560 --> 01:06:36,520
Speaker 1: and romance. Until then, it had never occurred to me

1038
01:06:36,560 --> 01:06:38,800
Speaker 1: to consider my relationship with my uncle under any of

1039
01:06:38,800 --> 01:06:42,160
Speaker 1: those genres that anyone could think of. A romance nauseated me,

1040
01:06:42,360 --> 01:06:47,200
Speaker 1: while crime and drama seemed overblown. The behavior of Bonsanot's

1041
01:06:47,280 --> 01:06:52,000
Speaker 1: uncle often reflects Humbert's exactly becoming a confidant and alternative

1042
01:06:52,120 --> 01:06:55,880
Speaker 1: to her conservative parents buying her presence, conditioning her to

1043
01:06:55,960 --> 01:06:59,480
Speaker 1: believe that keeping a secret should be empowering to her,

1044
01:06:59,760 --> 01:07:04,520
Speaker 1: not limiting or scary. She continues under the false pretense

1045
01:07:04,520 --> 01:07:06,720
Speaker 1: of his wife joining us. He turned our day trips

1046
01:07:06,720 --> 01:07:10,320
Speaker 1: into overnights. On weekends, he drove us into Manhattan, delivering

1047
01:07:10,320 --> 01:07:12,160
Speaker 1: me to acting classes and then picking me up for

1048
01:07:12,200 --> 01:07:16,960
Speaker 1: dinners and Broadway plays. Understanding she was being abused, but

1049
01:07:17,120 --> 01:07:19,760
Speaker 1: afraid she would ruin her uncle's life by saying so,

1050
01:07:20,040 --> 01:07:22,800
Speaker 1: she turned back to the text of Lolita to take

1051
01:07:22,920 --> 01:07:26,480
Speaker 1: cues from Dolores Hayes. I came to see how Lolita

1052
01:07:26,640 --> 01:07:28,840
Speaker 1: uses Humbert's obsession with her as a means to gain

1053
01:07:28,920 --> 01:07:31,600
Speaker 1: power over him. In the Blue Kidnapping Car, in which

1054
01:07:31,600 --> 01:07:34,040
Speaker 1: the two travel cross country, she uses his power to

1055
01:07:34,080 --> 01:07:36,600
Speaker 1: accuse him of rape, of being a dirty man, while

1056
01:07:36,680 --> 01:07:39,640
Speaker 1: Humbert fumbles to justify booking one hotel room for both

1057
01:07:39,640 --> 01:07:42,040
Speaker 1: of them. She names their situation for the incest it

1058
01:07:42,160 --> 01:07:45,080
Speaker 1: is she knows she is Humbert's vulnerability and learns how

1059
01:07:45,120 --> 01:07:49,080
Speaker 1: to use herself against him. Later, she says this, when

1060
01:07:49,120 --> 01:07:51,200
Speaker 1: he surprised me with an apartment he had rented for

1061
01:07:51,280 --> 01:07:53,360
Speaker 1: us near my school, I told him for the first

1062
01:07:53,400 --> 01:07:55,760
Speaker 1: time that I hated him, that he was as much

1063
01:07:55,760 --> 01:07:57,760
Speaker 1: a pervert as a man in the book, and once

1064
01:07:57,760 --> 01:08:00,440
Speaker 1: the accusations began, I could not stop. Although he had

1065
01:08:00,440 --> 01:08:03,360
Speaker 1: helped to finance my school fees, I also demanded envelopes

1066
01:08:03,360 --> 01:08:07,000
Speaker 1: of money, determined to be ungrateful to exact collateral over dinners.

1067
01:08:07,000 --> 01:08:08,560
Speaker 1: I told him about men I had been with and

1068
01:08:08,600 --> 01:08:10,320
Speaker 1: what we had done, at which point he would set

1069
01:08:10,320 --> 01:08:12,760
Speaker 1: aside his plate and moan that he had lost his appetite.

1070
01:08:13,480 --> 01:08:17,439
Speaker 1: Bonsonath told a teacher about the abuse before graduating high school,

1071
01:08:17,600 --> 01:08:21,240
Speaker 1: and then the police. Through Dolores's actions, she was able

1072
01:08:21,280 --> 01:08:24,559
Speaker 1: to take steps Dolores did towards her liberation from an

1073
01:08:24,560 --> 01:08:27,800
Speaker 1: abuser and got out. Today, she's a professional writer with

1074
01:08:27,840 --> 01:08:31,240
Speaker 1: a master's degree, whose modern love piece is being republished

1075
01:08:31,280 --> 01:08:35,960
Speaker 1: in Lolita in the Afterlife. She is awesome, and I

1076
01:08:35,960 --> 01:08:37,760
Speaker 1: got to catch up with her a couple of weeks ago.

1077
01:08:39,080 --> 01:08:41,280
Speaker 1: I think you're all. I was always kind of searching

1078
01:08:41,320 --> 01:08:45,040
Speaker 1: for her in the text. She's so much occluded by

1079
01:08:45,080 --> 01:08:47,519
Speaker 1: everything that Humbert Humbert is saying. I mean, she really

1080
01:08:47,720 --> 01:08:51,080
Speaker 1: really is his narrative, and you know, even the moments

1081
01:08:51,080 --> 01:08:54,240
Speaker 1: that you feel or I feel um that she peeks

1082
01:08:54,280 --> 01:08:58,720
Speaker 1: through um unfiltered you know, moments of dialogue or this

1083
01:08:58,800 --> 01:09:01,880
Speaker 1: is like nerdy but chapter thirty two, or he's kind

1084
01:09:01,920 --> 01:09:05,840
Speaker 1: of thinking about you know, things details about her that

1085
01:09:05,880 --> 01:09:09,160
Speaker 1: he's omitted that kind of things that make him feel

1086
01:09:09,160 --> 01:09:14,559
Speaker 1: guilty or um, really highlight her how he doesn't really

1087
01:09:14,560 --> 01:09:17,160
Speaker 1: know who she is as an individual, or her thought process,

1088
01:09:17,439 --> 01:09:20,240
Speaker 1: or the fact that she is feeling like deep pain

1089
01:09:20,360 --> 01:09:25,439
Speaker 1: over everything waiting through all of his language about her.

1090
01:09:26,479 --> 01:09:29,240
Speaker 1: I just thought that she was you know, bold and

1091
01:09:29,640 --> 01:09:34,360
Speaker 1: brave and um, you know, she kind of challenged him

1092
01:09:34,400 --> 01:09:37,120
Speaker 1: in a kind of snarky way, and and I don't

1093
01:09:37,120 --> 01:09:39,240
Speaker 1: know her fate is like very sad in the story,

1094
01:09:39,280 --> 01:09:43,040
Speaker 1: but she's so opaque in ways that I think, Um,

1095
01:09:43,040 --> 01:09:45,519
Speaker 1: when when she does come through, I really like latched

1096
01:09:45,560 --> 01:09:48,080
Speaker 1: onto it. And um, I know I wrote about us

1097
01:09:48,080 --> 01:09:50,640
Speaker 1: in the piece, but you know, even moments where you

1098
01:09:50,640 --> 01:09:54,160
Speaker 1: know he's gaslighting her or you know, doing classic grooming tactics.

1099
01:09:54,240 --> 01:09:56,240
Speaker 1: So she kind of sees through all like you know,

1100
01:09:56,280 --> 01:09:58,840
Speaker 1: booking one bedroom for the two of them, and and

1101
01:09:58,840 --> 01:10:01,840
Speaker 1: and also knowing that you know, whatever happened with her mother.

1102
01:10:02,160 --> 01:10:04,200
Speaker 1: You know feel it's like he had a dirty hand

1103
01:10:04,240 --> 01:10:06,000
Speaker 1: in it as well, like she can see all of that.

1104
01:10:06,040 --> 01:10:09,200
Speaker 1: And I think that comes through between the second time

1105
01:10:09,240 --> 01:10:13,479
Speaker 1: when you were returning to it, Um, was there anything

1106
01:10:13,680 --> 01:10:17,360
Speaker 1: that kind of struck you very differently or what was

1107
01:10:17,720 --> 01:10:20,559
Speaker 1: what was it like returning to that text? I think

1108
01:10:20,600 --> 01:10:24,560
Speaker 1: what was different is even the frame, um, the framework

1109
01:10:24,600 --> 01:10:26,920
Speaker 1: of how I arrived at it. I think when I

1110
01:10:26,960 --> 01:10:29,320
Speaker 1: was UM, when I first read it. And it was

1111
01:10:29,360 --> 01:10:31,400
Speaker 1: funny because even in this college class, we all kind

1112
01:10:31,400 --> 01:10:33,840
Speaker 1: of talked about everyone had read this book before as

1113
01:10:33,880 --> 01:10:37,439
Speaker 1: a teenager or an adolescent and had like a very

1114
01:10:37,520 --> 01:10:42,280
Speaker 1: weird whatever brought them to it was weird, and I

1115
01:10:42,320 --> 01:10:44,840
Speaker 1: think has to do a lot with the ways that

1116
01:10:44,880 --> 01:10:48,599
Speaker 1: this is twisted and popular culture. I kind of bought

1117
01:10:48,720 --> 01:10:52,280
Speaker 1: the like quotes around it, you know what's that really

1118
01:10:52,280 --> 01:10:56,760
Speaker 1: popular one the greatest love story or whatever, um, and

1119
01:10:57,120 --> 01:10:59,720
Speaker 1: this and that. So I think by the time I

1120
01:10:59,760 --> 01:11:05,320
Speaker 1: was coming to it again, UM, I was well much

1121
01:11:05,720 --> 01:11:07,519
Speaker 1: it was a totally different framework. It was about like

1122
01:11:07,560 --> 01:11:12,240
Speaker 1: reading books about about rape and UM, so I kind

1123
01:11:12,240 --> 01:11:15,960
Speaker 1: of was, you know, not drawn in by that. Um,

1124
01:11:16,160 --> 01:11:19,040
Speaker 1: you don't know, like the the love weird love aspect

1125
01:11:19,080 --> 01:11:21,160
Speaker 1: of it. I think it would be useful too before

1126
01:11:21,240 --> 01:11:24,800
Speaker 1: reading it, kind of read the conversation around it and

1127
01:11:24,800 --> 01:11:29,040
Speaker 1: how that conversation has been distorted and um, you know

1128
01:11:29,320 --> 01:11:33,040
Speaker 1: really you know, kind of growth at times, and and

1129
01:11:33,120 --> 01:11:37,240
Speaker 1: over sexualizing this trope of a precocious girl. I feel like,

1130
01:11:37,320 --> 01:11:40,040
Speaker 1: you know, reading all of that, I would if I

1131
01:11:40,080 --> 01:11:43,000
Speaker 1: was teaching it, I would do that first. Um, and

1132
01:11:43,040 --> 01:11:45,760
Speaker 1: then because I think it kind of makes it even

1133
01:11:45,840 --> 01:11:48,880
Speaker 1: more appalling then like when you read about how it's

1134
01:11:48,920 --> 01:11:55,599
Speaker 1: been um celebrated and really weird ways and unsettling ways,

1135
01:11:55,680 --> 01:12:00,880
Speaker 1: and then too, then go into the text knowing knowing

1136
01:12:00,920 --> 01:12:03,280
Speaker 1: how it's been distorted. Then you're like looking at it

1137
01:12:03,320 --> 01:12:06,559
Speaker 1: and you're seeing it for what it truly is. Oh,

1138
01:12:06,720 --> 01:12:08,680
Speaker 1: maybe you just wanted to add something that I was

1139
01:12:08,720 --> 01:12:12,200
Speaker 1: thinking about since you brought it up earlier. But talking

1140
01:12:12,240 --> 01:12:15,559
Speaker 1: about how a lot of women have the experience of

1141
01:12:15,560 --> 01:12:18,400
Speaker 1: reading this twice reading it once as a as a

1142
01:12:18,439 --> 01:12:21,679
Speaker 1: young person who identifies with this character in an immediate sense.

1143
01:12:21,840 --> 01:12:24,280
Speaker 1: You know, either they're still going through the abuse or

1144
01:12:24,439 --> 01:12:27,280
Speaker 1: they're just like her age versus reading it when you're

1145
01:12:27,280 --> 01:12:29,640
Speaker 1: a little bit older. And I think one of the

1146
01:12:29,680 --> 01:12:32,760
Speaker 1: weird things, I mean, one of the things, I mean,

1147
01:12:32,760 --> 01:12:34,800
Speaker 1: the process of grooming does this to you, like it

1148
01:12:34,840 --> 01:12:39,439
Speaker 1: adultifies you? And it's interesting how when you read it.

1149
01:12:39,560 --> 01:12:43,759
Speaker 1: When I read it as um as a teenager, Um,

1150
01:12:44,000 --> 01:12:47,080
Speaker 1: I just thought of myself as so adult, and in

1151
01:12:47,280 --> 01:12:49,240
Speaker 1: that weird way, I kind of thought of her as

1152
01:12:49,240 --> 01:12:52,559
Speaker 1: older as well, because that's I just didn't really see

1153
01:12:52,560 --> 01:12:56,559
Speaker 1: myself as a child, and the book is also asking

1154
01:12:56,600 --> 01:12:58,439
Speaker 1: you not to see her as a child. And then

1155
01:12:58,439 --> 01:13:02,760
Speaker 1: when you're older, Um, it's it's so I think that's

1156
01:13:02,800 --> 01:13:06,559
Speaker 1: like a really weird thing to confront that you had

1157
01:13:06,880 --> 01:13:08,560
Speaker 1: once seen it that way and you kind of have to,

1158
01:13:09,479 --> 01:13:11,639
Speaker 1: you know, have sympathy for yourself at a younger age

1159
01:13:11,680 --> 01:13:14,160
Speaker 1: as well, and you know, look at yourself as a girl,

1160
01:13:14,200 --> 01:13:15,920
Speaker 1: and I think that you're looking at her as a

1161
01:13:15,960 --> 01:13:20,080
Speaker 1: girl because that's what she is. Bonzanata has an essay

1162
01:13:20,160 --> 01:13:24,839
Speaker 1: included in the upcoming anthology Lolita in the Afterlife on beauty,

1163
01:13:25,120 --> 01:13:28,559
Speaker 1: risk and Reckoning with the most indelible and shocking novel

1164
01:13:28,640 --> 01:13:32,200
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, which comes out in Thank You

1165
01:13:32,280 --> 01:13:34,920
Speaker 1: So Much, Bin Do. The final example I'm going to

1166
01:13:35,000 --> 01:13:38,120
Speaker 1: pull from here is when we talked about in episode

1167
01:13:38,160 --> 01:13:43,160
Speaker 1: one of Lolita podcast, Azar Nafeces reading Lolita in Tehran.

1168
01:13:43,520 --> 01:13:46,200
Speaker 1: As a reminder, this is a memoir of a professor

1169
01:13:46,240 --> 01:13:48,800
Speaker 1: who began a secret reading group with a group of

1170
01:13:48,880 --> 01:13:52,479
Speaker 1: female Iranian students in the ninety nineties. Nafisi and her

1171
01:13:52,520 --> 01:13:55,920
Speaker 1: group analyzed Western literature through the lens of students who

1172
01:13:56,000 --> 01:13:59,960
Speaker 1: haven't known anything but the oppressive gender roles of revolutionary Iran,

1173
01:14:00,000 --> 01:14:04,000
Speaker 1: and the women in the group empathize with Dolores considerably,

1174
01:14:04,160 --> 01:14:08,120
Speaker 1: talking through the manipulative tactics that Humbert Humbert takes both

1175
01:14:08,160 --> 01:14:11,640
Speaker 1: with Nafisi and with each other, and are troubled and

1176
01:14:11,720 --> 01:14:16,000
Speaker 1: touched by Dolores's inability to live as a quote unquote

1177
01:14:16,240 --> 01:14:21,360
Speaker 1: normal girl. Nafisi has this to say, Lolito belongs to

1178
01:14:21,400 --> 01:14:23,960
Speaker 1: a category of victims who have no defense and are

1179
01:14:24,000 --> 01:14:27,519
Speaker 1: never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such,

1180
01:14:27,720 --> 01:14:31,400
Speaker 1: she becomes a double victim. Not only her life but

1181
01:14:31,560 --> 01:14:35,519
Speaker 1: also her life story is taken from her. We told

1182
01:14:35,520 --> 01:14:37,759
Speaker 1: ourselves that we were in that class to prevent ourselves

1183
01:14:37,760 --> 01:14:41,600
Speaker 1: from falling victim to this second crime. The women and

1184
01:14:41,680 --> 01:14:45,080
Speaker 1: the reading group had what first time readers like Alison

1185
01:14:45,120 --> 01:14:49,639
Speaker 1: would and Bindu Bonsanath did not each other, and being

1186
01:14:49,760 --> 01:14:52,639
Speaker 1: slightly older and a framing of the work that did

1187
01:14:52,640 --> 01:14:56,160
Speaker 1: not have a vested interest in selling Humbert Humbert as

1188
01:14:56,160 --> 01:14:59,400
Speaker 1: a romantic hero. There are a lot of fascinating parts

1189
01:14:59,439 --> 01:15:02,479
Speaker 1: of naphi He's memoir, but what really shines through about

1190
01:15:02,560 --> 01:15:05,719
Speaker 1: Lolita is the difference it makes when a young reader

1191
01:15:05,800 --> 01:15:09,160
Speaker 1: is encouraged to empathize with the lories from the book's

1192
01:15:09,240 --> 01:15:13,080
Speaker 1: first page, to prioritize finding her in the novel instead

1193
01:15:13,120 --> 01:15:16,160
Speaker 1: of taking her abuser's word at phase value. In my

1194
01:15:16,240 --> 01:15:19,760
Speaker 1: talking to psychology professionals for this show, one thing that

1195
01:15:19,840 --> 01:15:23,200
Speaker 1: really shines through, in particular is the need for our

1196
01:15:23,240 --> 01:15:26,480
Speaker 1: culture to find a way to have a meaningful discussion

1197
01:15:26,520 --> 01:15:29,800
Speaker 1: on the subject of child abuse and to educate both

1198
01:15:29,920 --> 01:15:33,080
Speaker 1: children and adults on communicating with each other and being

1199
01:15:33,160 --> 01:15:35,720
Speaker 1: vigilant to children around them who may be at risk

1200
01:15:35,760 --> 01:15:38,879
Speaker 1: for abuse. I am not claiming that this field is perfect,

1201
01:15:39,000 --> 01:15:41,479
Speaker 1: but it has come a long way. So to close

1202
01:15:41,520 --> 01:15:44,000
Speaker 1: this episode, I want to share some of my interview

1203
01:15:44,120 --> 01:15:46,760
Speaker 1: with Dr Mike gold Lamb. He's a pioneer in the

1204
01:15:46,760 --> 01:15:49,600
Speaker 1: field of child psychology and was the head of the

1205
01:15:49,640 --> 01:15:53,680
Speaker 1: Section on Social and Emotional Development of the National Institute

1206
01:15:53,680 --> 01:15:56,880
Speaker 1: of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, d C.

1207
01:15:57,160 --> 01:16:00,240
Speaker 1: For seventeen years. He was also an expert witness when

1208
01:16:00,280 --> 01:16:04,080
Speaker 1: Prop eight challenged same sex marriage in California and effectively

1209
01:16:04,160 --> 01:16:07,599
Speaker 1: argued that a child did not need heterosexual parents in

1210
01:16:07,680 --> 01:16:10,240
Speaker 1: order to grow up happy and well cared for. He

1211
01:16:10,320 --> 01:16:13,960
Speaker 1: also developed the n I C h D Protocol, which

1212
01:16:14,040 --> 01:16:17,599
Speaker 1: is grounded in research on the cognitive and communicative elements

1213
01:16:17,800 --> 01:16:21,160
Speaker 1: of children's development, as well as developing techniques that allow

1214
01:16:21,280 --> 01:16:26,040
Speaker 1: children to provide accurate information about their experiences, very often

1215
01:16:26,160 --> 01:16:30,880
Speaker 1: about sexual abuse. Here's some of our interview. Well, the

1216
01:16:31,200 --> 01:16:36,200
Speaker 1: major problems which came to before in a spate of

1217
01:16:38,320 --> 01:16:44,280
Speaker 1: multi victim cases in the nine eighties work cases where

1218
01:16:44,760 --> 01:16:51,080
Speaker 1: very young children were believed to have been abused UH

1219
01:16:51,120 --> 01:16:57,679
Speaker 1: and were intensively and repeatedly and it turns out highly

1220
01:16:57,800 --> 01:17:04,160
Speaker 1: suggestively interview by those investigating it, and that the justifications

1221
01:17:04,200 --> 01:17:07,680
Speaker 1: for doing that were varied, but but for many they

1222
01:17:07,680 --> 01:17:12,879
Speaker 1: included the idea that that that little children really couldn't

1223
01:17:12,960 --> 01:17:18,640
Speaker 1: adequately describe their experiences, or they were predicated on assumptions

1224
01:17:18,680 --> 01:17:24,800
Speaker 1: that many children were too afraid to talk or were

1225
01:17:25,880 --> 01:17:30,519
Speaker 1: trying to protect themselves and others by not talking, And

1226
01:17:30,640 --> 01:17:36,160
Speaker 1: again that the solution was to make suggestive comments to

1227
01:17:36,320 --> 01:17:43,479
Speaker 1: them and encourage them to verify or acquiesced to those

1228
01:17:43,560 --> 01:17:52,160
Speaker 1: kinds of art allegations. In these cases, guilty verdicts were delivered,

1229
01:17:52,479 --> 01:17:57,680
Speaker 1: and then those verdicts were overthrown on appeal as it

1230
01:17:57,760 --> 01:18:01,920
Speaker 1: became clear that that really we weren't listening to the

1231
01:18:02,000 --> 01:18:06,320
Speaker 1: child's words, we were simply listening to the words of these,

1232
01:18:07,640 --> 01:18:13,400
Speaker 1: in most cases, well meaning but perhaps overzealous advocates. But

1233
01:18:13,479 --> 01:18:17,320
Speaker 1: what we've tried to do is to first knock back

1234
01:18:17,360 --> 01:18:20,720
Speaker 1: a lot of the assumptions about how incompetent children are,

1235
01:18:20,880 --> 01:18:25,640
Speaker 1: because in fact, actually kids are quite capable of describing

1236
01:18:25,680 --> 01:18:30,200
Speaker 1: their experiences from a relatively young age. We want to

1237
01:18:30,200 --> 01:18:34,800
Speaker 1: turn that dynamic around. We want the adults role to

1238
01:18:34,960 --> 01:18:39,680
Speaker 1: be primarily that of the person who is providing the

1239
01:18:39,840 --> 01:18:43,639
Speaker 1: scaffolds or the context in which the child can actually

1240
01:18:43,680 --> 01:18:46,920
Speaker 1: talk about his or her experiences. We need to get

1241
01:18:46,960 --> 01:18:51,160
Speaker 1: them to understand that this is a situation where the

1242
01:18:51,200 --> 01:18:54,080
Speaker 1: adult doesn't know what the right answer is, that they're

1243
01:18:54,120 --> 01:18:56,960
Speaker 1: the expert. So it involves a little bit of just

1244
01:18:57,160 --> 01:19:02,160
Speaker 1: changing changing the dynamics, understanding that from the perspective of

1245
01:19:02,280 --> 01:19:07,400
Speaker 1: the child, this is a kind of unusual situation. What

1246
01:19:07,600 --> 01:19:12,719
Speaker 1: I think was the prevailing notion, which was that sexual

1247
01:19:12,760 --> 01:19:18,360
Speaker 1: abuse was a very rare phenomenon, that it didn't happen

1248
01:19:18,520 --> 01:19:24,639
Speaker 1: very often, and when it did, it was mostly thought

1249
01:19:24,680 --> 01:19:29,559
Speaker 1: of in terms of incest within family dynamics, and was

1250
01:19:29,640 --> 01:19:36,840
Speaker 1: seen as as a really remarkable behavior that came from

1251
01:19:37,720 --> 01:19:44,040
Speaker 1: highly pathological motivations and sources. And I think both sorts

1252
01:19:44,040 --> 01:19:50,559
Speaker 1: of beliefs really hindered our recognition of what must have

1253
01:19:50,600 --> 01:19:54,160
Speaker 1: been the reality that there was actually much more sexual

1254
01:19:54,200 --> 01:20:01,599
Speaker 1: abuse taking place than anybody wanted to recognize. To some extent,

1255
01:20:01,840 --> 01:20:04,800
Speaker 1: I think you know that that was part of the

1256
01:20:04,920 --> 01:20:11,160
Speaker 1: problem with the reception of Lolita, because it describes a

1257
01:20:11,240 --> 01:20:16,520
Speaker 1: situation where you have what would otherwise be very obvious

1258
01:20:16,800 --> 01:20:22,920
Speaker 1: sexual abuse and in a and otherwise normal sort of context,

1259
01:20:22,960 --> 01:20:26,160
Speaker 1: if I can use that words. Now, there's often this

1260
01:20:26,360 --> 01:20:34,000
Speaker 1: reference to the seductive behavior of of Flita Um and

1261
01:20:34,479 --> 01:20:39,040
Speaker 1: you know that lucis the whole point. It is sexual abuse.

1262
01:20:39,840 --> 01:20:44,240
Speaker 1: You know what, whatever whatever way you try to cast

1263
01:20:44,720 --> 01:20:51,000
Speaker 1: her behavior, she is not responsible for what happened. But

1264
01:20:51,120 --> 01:20:57,920
Speaker 1: I think for for children, you know, prepubescent children, but

1265
01:20:58,240 --> 01:21:06,679
Speaker 1: also you know, early adolescents, there's a big concern about

1266
01:21:07,000 --> 01:21:11,320
Speaker 1: issues of our partly responsible did I do something, which

1267
01:21:11,360 --> 01:21:14,080
Speaker 1: I have to say is also a you know, a

1268
01:21:14,160 --> 01:21:20,160
Speaker 1: huge part of the issue when prosecuting rent cases, because

1269
01:21:20,200 --> 01:21:26,120
Speaker 1: there is often the inference made was the suggestion that

1270
01:21:26,240 --> 01:21:31,640
Speaker 1: the victim in some way bears some of the responsibility,

1271
01:21:32,160 --> 01:21:37,320
Speaker 1: and in many cases of abuse, particularly when you have

1272
01:21:38,280 --> 01:21:42,639
Speaker 1: sort of long term abuse by somebody who has taken

1273
01:21:42,680 --> 01:21:47,120
Speaker 1: the time to gloom a victim, that may indeed be

1274
01:21:48,000 --> 01:21:52,400
Speaker 1: part of the message that the gloomer is conveying. You know,

1275
01:21:52,520 --> 01:21:57,640
Speaker 1: this is our special secret. We need to keep it.

1276
01:21:57,640 --> 01:22:03,840
Speaker 1: It's secret um And I think that that's something that

1277
01:22:03,840 --> 01:22:08,040
Speaker 1: that is played quite well in the book and is

1278
01:22:08,640 --> 01:22:12,720
Speaker 1: very relevant to what I think we often see a

1279
01:22:12,760 --> 01:22:15,160
Speaker 1: lot of what I what I'm tackling here has to

1280
01:22:15,200 --> 01:22:18,840
Speaker 1: do with the book and how the book clearly outlines

1281
01:22:18,960 --> 01:22:23,960
Speaker 1: this really horrible, detailed account that's narrated by an abuser,

1282
01:22:24,720 --> 01:22:28,400
Speaker 1: and then the cultural takeaway, which I think is, you know,

1283
01:22:28,479 --> 01:22:33,000
Speaker 1: tends to frame Lolita as the seductress. What do you

1284
01:22:33,080 --> 01:22:37,639
Speaker 1: make of I guess that kind of cultural trend. Yeah,

1285
01:22:37,680 --> 01:22:42,519
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's the the ultimate irony, that

1286
01:22:42,520 --> 01:22:47,320
Speaker 1: that again it's the victim blaming, and that it's the

1287
01:22:48,320 --> 01:22:52,920
Speaker 1: the child in this piece who has been regardless of

1288
01:22:53,920 --> 01:23:04,720
Speaker 1: whatever she did or felt morally and legally, she's a victim.

1289
01:23:04,800 --> 01:23:10,120
Speaker 1: She's a victim of this older man, and and that's

1290
01:23:10,160 --> 01:23:14,200
Speaker 1: where the responsibility should lie. And it it does bother

1291
01:23:14,320 --> 01:23:20,160
Speaker 1: me a great deal that the perception would be one

1292
01:23:20,360 --> 01:23:24,720
Speaker 1: that in a sense attributes responsibility some or all to

1293
01:23:24,880 --> 01:23:30,040
Speaker 1: her for the fact that she was a victim. In

1294
01:23:30,120 --> 01:23:35,559
Speaker 1: so many ways. Sexual abuses still with us. We're now

1295
01:23:35,720 --> 01:23:40,640
Speaker 1: so much more aware of it. I think that the

1296
01:23:40,680 --> 01:23:48,320
Speaker 1: popular views, though, are still quite distorted. There are lots

1297
01:23:48,320 --> 01:23:50,960
Speaker 1: of myths, but one of the prevailing myths is the

1298
01:23:51,040 --> 01:23:58,560
Speaker 1: notion that, you know, most sexual abuses performed by strangers,

1299
01:23:58,720 --> 01:24:03,400
Speaker 1: you know. And so there's all of these paragrams that

1300
01:24:03,560 --> 01:24:07,960
Speaker 1: encourage kids, you not to get into a call as strangers,

1301
01:24:08,000 --> 01:24:11,559
Speaker 1: and not to go off with people and so on,

1302
01:24:13,040 --> 01:24:16,719
Speaker 1: which are good, which are good advice, but they list

1303
01:24:16,840 --> 01:24:21,439
Speaker 1: the point that most sexual abuse is performed by people

1304
01:24:21,920 --> 01:24:25,920
Speaker 1: familiar to the child. Thank you so much to Michael.

1305
01:24:26,840 --> 01:24:31,560
Speaker 1: Another area of prevention, of course, is prevention regarding offenders.

1306
01:24:31,600 --> 01:24:35,400
Speaker 1: This podcast is focused on the reclaiming of Dolores Hayes,

1307
01:24:35,640 --> 01:24:38,599
Speaker 1: not the analysis of Humbert Humbert. I think he's gotten

1308
01:24:38,720 --> 01:24:42,400
Speaker 1: quite enough airtime over the years, but in speaking with

1309
01:24:42,479 --> 01:24:47,040
Speaker 1: Lucia and Michael particularly, the need for preventative treatment is

1310
01:24:47,160 --> 01:24:51,120
Speaker 1: necessary on the end of potential offenders as well. So

1311
01:24:51,160 --> 01:24:54,320
Speaker 1: I'll place another trigger warning here for the discussion of

1312
01:24:54,520 --> 01:24:57,639
Speaker 1: people who are attracted to miners as well as child

1313
01:24:57,680 --> 01:25:01,680
Speaker 1: sexual abuse. This was an area was extremely triggering for

1314
01:25:01,760 --> 01:25:04,600
Speaker 1: me as well, and I've been struggling on how to

1315
01:25:05,080 --> 01:25:09,599
Speaker 1: address this responsibly within this show, so full disclosure. When

1316
01:25:09,640 --> 01:25:13,200
Speaker 1: the first episode of Lolita podcast came out, I got

1317
01:25:13,200 --> 01:25:17,519
Speaker 1: several emails from m a p s. That is short,

1318
01:25:17,720 --> 01:25:22,040
Speaker 1: I learned for minor attracted people. The people who reached

1319
01:25:22,040 --> 01:25:25,760
Speaker 1: out were non offending m a p s or law

1320
01:25:25,800 --> 01:25:28,760
Speaker 1: abiding m a p s. As one put it. They

1321
01:25:28,760 --> 01:25:32,720
Speaker 1: were careful to specify in these emails that acknowledging oneself

1322
01:25:32,760 --> 01:25:37,000
Speaker 1: as a minor attractive person does not necessitate being an offender.

1323
01:25:37,560 --> 01:25:40,599
Speaker 1: Not that that makes it any less uncomfortable or triggering.

1324
01:25:40,880 --> 01:25:44,599
Speaker 1: I was honestly very taken aback and extremely anxious when

1325
01:25:44,600 --> 01:25:48,120
Speaker 1: this happened. This is an area where I struggled to

1326
01:25:48,280 --> 01:25:52,200
Speaker 1: even attempt empathy and gut instinct. I was tempted to

1327
01:25:52,320 --> 01:25:56,160
Speaker 1: ignore the emails altogether. But after thinking on it for

1328
01:25:56,160 --> 01:26:00,080
Speaker 1: a couple of days, what Lucia said in particular in

1329
01:26:00,120 --> 01:26:03,519
Speaker 1: our conversation stuck with me, where she said essentially that

1330
01:26:03,880 --> 01:26:08,000
Speaker 1: not confronting an issue because it makes you uncomfortable doesn't

1331
01:26:08,040 --> 01:26:11,640
Speaker 1: do anything to help anybody. The sexual abuse of a

1332
01:26:11,720 --> 01:26:15,000
Speaker 1: minor is a very common crime, and that means that

1333
01:26:15,080 --> 01:26:16,960
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people out there who are

1334
01:26:17,000 --> 01:26:20,400
Speaker 1: committing that crime, and yet the conversation about how these

1335
01:26:20,439 --> 01:26:24,080
Speaker 1: crimes could have been prevented is still a very silent

1336
01:26:24,200 --> 01:26:27,920
Speaker 1: and taboo discussion. I've learned in the past two weeks

1337
01:26:28,040 --> 01:26:31,679
Speaker 1: that there is a distinction between the term pedophile another

1338
01:26:31,720 --> 01:26:34,880
Speaker 1: way of saying m a P. And the term child

1339
01:26:34,960 --> 01:26:39,360
Speaker 1: sexual abuser. I touched base with Lucia Dr Williams to

1340
01:26:39,439 --> 01:26:42,920
Speaker 1: ask for some clarity on how to best approach making

1341
01:26:42,960 --> 01:26:46,679
Speaker 1: this distinction in the show. She can explain far better

1342
01:26:46,720 --> 01:26:49,080
Speaker 1: than I can on this topic, so I'm going to

1343
01:26:49,160 --> 01:26:52,000
Speaker 1: quote her with permission from an email she sent me

1344
01:26:52,160 --> 01:26:56,360
Speaker 1: this past week. She says, quote, It's important to stress

1345
01:26:56,439 --> 01:26:59,559
Speaker 1: that pedophilia is a type of mental illness and not

1346
01:26:59,680 --> 01:27:03,920
Speaker 1: a rhime. As usually, there is plenty of confusion the

1347
01:27:04,080 --> 01:27:08,679
Speaker 1: crime is child sexual abuse. To complicate things, this crime

1348
01:27:08,760 --> 01:27:12,440
Speaker 1: can also be committed by people who did not have pedophilia.

1349
01:27:12,720 --> 01:27:15,960
Speaker 1: This could be due to a series of factors including

1350
01:27:16,160 --> 01:27:21,559
Speaker 1: previous abuse history, sexual difficulties, loneliness, etcetera. In other words,

1351
01:27:21,600 --> 01:27:24,759
Speaker 1: if you are not exclusively attracted by children, you don't

1352
01:27:24,800 --> 01:27:29,200
Speaker 1: have pedophilia. A lot of fake news mentions pedophilia inappropriately.

1353
01:27:29,720 --> 01:27:33,000
Speaker 1: We talked about pedophilia because that was Humbert Humbert's case,

1354
01:27:33,320 --> 01:27:38,120
Speaker 1: but people without pedophilia may abuse children unquote. So I

1355
01:27:38,160 --> 01:27:41,240
Speaker 1: am the conversation around Humbert. Humbert for years have been

1356
01:27:41,320 --> 01:27:44,840
Speaker 1: using the word pedophile to equate it with criminality, and

1357
01:27:44,880 --> 01:27:47,080
Speaker 1: I've used the word pedophile in the past as an

1358
01:27:47,080 --> 01:27:51,400
Speaker 1: all encompassing qualifier for a person who has sexually abused

1359
01:27:51,400 --> 01:27:54,200
Speaker 1: a minor. Given that Humbert is not a real person

1360
01:27:54,240 --> 01:27:57,400
Speaker 1: anymore than I'm a real psychologist, I couldn't say exactly

1361
01:27:57,400 --> 01:28:00,639
Speaker 1: where he falls here, except that doctor will Him seems

1362
01:28:00,680 --> 01:28:03,640
Speaker 1: to believe that he is both a pedophile and a

1363
01:28:03,760 --> 01:28:07,559
Speaker 1: child sex abuser, and Nabokov makes it clear that Humbert

1364
01:28:07,600 --> 01:28:10,720
Speaker 1: should be receiving mental health treatment for this reason, but

1365
01:28:10,880 --> 01:28:13,519
Speaker 1: is not willing to do so in good faith, and

1366
01:28:13,560 --> 01:28:15,880
Speaker 1: I know that there may be people who are upset

1367
01:28:15,920 --> 01:28:19,400
Speaker 1: with me for trying to speak about this. But when

1368
01:28:19,640 --> 01:28:22,960
Speaker 1: m APS reached out to me, that presented a just

1369
01:28:23,040 --> 01:28:26,760
Speaker 1: kind of a quandary that needed a lot of consideration

1370
01:28:27,200 --> 01:28:30,680
Speaker 1: on my part, and so I took a little bit

1371
01:28:30,720 --> 01:28:33,200
Speaker 1: of time and I talked to a number of people

1372
01:28:33,400 --> 01:28:37,040
Speaker 1: whose opinions I trust, several of whom who have experienced

1373
01:28:37,200 --> 01:28:41,520
Speaker 1: c s A, which is short for child sexual abuse themselves.

1374
01:28:41,640 --> 01:28:44,200
Speaker 1: And this is the decision that I came to. And

1375
01:28:44,360 --> 01:28:48,479
Speaker 1: in making that call, something that particularly moved me was

1376
01:28:49,080 --> 01:28:52,320
Speaker 1: this anonymous account of someone I know who is a

1377
01:28:52,400 --> 01:28:56,280
Speaker 1: cis a survivor who has very strong feelings on this topic,

1378
01:28:56,920 --> 01:29:01,600
Speaker 1: and I'm going to be reading this for them quote.

1379
01:29:02,200 --> 01:29:05,759
Speaker 1: As a survivor, I have an abundance of resources, books,

1380
01:29:05,800 --> 01:29:08,680
Speaker 1: and support groups at my disposal, but the damage has

1381
01:29:08,720 --> 01:29:13,160
Speaker 1: already been done. Making sense of the sexual abuse I

1382
01:29:13,320 --> 01:29:17,000
Speaker 1: endured for the duration of my adolescence, beginning when I

1383
01:29:17,040 --> 01:29:20,120
Speaker 1: was twelve years old, has been and continues to be

1384
01:29:20,479 --> 01:29:23,720
Speaker 1: one of the greatest obstacles of my life. I was

1385
01:29:23,760 --> 01:29:26,120
Speaker 1: twenty eight before I could even bring myself to say

1386
01:29:26,160 --> 01:29:29,920
Speaker 1: the words to a therapist. The particular challenge I face

1387
01:29:30,320 --> 01:29:32,759
Speaker 1: is the man who abused me as a family member,

1388
01:29:32,840 --> 01:29:36,680
Speaker 1: who remains very much in my life, which unfortunately is

1389
01:29:36,760 --> 01:29:40,439
Speaker 1: far from unique. According to RAIN the Rape Abuse in

1390
01:29:40,560 --> 01:29:44,280
Speaker 1: Incest National Network, over ninety three percent of c s

1391
01:29:44,280 --> 01:29:48,080
Speaker 1: A perpetrators are known to their victim. The culture of

1392
01:29:48,120 --> 01:29:52,880
Speaker 1: silence and shame around childhood sexual abuse both belies its

1393
01:29:52,880 --> 01:29:57,880
Speaker 1: pervasiveness and perpetuates it. More recently, the rise of the

1394
01:29:57,920 --> 01:30:01,439
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory group Q and on signifies to me that

1395
01:30:01,560 --> 01:30:04,680
Speaker 1: it is easier for some people to stomach the fictitious

1396
01:30:04,760 --> 01:30:08,600
Speaker 1: notion that cis A perpetrators are confined to a powerful,

1397
01:30:08,760 --> 01:30:14,880
Speaker 1: evil superstructure far away from them, rather than father's, uncle's, brothers, cousins,

1398
01:30:15,040 --> 01:30:18,120
Speaker 1: and sometimes mothers, people they pass in the aisles of

1399
01:30:18,120 --> 01:30:22,280
Speaker 1: the grocery store every day, which is overwhelmingly the reality.

1400
01:30:24,280 --> 01:30:27,960
Speaker 1: Much has been said about stopping the cycle of childhood

1401
01:30:27,960 --> 01:30:31,719
Speaker 1: sexual abuse, but that phrase is usually targeted towards adjusting

1402
01:30:31,760 --> 01:30:35,479
Speaker 1: the behavior of a survivor rather than a potential abuser.

1403
01:30:36,080 --> 01:30:39,280
Speaker 1: The clearest articulation of my feeling on this matter comes

1404
01:30:39,280 --> 01:30:43,759
Speaker 1: from writer, activist and fellow cis A survivor, Tashmika Tarrok

1405
01:30:44,000 --> 01:30:49,320
Speaker 1: in her essay casting Aspersions, where she writes, quote, it

1406
01:30:49,439 --> 01:30:52,439
Speaker 1: is time to consider where interventions might take place for

1407
01:30:52,479 --> 01:30:55,519
Speaker 1: those who might harm children. Teens who did not have

1408
01:30:55,600 --> 01:30:59,879
Speaker 1: an understanding of bodily autonomy and consent will not respect

1409
01:30:59,880 --> 01:31:03,360
Speaker 1: the bodies of others. There is not national movement to

1410
01:31:03,439 --> 01:31:07,120
Speaker 1: make services available for people who have caused harm or

1411
01:31:07,120 --> 01:31:11,200
Speaker 1: who were contemplating sexual violence towards children. There are not

1412
01:31:11,400 --> 01:31:16,679
Speaker 1: enough publicly accessible accountability support groups or cognitive behavioral therapy

1413
01:31:16,720 --> 01:31:20,360
Speaker 1: groups in service of changing the behavior of perpetrators of

1414
01:31:20,400 --> 01:31:24,200
Speaker 1: sexual violence. Why do we always lay the burden of

1415
01:31:24,400 --> 01:31:27,040
Speaker 1: ending sexual violence at the feet of those who have

1416
01:31:27,240 --> 01:31:33,360
Speaker 1: survived it? And that ends touchmaker tax quote continuing the

1417
01:31:33,400 --> 01:31:38,120
Speaker 1: anonymous survivor. The ubiquity of childhood sexual abuse and its

1418
01:31:38,160 --> 01:31:42,720
Speaker 1: lifelong implications for victims demands that we dismantle the reticence

1419
01:31:42,760 --> 01:31:47,080
Speaker 1: and denial that surrounds addressing abusers and would be perpetrators

1420
01:31:47,120 --> 01:31:50,040
Speaker 1: outside of the cars ROLL system, that we make a

1421
01:31:50,120 --> 01:31:53,680
Speaker 1: concerted effort to pull the problem from its root. We

1422
01:31:53,760 --> 01:31:59,040
Speaker 1: owe survivors that much unquote, and I want to thank

1423
01:31:59,080 --> 01:32:01,519
Speaker 1: them so much again and for sharing that with me,

1424
01:32:02,080 --> 01:32:06,240
Speaker 1: um and with you for this show. The m a

1425
01:32:06,320 --> 01:32:09,240
Speaker 1: p s who contacted me directed me to some of

1426
01:32:09,280 --> 01:32:12,800
Speaker 1: the few anonymous resources available to m a p s

1427
01:32:13,120 --> 01:32:16,080
Speaker 1: who either feel they are at risk for offending or

1428
01:32:16,160 --> 01:32:19,400
Speaker 1: are seeking a therapist that they can speak with openly

1429
01:32:19,680 --> 01:32:22,719
Speaker 1: and In preparing for this episode and for this segment,

1430
01:32:23,040 --> 01:32:25,960
Speaker 1: I spoke with a few of the nonprofits whose priorities

1431
01:32:26,000 --> 01:32:28,600
Speaker 1: are connecting m a p s with the therapy and

1432
01:32:28,640 --> 01:32:31,479
Speaker 1: the treatment that they need, as well as pure support

1433
01:32:31,720 --> 01:32:34,840
Speaker 1: and connecting researchers with subjects so that this field of

1434
01:32:34,880 --> 01:32:37,640
Speaker 1: study can continue. I'm not going to get into the

1435
01:32:37,680 --> 01:32:41,200
Speaker 1: details of that treatment here because I'm here for Dolores.

1436
01:32:42,200 --> 01:32:44,559
Speaker 1: But I think that part of showing up for Dolores

1437
01:32:45,040 --> 01:32:49,080
Speaker 1: is mentioning that these organizations and these options exist and

1438
01:32:49,120 --> 01:32:53,080
Speaker 1: that their intent is to reduce harm. And I know that,

1439
01:32:53,160 --> 01:32:56,000
Speaker 1: based on the past several weeks, that many m a

1440
01:32:56,080 --> 01:32:59,439
Speaker 1: p s have already heard this show. And so if

1441
01:32:59,520 --> 01:33:02,200
Speaker 1: you are an m a P who has not started

1442
01:33:02,240 --> 01:33:06,639
Speaker 1: treatment yet, please go to Before You Act dot org.

1443
01:33:07,200 --> 01:33:12,280
Speaker 1: That's letter B numeral for Letter you a CT dot

1444
01:33:12,400 --> 01:33:17,880
Speaker 1: org to connect with professionals and access resources. Please thank you.

1445
01:33:19,360 --> 01:33:21,479
Speaker 1: And if you are a victim of sexual violence of

1446
01:33:21,520 --> 01:33:25,000
Speaker 1: any kind who is seeking help or more resources, please

1447
01:33:25,040 --> 01:33:28,479
Speaker 1: go to RAIN dot org. That's r A I n

1448
01:33:28,720 --> 01:33:32,280
Speaker 1: N dot org And for those interested, there's also an

1449
01:33:32,280 --> 01:33:36,040
Speaker 1: excellent guide on how to approach discussions with survivors of

1450
01:33:36,080 --> 01:33:39,519
Speaker 1: sexual abuse from RAIN that a listener sent my way

1451
01:33:39,600 --> 01:33:43,120
Speaker 1: that I will have linked in the show notes. And

1452
01:33:43,160 --> 01:33:45,479
Speaker 1: I want to bring things back to Sally Horner one

1453
01:33:45,600 --> 01:33:48,000
Speaker 1: last time, to a passage from Sarah Weinman in The

1454
01:33:48,040 --> 01:33:51,360
Speaker 1: Real Alita describing the moment that Sally Horner was finally

1455
01:33:51,439 --> 01:33:55,200
Speaker 1: returned to her mother after being abducted for twenty one months.

1456
01:33:55,479 --> 01:33:58,599
Speaker 1: Quote from the plane, Sally spotted her brother in law

1457
01:33:58,640 --> 01:34:01,120
Speaker 1: in the crowd. Sally wanted to get out right away,

1458
01:34:01,280 --> 01:34:02,840
Speaker 1: but co and told her to wait for the other

1459
01:34:02,880 --> 01:34:06,040
Speaker 1: passengers to leave first. I want to see mama, she cried.

1460
01:34:06,320 --> 01:34:08,839
Speaker 1: She and her mother clung to each other for several minutes,

1461
01:34:09,080 --> 01:34:13,400
Speaker 1: oblivious to the myriad flashbulbs popping at them. At first,

1462
01:34:13,600 --> 01:34:16,800
Speaker 1: they were weeping too hard to speak. Then Sally said,

1463
01:34:17,400 --> 01:34:20,200
Speaker 1: I want to go home. I just want to go home.

1464
01:34:21,280 --> 01:34:24,160
Speaker 1: And there is so much more to be said about

1465
01:34:24,240 --> 01:34:27,480
Speaker 1: this conversation, but I hope this episode has been successful

1466
01:34:27,640 --> 01:34:30,160
Speaker 1: in getting it started. We need to find a way

1467
01:34:30,200 --> 01:34:34,040
Speaker 1: to have this conversation. Not doing so ties back into

1468
01:34:34,160 --> 01:34:37,920
Speaker 1: how Lolita was able to gather such momentum blaming its

1469
01:34:37,920 --> 01:34:42,400
Speaker 1: titular character for her own abuse uninterrupted for decades, and

1470
01:34:42,439 --> 01:34:45,400
Speaker 1: why so many accounts reflect the dynamics we see with

1471
01:34:45,520 --> 01:34:48,760
Speaker 1: Dolores and Humber. I highly recommend reading into the work

1472
01:34:48,800 --> 01:34:51,280
Speaker 1: of everyone I spoke with in this episode, and I'm

1473
01:34:51,280 --> 01:34:54,160
Speaker 1: going to be including a bibliography in the notes of

1474
01:34:54,160 --> 01:34:57,360
Speaker 1: this episode. But if you thought we were done with Lolita, honey,

1475
01:34:57,479 --> 01:35:00,920
Speaker 1: we are only halfway there. Next week, a little bit

1476
01:35:00,960 --> 01:35:04,080
Speaker 1: of bizarre levity, we're taking a look at not one,

1477
01:35:04,560 --> 01:35:08,840
Speaker 1: but two failed Broadway adaptations of Lolita, neither of which

1478
01:35:09,000 --> 01:35:11,840
Speaker 1: ever made it to opening night. One's a musical by

1479
01:35:11,840 --> 01:35:13,840
Speaker 1: the man who wrote My Fair Lady and the man

1480
01:35:13,880 --> 01:35:17,720
Speaker 1: who wrote the music for James Bond Seriously, and the

1481
01:35:17,760 --> 01:35:20,960
Speaker 1: other is a gritty rewrite by Edward Albey of Who's

1482
01:35:21,000 --> 01:35:25,400
Speaker 1: Afraid of Virginia Wolf Fame? Seriously. They may never have debuted,

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01:35:25,520 --> 01:35:27,439
Speaker 1: but that didn't stop me from getting my hands on

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01:35:27,520 --> 01:35:30,920
Speaker 1: them or talking to the women who played Lolita. Next

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Speaker 1: week on Lolita Podcast, this has been a production of

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01:35:37,760 --> 01:35:40,880
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. My Name is Jamie Loftus, I write

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01:35:40,960 --> 01:35:44,240
Speaker 1: and hosted the show. My producers are the wonderful Sophia Lichtman,

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01:35:44,400 --> 01:35:48,599
Speaker 1: Miles Gray, bet An Marcoluso, and Jack O'Brien. My editor

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01:35:48,800 --> 01:35:52,400
Speaker 1: is the amazing Isaac Taylor. Additional research and transcription from

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01:35:52,400 --> 01:35:56,120
Speaker 1: Ben Loftis. Music is by Zoey Blade. Theme is by

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01:35:56,200 --> 01:35:59,719
Speaker 1: Brad Dickard. I wanted to also think my guest voices

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01:35:59,760 --> 01:36:03,280
Speaker 1: on the episode as He's Laura as Humbert Humbert, Robert

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01:36:03,280 --> 01:36:08,600
Speaker 1: Evans as Vladimir Nabokov, Joel Smith, Anna Josnier, Paula Vignalen,

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Speaker 1: and Aristotle Assevedo as Sigmund Freud. We'll see you next week.