The novel in the image (Lolita) is about an adult male character (who in the story is referred to by a pseudonym, Humbert Humbert) who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl named Lolita. Spoiler/tw child abuse: >!he then kidnaps and sexually abuses her.!< So, the person who wrote the message in the book is saying that the book's giftee was a creep like Humbert Humbert.
Hopefully just a joke. My buddies now wife was a few years younger than him (maybe like 18/21?) and we mocked him endlessly because she was still in high school. She was more mature than him by leaps and bounds anyway, and now they're married and have a kid, but at the time I would have considered this as a joke gift.
We're more mature because grown men start hunting us in middle school. We shouldn't have to be and it's not right to use it as a justification. I'm glad she's fine, but this way of discussing these issues can be used in very harmful ways.
At the risk of giving more information than needed, I’m going to break it down for someone who is unfamiliar with the story. In the book Lolita, Humbert Humbert is a middle aged man who becomes obsessed with 12 year old Lolita (the movie versions made her a bit older). After becoming her step father, he kidnaps & abuses her. If the recipient of the book is like the Humbert of the 1990s, then Jimmy may have a thing for younger women or girls, and/or he may have a thing for inexperienced young women. 🤢
In the days before the current moral panic kicked in the comparison could have been made much more light-heartedly than would be likely today, just saying...
It may have been made lightheartedly. However, if one was the recipient of the inappropriate behavior that so many were dealing with at that time - sexual abuse, assault, & harassment - then one might not find it so funny. There are many sad reasons that the world had to change.
As an older person, I can get annoyed at how things that were acceptable at the time are now judged by today’s standards. Then I remember things about the past, like my gay friend having a brick thrown at him & being called fagg#t. Or how my ex used the n word. Or how my child molester dad was a military police officer & helped kick “q#eers” out of the Air Force. Or how - as a girl & woman - I experienced abuse, assault, & harassment, & really was expected to stay quiet about it. And like a good girl, I was mostly quiet. Fuck that. The world has changed, and I am thankful for that.
I am so glad you survived.
I think compared to the past, likely victims of SA are being empowered more and more. Hopefully someday there will be no more victims.
We've worked on some things, much of it positive without a doubt, but when you see Zoomers expressing disgust over adults with a two year age gap dating and 'Feminist Male' is another predator-trope, something's still broken...
No, no they’re not. Show me the disgust at a 2 year age gap for consenting adults. And again, this is a child and a middle-age man. The fact that you’re comparing the two makes me think you dabble in the world of “minor attraction.” Be gone, pedo.
Have you read the book? I wouldn’t exactly call it light hearted. Can you make light hearted jokes about serious, intense, taboo subject matter? I don’t think so. Those kind of jokes are by their nature “edgy” at best
The term had plenty of currency in pop culture and had since the book was published, especially since the first movie version came out.
Male banter is often deliberately 'edgy', nature of the beast, pretending otherwise is counterproductive...
Not sure why he gets downvotes. Go onto Goodreads.com and read some reviews. You’ll see a lot of people (women no less) who openly admit that they read it as a romance when they first picked it up and now coming back to it 25 years later, the current climate has given it a whole new lens to be looked at through. Personally, I always found it fucked up! But it is beautifully written and one of my favourite books. Favourite quote:
“My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; and no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she is not in the kitchen - not banging the refrigerator door or screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let us grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is empty, is dead.”
Soooo, so sinister…
>Personally, I’ve always found it fucked up!
They literally state they have never seen it as a romance novel. They stated that *people on Goodreads* have admitted to seeing it as a cute romance the first time they read it.
Welcome to Reddit: where you get downvoted for having read a modern literary classic and not burning it upon completion. I can’t believe the number of childish dweebs on here who must live such sheltered existences, that they live in ignorance of any kind of media that contains anything other than purple unicorns and sugary rainbows.
Nabokov’s command over the English language is beyond impressive, especially for someone for whom it’s a second language. Thanks for sharing this passage, it really is beautifully written.
Agreed. Most of the writing in the novel is completely masterful, and it’s for that reason that it will go down as one of my favourites. I also can appreciate the relationship between the unreliable narrator and the reader, unlike some others on here. And no- that doesn’t mean that I like him!
It might not be for you, and that’s fine, but the novel is written from the perspective of the criminal while he’s on trial for his crime. It’s a master class in subtlety, because underneath the flowery descriptions of romance and obsession we as readers with a moral compass gradually become more and more horrified at the narrator’s acts. Lolita does contain sensitive and disturbing subject matter but it certainly isn’t a defense of pedophilia.
Nabokov was sexually abused as a kid and he wrote the book to bring light to the horrors of child abuse. Hey always said it wasn't a love story and that there should never be a picture of a little girl on the cover.
I don’t know why but for some reason I read it when I was fairly young, about 14 or 15. Made me extremely wary of men in general as a teenage girl. It is a unique read but I agree, definitely worth a read.
Oddly enough, while this is before the singer Lana del Rey took on that name, the signature is a bit similar to hers:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LanaDelReySignature.png
*I'm confused, why are*
*You all acting like you've never*
*Seen banter before?*
\- fKusipaa
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I don’t care what kind of rapport I have with someone, but being compared to a character who spends his days watching and fantasizing over eight-year-old girls on the playground, marries a woman to get close to her 12-year-old daughter, repeatedly drugs his wife, then kidnaps, drugs, and rapes said stepdaughter, and eventually murders someone is pretty messed up.
Hey, it really is that serious. Hope this helps! Cheers!
Signed, the gal whose job it is to ask children to point to where they were touched on a doll.
There's a heavy representation of reflexive-leftist, helicopter-parented, and over-educated hothouse flowers on reddit, the females of that contingent almost certainly never have and the many of the males haven't ever been far enough off the leash to participate, the rest of them are so heavily masked they'll never admit it...
Before the Internet they'd all be terrors at the WCTU or MADD meetings and their neighborhood's 'Mrs Kravitz', but for the most part the rest of us could live life in peace, now they can organize :(
That’s… concerning.
I’ve had a few friends like that. “Had”.
Ouch!! Literary gift burn is a level…
*oof.*
Jimmy....Savile??
What an absolute cretin that guy was. The Netflix doc was horrifying.
I watched that same documentary and, yeah, what a creep.
you misspelled child predator.
Jim’ll fix it! Ugh
oh that’s not-
Wow “certified lover boy? Certified ….” Really is a tale as old as time. Gonna keep this burn in the pocket next time we need it
Yikes! Keep your kids the fuck away from Jimmy.
Woah now
Someone explain please 🙏🏼🙏🏼
The novel in the image (Lolita) is about an adult male character (who in the story is referred to by a pseudonym, Humbert Humbert) who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl named Lolita. Spoiler/tw child abuse: >!he then kidnaps and sexually abuses her.!< So, the person who wrote the message in the book is saying that the book's giftee was a creep like Humbert Humbert.
Hopefully just a joke. My buddies now wife was a few years younger than him (maybe like 18/21?) and we mocked him endlessly because she was still in high school. She was more mature than him by leaps and bounds anyway, and now they're married and have a kid, but at the time I would have considered this as a joke gift.
We're more mature because grown men start hunting us in middle school. We shouldn't have to be and it's not right to use it as a justification. I'm glad she's fine, but this way of discussing these issues can be used in very harmful ways.
Or obsession. The big theme in the book is his obsession.
If it’s just obsession, you get them Moby Dick
Be that as it may, he also explicitly wanted to address the sexual abuse of children. He never wavered on that in interviews until the day he died.
At the risk of giving more information than needed, I’m going to break it down for someone who is unfamiliar with the story. In the book Lolita, Humbert Humbert is a middle aged man who becomes obsessed with 12 year old Lolita (the movie versions made her a bit older). After becoming her step father, he kidnaps & abuses her. If the recipient of the book is like the Humbert of the 1990s, then Jimmy may have a thing for younger women or girls, and/or he may have a thing for inexperienced young women. 🤢
In the days before the current moral panic kicked in the comparison could have been made much more light-heartedly than would be likely today, just saying...
Moral panic about pedophilia?
You mean back in the day before woman and girls were considered actual people and before child sexual abuse was criminalized?
It may have been made lightheartedly. However, if one was the recipient of the inappropriate behavior that so many were dealing with at that time - sexual abuse, assault, & harassment - then one might not find it so funny. There are many sad reasons that the world had to change. As an older person, I can get annoyed at how things that were acceptable at the time are now judged by today’s standards. Then I remember things about the past, like my gay friend having a brick thrown at him & being called fagg#t. Or how my ex used the n word. Or how my child molester dad was a military police officer & helped kick “q#eers” out of the Air Force. Or how - as a girl & woman - I experienced abuse, assault, & harassment, & really was expected to stay quiet about it. And like a good girl, I was mostly quiet. Fuck that. The world has changed, and I am thankful for that.
I am so glad you survived. I think compared to the past, likely victims of SA are being empowered more and more. Hopefully someday there will be no more victims.
We've worked on some things, much of it positive without a doubt, but when you see Zoomers expressing disgust over adults with a two year age gap dating and 'Feminist Male' is another predator-trope, something's still broken...
No, no they’re not. Show me the disgust at a 2 year age gap for consenting adults. And again, this is a child and a middle-age man. The fact that you’re comparing the two makes me think you dabble in the world of “minor attraction.” Be gone, pedo.
Username checks out
Yeah we really need to lighten up about rape and molestation.
Some self awareness about redefining normal human behavior would be helpful...
Can you elaborate? Edit: Never mind I took a look at your history. It’s pretty clear where you are coming from.
Nope. Please elaborate.
Have you read the book? I wouldn’t exactly call it light hearted. Can you make light hearted jokes about serious, intense, taboo subject matter? I don’t think so. Those kind of jokes are by their nature “edgy” at best
The term had plenty of currency in pop culture and had since the book was published, especially since the first movie version came out. Male banter is often deliberately 'edgy', nature of the beast, pretending otherwise is counterproductive...
No one pretended otherwise. Just clarifying terms. Edgy and light hearted are basically opposites. Also not all men are the same.
Nature of what beast? Counterproductive to accomplishing what?
You mean smack in the middle of that Satanic Panic? That wasn’t a moral panic?
Well that’s one way to tell on yourself….
Not sure why he gets downvotes. Go onto Goodreads.com and read some reviews. You’ll see a lot of people (women no less) who openly admit that they read it as a romance when they first picked it up and now coming back to it 25 years later, the current climate has given it a whole new lens to be looked at through. Personally, I always found it fucked up! But it is beautifully written and one of my favourite books. Favourite quote: “My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; and no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she is not in the kitchen - not banging the refrigerator door or screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let us grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is empty, is dead.” Soooo, so sinister…
This dude is describing himself as an all encompassing predatory spider looking for his prey who is his stepdaughter. It’s absolutely sinister.
It was never supposed to be a cute romance and if you have any critical thinking skills at all you can clearly see it’s a story of abuse.
>Personally, I’ve always found it fucked up! They literally state they have never seen it as a romance novel. They stated that *people on Goodreads* have admitted to seeing it as a cute romance the first time they read it.
Did I say it was supposed to be a cute romance story? Nope. And yes, I’m quite confident I understand that it’s a story of abuse…
Welcome to Reddit: where you get downvoted for having read a modern literary classic and not burning it upon completion. I can’t believe the number of childish dweebs on here who must live such sheltered existences, that they live in ignorance of any kind of media that contains anything other than purple unicorns and sugary rainbows.
Welcome to reddit, where the leftoid mind-worm short-circuits reading comprehension daily...
Nabokov’s command over the English language is beyond impressive, especially for someone for whom it’s a second language. Thanks for sharing this passage, it really is beautifully written.
Agreed. Most of the writing in the novel is completely masterful, and it’s for that reason that it will go down as one of my favourites. I also can appreciate the relationship between the unreliable narrator and the reader, unlike some others on here. And no- that doesn’t mean that I like him!
[удалено]
Why "fuck the author?" You aren't supposed to come away from reading it feeling like HH is the hero of the piece. He very obviously isn't.
It might not be for you, and that’s fine, but the novel is written from the perspective of the criminal while he’s on trial for his crime. It’s a master class in subtlety, because underneath the flowery descriptions of romance and obsession we as readers with a moral compass gradually become more and more horrified at the narrator’s acts. Lolita does contain sensitive and disturbing subject matter but it certainly isn’t a defense of pedophilia.
Nabokov was sexually abused as a kid and he wrote the book to bring light to the horrors of child abuse. Hey always said it wasn't a love story and that there should never be a picture of a little girl on the cover.
Glad you came to your senses, but that original comment is so fucking eyeroll-worthy. Anyway, glad you snapped out of that.
Snap out of being a miserable bully 💕
God, you're weird, lmao.
Moral Panic in action...
Absolutely recommend Lolita, it's a masterpiece regardless of its vile content.
Agreed, it was a fantastic book. Beautifully written and a great character study.
I don’t know why but for some reason I read it when I was fairly young, about 14 or 15. Made me extremely wary of men in general as a teenage girl. It is a unique read but I agree, definitely worth a read.
Gross lol
I just started reading “Lolita” this week, if someone called me Humbert Humbert I’d throughly reassess my life decisions.
Yikes
😬
Oh no.
Yikes on bikes.
Scroll through the comments and you'll get an explanation
Ew
Ewwwwwwwww
owned lol
Yikes
What's going on here?
😬 😬 😬
Oh. Yuck.
Oddly enough, while this is before the singer Lana del Rey took on that name, the signature is a bit similar to hers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LanaDelReySignature.png
😬😬😬😬
Um
ewwwwwwwwwwwww
[удалено]
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I don’t care what kind of rapport I have with someone, but being compared to a character who spends his days watching and fantasizing over eight-year-old girls on the playground, marries a woman to get close to her 12-year-old daughter, repeatedly drugs his wife, then kidnaps, drugs, and rapes said stepdaughter, and eventually murders someone is pretty messed up.
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Hey, it really is that serious. Hope this helps! Cheers! Signed, the gal whose job it is to ask children to point to where they were touched on a doll.
No it really is, there’s no other way to read it? The lightest interpretation is that the receiver is an older man into young girls, which is gross
There's a heavy representation of reflexive-leftist, helicopter-parented, and over-educated hothouse flowers on reddit, the females of that contingent almost certainly never have and the many of the males haven't ever been far enough off the leash to participate, the rest of them are so heavily masked they'll never admit it... Before the Internet they'd all be terrors at the WCTU or MADD meetings and their neighborhood's 'Mrs Kravitz', but for the most part the rest of us could live life in peace, now they can organize :(
This one too.
Humor is becoming far too safe, but we daren't discuss that out in the open.
Hey, FBI. Here’s your guy. Check his laptop.