People Are Victim-Blaming Hannah Anderson, and It’s Depressing as Hell

It’s hard to say what’s more disheartening about the way some people in the media — both social and regular old-person media — have been casting Hannah Anderson, the 16-year-old kidnapping victim whose mother and brother were allegedly tortured and killed by James Lee DiMaggio before he took Anderson to a remote…
Elle Fanning Plays a Coy Wood Nymph for Lolita Lempicka Perfume
14-year-old Elle Fanning, actress and sister to Dakota, is now the face of Lolita Lempicka, the fragrance by the French designer of the same name. Lempicka's legal name is Josiane Maryse Pividal, but she began working under the pseudonym as an homage to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the 1950s novel chronicling a…
January Jones Goes Nude For Versace
- January Jones' reward for holding up the spring Versace show by over an hour is apparently...the brand's spring campaign. Says Donatella Versace, "In January I feel I have found a perfect Versace woman for the 21st century." [WWD]
Only Words To Play With
In 2007 John Bertram issued a challenge: design a cover for Nabokov's Lolita. The results run the gamut from horribly creepy to uncannily pretty. Check out the full library (and compare representations of pedophilia) here: [Flickr via BlackBook]
A Rave Review Of Lolita
"To be blunt, I do not love Lolita in spite of my own history; I love it, in part, because of my history." That history is fascinating, and can (and should) be read here: [The Second Pass]
Why Sexualizing Little Girls Sucks For Grown-Ass Women
MG Durham writes in today's Guardian that the sexualization of young girls (cf. Miley Cyrus, Emma Watson, etc., etc.) is deeply damaging for them. But western culture's Lolita fetish sucks for the legal as well as the barely.
"I Don't Wish To Touch Hearts..."
Fellow nerds! Check out this discussion with Vladimir Nabokov, shortly after Lolita's American publication. He's combative, has a heavy Russian accent, and at one point they all tacitly stand up and move to this "drawing room" set. [YouTube via BoingBoing]
Lost In Translation
Of Nabokov's Russian version of Lolita, the New Republic, in 1968, noted: "Lolita herself...is one-and-one-half inches shorter in Russian." [The New Republic]
Reading Lolita In America: Where Victim Becomes Vixen
A 34-year-old Italian butcher who was having an affair with 13-year-old girl had his sentence reduced by two-thirds because a judge decided there was "real love" involved. Antonio de Pascale was given a sentence of a year and four months instead of the maximum possible penalty — 12 years — because, according to the …
Woolworths in the UK has stopped selling a "Lolita" bedroom set for young girls after a group of mothers began a campaign in protest of it. But don't blame Woolworths! They supposedly had never even heard of Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name. "The staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be…
Miu Miu is supposed to be Prada-lite, Prada for the poor folk. In reality, it costs about the same as its big-sister label, but its design aesthetic? Decidedly different. While Prada is known for being anti-sexy and "intellectual" (because, uh, brains and beauty are mutually exclusive?), Miu Miu is a little more,…
Britney Spears: 21st Century 'Lolita'
[West Hollywood, August 3. Image via Splash]
