Being Lolita

New York Press

9/21/2005

Being Lolita

Written as Xandi Line

“But why shall I say more? To-day I wear these chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless!-but where?”

- From “The Imp of the Perverse” by Edgar Allen Poe

If you want to be Lolita you’ve got to start young. I was 13, had only had breasts for about a year, and liked to brag that I’d dealt with my first period by smoking a cigarette.

What Guides youth is not principled. Mostly it’s fear: of danger, punishment, abandonment. But the price for testing these fears and finding the maturity is youth, of course.

In the same way that a small child wields innocence-cries not out of sadness but for profit, barters “I didn’t know better” for knowing more than she should-so a young girl aware of sex and it’s benefits (in a city where 12-year-olds receive cat-calls) learns to exchange them for knowledge, a sense of superiority and, most of all, the devoted attention that comes with power over another human being.

Sometimes it’s for pleasure, hysterical and utter pleasure. Intoxicated, fetterless.

A young girl dangles one of the rarest and most enticing form of sexuality: The purposeful and lascivious love of a child.

I could always find a Humbert, or drag him out of a man if I felt up to the challenge, but I lacked the introspection to understand the implications. Holding this strange dominance through sex was infinitely more fascinating than examining my motives for doing so.

Watching a man relax his convictions is a great victory for a thirteen-year-old girl. Every young girl has a crush on an older man- a movie star, an older sister’s boyfriend, a teacher.

You talk fast, so fast that you give them an excuse: She’s an anomaly: a mature thirteen, thirteen going on thirty. Chuckle, chuckle. We had all read Lolita. I let it hang out of my back pocket or carried it when the length of my skirt didn’t permit pockets.

Most of us read and watched anything we could dealing with the subject of ourselves, honestly. I focused on Lolita and her means of playing with this man. Holding his need for her over him, watching him grapple and pull at himself; her wrestling with, squirming away from her compulsion to make him grapple and pull.

What none of us had come to terms with, though, was the first chapter of Henry Miller’s Opus Pistorum. Miller describes this 12-year-old girl sucking off her trick. The John’s arousal soon becomes revulsion for himself and for her. He child’s ignorance of integrity is willful, Miller tells us-She is disgusting and the older whore is at her charge’s side not for contrast but to demonstrate inevitability. Where Humbert was a weakling, Lolita is the goal to be attained; Miller’s nameless 12-year-old is just a whore.

What drives Lolita is not the pedophile but the precocious child with a combative willingness to play the torturous game, to portray the victor by wielding her power over his weakness.

It’s easy to navigate the city this way, knowing the motive of the bouncer who can deny you access to a coveted social setting or usher you in as the envious stare. Yes I will fawn over you. No. I will not fuck you for a pass on my ID check! Those who lay each bouncer or lost soul stand out of the game rather quickly; a few go on tilt and keep playing. For the rest of us, access becomes negotiable. Drugs, for instance, a easily scored, never paid for. Affection is on much the same terms.

You know a city (and a world) that your peers don’t even believe exists. Usually someone older instructs you on, say, the pros and cons of shooting drugs as opposed to snorting them, or of sleeping with men vs. leading them on, punctuating lessons with an idle “but if I ever catch you” or “but your too young…” I suppose such words soothe the teacher’s conscience, as it were.

I studied the role, and knew from early on that time was short. I remember Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby playing a 12-year-old prostitute in turn-of –the-century New Orleans. After she’s been in silk negligees, lounging on men’s laps, her schoolgirl regalia no longer fits quite right.

What becomes of the aged Lolita on her sixteenth birthday?

A self-loathing man won’t weep for you, a conflicted boy won’t fuck you, your attempts to extort attention earn repulsion. Some women stoop to scratching their own genitals and faces in doorways, leaning hard on anyone who will listen to the explanatory fairytale. Fettered.

Or at least grounded. I ended my debauched stint just as most of my peers were beginning theirs. I looked askance at those who clung to the game, who now seemed so grim, too old to pretend they didn’t know better, too damaged to behave better. Romantic advances and endearment became formulaic, easily navigated.

One’s own feelings, though, are not so easily navigated. There is still an ach for youth, attention, manipulation, and excitement, even at the cost of my own happiness-even though I’m too old now to claim that I didn’t know better.