Photo by Flickr user Shooz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Holly of Self-Portrait as, riffing off my loli-con posts points out that whether he meant it to be or not, Nabokov’s Lolita (after whom, after all, the Japanese term “loli-con” derives) blueprinted how men construct women as the “no-sex” class.

I defy anyone to find a passage from that book that is really truly sexy. Consider this example in all its euphemistic obscurity and see if its depiction of a young girl reaction’s to sex is hot—or not:

I liked the cool of armchair feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.

Yeah. A naked adult man in a leather armchair, straddled by a girl he has had to bribe into allowing him to touch her, and even still, the only way she’ll tolerate sex with him is if she can read the comics while it’s happening and completely ignore what she’s sitting on. I don’t think that’s hot, and I don’t think for a second that Nabokov wants us to find it hot.

She said it here.

That’s about as clear as it gets, eh? Inside the paradigm the perfect partner really would be a woman too young to feel sexual in an adult sex, too ignorant to distinguish his cock from a tennis racket, and too passive to rise off it even if she did, who’s only interest in him for his money, who’d rather be reading the paper!

What’s compelling to me about Holly’s post is Nabokov’s illustration of Side “B” of the no-sex class paradigm and that’s the equal and opposite distortions men impose on ourselves as the “sex class.” Because of his incapacity to recognize adult women as sexual beings, Nabakov’s Humbert bends his life into an elaborate construction justifying this gigantic other lie he believes he’s living into.

And yeah, sure, Humbert’s an epitome of the banal emptiness of human evil but that only makes his efforts to live into that lie worse, not different, than the rest of us are raised to do.

Can you see any reason on earth why, once we learn to notice the incredible alternatives we’ve been raised to miss, men would be any less inclined than women to stream for the exits on the world view we’re living in?

“There she would be … as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon … and was too indolent to remove.” To paraphrase General Bosquet, “C’est magnifique writing, mais ce n’est pas la Real Adult Sex: c’est de la folie!”