Not to be fair to yud, but so much fiction (written by men) sexualizes ~14 year old girls and it gets really weird when you start to notice it. This includes beloved science fiction like Snow Crash for example. Im starting to get why so many of us misinterpreted Lolita, and why a lot of women/girls are a bit annoyed with the sexism at times.
There are probably a lot of geeks who have bitter memories of being ostracised misfits in high school while all the jocks and popular kids were partying and presumably having all the sex, for whom the idea of teenage sex is like catnip. Hence the voyeuristic underage sex in geek-adjacent literature, the “actually, the term is ephebophilia” fedora bros and far worse things. (By some accounts, after Amazon engineers gentrified Seattle, the teenage prostitution rate there went up, due to cashed-up nerds “making up for lost time”.)
Dolores in Lolita was like twelve though, at least in the book.
edit: also I don’t think Yud recommending The Softcore Adventures Of A Six-year-old In A Thirteen-year-old’s Body as a Very Normal Book to his considerable audience fits this particular discourse.
Not the point? The point is that it was common enough for men in literature to creep on children that the obvious criticism was missed.
Nabokov’s Lolita really shouldn’t be pigeonholed as merely that, but I guess the movies are another story.
