I was feeling a little low, like the level of wingnuttery I’ve been reading lately isn’t entertaining enough to mock. The Disco Ball must have heard my cries of woe because an angel sent to me in the form of Jill alerted me to the fact that John Derbyshire has a review of Lolita up at National Review. Yes, that John Derbyshire. It is possibly the most defensive book review ever written.
I’ll skip all the pretentious blather the Derb uses to set up the scene for his first reading of the novel when he was 16, but suffice it to say, you get the strong impression that the Derb thinks he went to an English boarding school in the 40s,* though he admits it was actually an American high school. But do read it, because it’s so damn pretentious that if I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was a fictional pretentious twit invented by a writer who could squeeze maximum comic value out of such a character. A writer like Nabokov, for instance. Well, except I can’t imagine Nabokov writing this:
Still Nabokov’s prose was at some level beyond that. I sucked it in, reading and re-reading, of course not getting a tenth of the allusions and effects, but knowing that there was something there to be got. I even started to talk like Humbert Humbert, the book’s first-person narrator, dropping words like “callypygean� and “phocine� into my conversation, to much derision from my peers. To this day I can recall the expression on the face of one of my schoolmasters—a rugged old RAF veteran with a clipped George Orwell mustache, who had slaughtered thousands in the great bombing raids on German cities—when I slipped the term “soi-disant“ into an otherwise humdrum sentence.
I just can’t imagine Nabokov starting off a comic piece about a character who is seeking self-justification for being amongst other things, a pretentious ass and an unsubtle pervert with such an obvious joke, no matter how funny it is.
Later, in the 1970s, I got a copy of Alfred Appel Jr.’s The Annotated Lolita, and filled myself in on all the dismayingly many allusions I still had not got. I lost that book in my travels, and bought another, and lost that, and bought another. The Annotated Lolita in front of me now is my fourth or fifth.
My two major guesses for why he kept “losing” it were that it are a) his wife kept throwing it out or b) he had to replace it every time his current copy gets crusty.
Lolita was subsequently much written about, with critics lining up pro and con. Some thought it was a dirty book; some thought it nihilistic; some, to (Nabokov said) the author’s great pain, thought it anti-American.
The Derb would have you believe that Nabokov was prone to slapping crying bald eagles on his window, but I imagine that mostly Nabokov was upset that people missed his major theme of anti-”pretentious assholes who need to hang around with 12-year-olds or Jonah Goldberg to feel smart” theme.
Which brings us to the content of Lolita, the actual story. Humbert Humbert, born 1910, grew up on the French Riviera. In the spring of 1947 he rents a room in the house of Mrs. Haze, in “green-and-pink Ramsdale,� a sleepy New England town. Mrs. Haze has a daughter, Lolita, born January 1, 1935. Humbert is in love with Lolita. Mrs. Haze falls in love with Humbert. Humbert marries her to be close to the girl. The mother dies in an accident. Humbert has a sex affair with Lolita. The affair ends when she deserts him for a famous, but mediocre and decadent, playwright. After three years Humbert locates Lolita. Then he tracks down the playwright and murders him.
At this point, the ambiguity sets in for the reader of this article written by a “John Derbyshire”. Is he purposefully a bit obtuse about the plot lines implied in Lolita in order to uphold his illusion that admiring Humbert Humbert is a good thing? Or is he so blinded by admiration of Humbert that he actually believes the self-serving lies about this “sex affair” that is conducted like most “sex affairs” are, with kidnapping, murder and rape?
It is of course a dreadful story, of awful crimes narrated by the criminal. Like all criminals, Humbert is a solipsist, a person who does not really believe in the existence of anything outside himself.
I have to wonder sometimes if Nabokov made Humbert commit multiple crimes so that pro-pedophile reviewers ever after could be deliberately vague about which of his crimes they disapprove of.
Also like all criminals, he is full of self-justification.
Is he saying all NRO writers are criminals, perhaps even pedophiles?
There is really nothing to like about Humbert Humbert. The more you get to know him, in fact, the more unpleasant things you uncover.
True as this is, Humbert does tell you the worst parts of his character up front–that he’s a murderer, that he gets off on fucking young girls, and his delusional view of himself as a cultivated man is evident if not bluntly stated. If Nabokov wrote it now, though, he’s probably just make Humbert a blogger for The Corner and the rest of those things would be implied.
Discussing the book with a woman friend the other day, she pointed out a thing I hadn’t really noticed: Humbert is probably a lousy lover. Once you have been told this, it’s obvious. Why would a solipsist give any thought to another person’s gratification?
I love it–most of us would assume someone who humps a 12-year-old like he’s a dog going after your leg is the dictionary definition of a “lousy lover”, but Derbyshire had to have someone point it out to him.
And yet, by the magic of his art, Nabokov manages to bring us, at least grudgingly and partially, round to Humbert’s side—to be of Humbert’s party, as Milton made us of Satan’s. In an interview, Nabokov said that he thought Humbert should be given one day’s vacation from hell every year, to stroll a green country lane in the sunlight. That is the position the author wants his reader to arrive at; that is the position we do arrive at, if ignorance or prejudice do not get in our way.
For the first and possibly last time ever, an NRO writer comes out against ignorance and prejudice. And it’s on behalf of a pedophile, albeit a fictional one.
Ah, the realities of life! Was there ever a civilization more uncomfortable with them than ours is today? Humbert Humbert is a monster and a sociopath. He was a human monster, though, and a human sociopath. His monstrousnesses are hypertrophied growths of our own flaws; and his sociopathy consists in breaking rules for which, if there were not some fairly widespread propensity to break them, there would be no need.
If I were writing a review of Lolita in Humbert’s voice, that paragraph is pretty much how it would turn out, I think.
Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.
That makes perfect sense if you assume that most men’s reaction to finding a woman attractive is to seek out a chance to violently assault her. It’s true of course. The most common pick-up line you hear in bars is, “You would look hoooot cut into pieces and tossed in a plastic garbage bag after I have my way with you.” Works every time.
He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14… which is precisely the age Lolita was at the time of her affair with Humbert Humbert. As Razib noted, my own “15-20� estimate was slightly off. An upper limit of 24 would be more reasonable. The lower limit really doesn’t bear thinking about.
The reason it doesn’t bear thinking about is presumably because it completely tanks his argument that the most reliable measure of a woman’s “peak attractiveness age” is how likely she is to be raped. If you take the Derb’s assertion and apply it to the very statistics he shows here, then in fact you can easily argue that women are far sexier at age 5 than 25. But the Derb pretends it’s not that his argument doesn’t hold together even if you share his assumptions. The reason he wants to write off the age group that accounts for 29% of rapes is this:
(I have a 13-year-old daughter.)
And that doesn’t even fly, because again by his very own statistics, his daughter is prime age for being raped, since 13-year-olds are so outrageously seductive than no man can pass them up.
Behind such sad numbers, and in the works of literary geniuses like Vladimir Nabokov, does the reality of human nature lie.
And now the Derb puts Humbert’s self-delusions to shame, because even Humbert admits that he’s a pervert and doesn’t try to argue that he’s got a normal man’s sexual urges.
It is all too much for our prim, sissified, feminized, swooning, emoting, mealy mouthed, litigation-whipped, “diversity�-terrorized, race-and-“gender�-panicked society. We shudder and turn away, or write an angry email.
Fuck that. I’m such a mealy-mouthed pussy that I want to actually toss men who rape young girls in jail. That’s just how we mealy-mouthed liberals are. Too weak to roll over and let child rapists run around hurting children.
The America of 1958, with all its shortcomings, was saltier, wiser, closer to the flesh and the bone and the wet earth, less fearful of itself. (It was also, according to at least one scholarly study, happier.)
Less fearful of itself but if you were a teenage girl in this fantasy version of 1958, you presumably had lots of reasons to be fearful of Daddy.
This next part is fucking great, he openly envies Jerry Lee Lewis, and not for his massive skill on the piano.
One of the first media sensations ever to impinge upon my consciousness was the visit to Britain by rock star Jerry Lee Lewis in May 1958, four months before Lolita’s American debut. This was supposed to be a concert tour, but 22-year-old Jerry had brought his wife Myra along, and the British press got wind of the fact that Myra was only 13. This wasn’t an unusual thing in the south of that time; Jerry himself had first been wed at 15 (when he already had a drinking problem). Myra was his third wife, and also his second cousin once removed. Back then country people grew up fast and close to their kin. Neither Jerry nor Myra could understand what the fuss was about. He: “I plumb married the girl, didn’t I?� She: “Back home you can marry at 10, if you can find a husband.� (This was not true, even in the south, though Myra likely believed it. She also, according to the British press, believed in Santa Claus.)
Upon thinking about sex with someone who still believes in Santa Claus, I can’t resist wondering if the Derb had a Humbert-like moment of inappropriate semen placement. This in and of itself should not be considered evidence of being a bad lover, of course.
How long ago it seems! Nowadays our kids are financially dependent on us into their mid-twenties, and can’t afford to leave home till they are 35.
For the record, that’s having your kids at home, especially your daughters, 15 whole years after they’ve passed the age where they are proper fantasy fodder.
Marriage at 13? Good grief! And so, while Lolita met with a fair share of disapproval in 1958, and was denounced from many pulpits, I believe its reception would have been much more hostile if it appeared now. It would also have been differently politicized. Back then the complaints came mostly from social conservatives, who I imagine would disapprove of Lolita just as strongly today. The Left, however, almost unanimously championed the book. Would they still do so? A woman! Who was also a child! Exploited by a man! And both of them from stifled, self-denying bourgeois backgrounds! Oh, that evil Patriarchy!
Unlikely. I know The Left and I think if he hasn’t already read Lolita, if he did, he’d probably like it. But then again, he’s a bit quicker on the uptake than the Derb and would realize that it’s a novel and not really an endorsement of lusting after 12-year-olds. He would notice also that in the 1950s America portrayed in the book, just like the one that really existed, was hardly tolerant of pedophiliac “sex affairs”, and not the patriachal utopia that the Derb seems to think it was.
Here you see one of the paradoxes of our strange times.
That a man can claim to have read the Annotated Lolita a number of times through and yet doesn’t show much evidence of grasping the basic themes and characters?
Our women dress like sluts; our kids are taught about buggery in elementary school;
NAMBLA would be a perfectly acceptable organization but for that damn buggery.
“wardrobe malfunctionsâ€? expose to prime-time TV viewers body parts customarily covered in public since “the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C.”(Humbert);
Subjecting poor Derb to the unsightly view of a breast on a woman over the age of consent. Next time the NFL needs to take pity on him and strip the shirt off a teeny-bopper.
our colleges have coed bathrooms; songs about pimps rise to the top of the pop music charts; yet so far as anything to do with the actual reality of actual human nature is concerned, we are as prim and shockable as a bunch of Quaker schoolmarms.
Hear hear! Bring back the time they had the Negroes and women under control and if a man damn well wanted to fuck a 12-year-old, no one was going to stop him, by god. The only question this really brings to my mind is, “Why doesn’t the Derb suck it up and join a fringe Mormon church?”
What would Vladimir Nabokov say if he could view our present scene? I think he would weep. Political Correctness was only embryonic in the mid-1950s, and Nabokov poked some gentle fun at it in Lolita:
…according to the rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one—only one, but as cute as they make them—chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row.
Whoops, Derb got a little excited there and forgot something important–that it’s written in the first person and anything in the entire book can’t be treated as Nabokov’s opinion but the opinions and views of a fictional character called John Derbyshire Humbert Humbert. Not that Nabokov did or didn’t agree with this sentiment, but it does well to remember everything the character says is colored by the fact that he’s an immoral rat and a delusional misanthrope to boot.
He would have been horrified to see how this how these silly but harmless and well-intentioned courtesies have swollen into a monstrous dreary tyranny, shutting off whole territories of speech and thought, acting as a sheet anchor to hold back our commercial and intellectual progress, corrupting our constitutional jurisprudence, turning unscrupulous mountebank attorneys into billionaires, and making art like Nabokov’s incomprehensible to millions who, had they been born a few decades earlier, would have gotten from it such unexpected, unimagined delight as I got among the birdsong and bowlines in the Sea Cadets’ hut at Northampton School for Boys 44 years ago.
My pet theory about Humbert’s perverse desires, at least today, is that avoiding contact with adults and conducting a fantasy relationship with a 12-year-old is the only way he can preserve his delusions of intellectual superiority to others. For some reason, this seemed a good time to bring that up. I will say that my appreciation for Nabokov’s characterization is deepening rapidly.
That we are stupider, coarser, duller, lazier, narrower of mind, more fearful of strangeness, more abject, and more craven than the Americans of 1958 is bad enough.
Nothing bespeaks of a country’s slip from intellectual greatness like the loss of a steady supply of sex partners that still believe in Santa Claus.
What really shows that our civilization is, and richly deserves to be, on its way out, is that we are less able to savor and love a surpassingly beautiful work of art like Lolita.
I wonder if the Derb would be shocked to find out it’s my favorite novel even though I thoroughly and completely condemn eroticizing 12-year-old girls. Surely you can’t appreciate a novel where the main character is an asshole through and through as well as a pedophile and not think there’s some kind of endorsement of his sexual desires lingering behind all that. Only simple-minded people can grasp that being pulled into Humbert’s world shows that Nabokov is a great writer, not that Humbert’s world has an inherent appeal to it. In fact, simple and stupid and modern reader that I am, I might even be simple enough to notice the grand joke about the book is that Humbert is prone to rhapsodizing and romanticizing endlessly in an attempt to distract from the fact that he’s screwing a child in seedy hotel after seedy hotel.
*I misread that. The Derb went to an English school. That just makes his persona as a pseudo-intellectual Europeanized jackass snarling and snapping at tawdry American culture even funnier.
Christ, Amanda, after disemboweling the poor twit, did you really have to puree his intestines in a blender?
And then pouring the resulting concoction down his throat was really beyond the pale.
Nicely done, though.
I have never understood the illogical link made by many of :
Immoral conduct occurs in the events described in a piece of art —> the creator of said art approves of said acts.
About the only bit I liked in this wank-fest of an article was when Derbyshire attempted to communicate the degree to which having only one persons perspective can shake our objective judgement.
This is done brilliantly in Lolita, as well as in work such as The Collector, The Godfather and a Clockwork Orange.
The logic of viewing rape statistics to discover the age at which women are most attractive boggles the mind.
Yip!
Ngh… want to say something clever… could actually feel brain melting out ears while reading… damn you Derbyshire…
Just one nitpick (which I mention so that it doesn’t wind up distracting from your main points) - Derbyshire went to school in Britain… ” a public school” in the American sense, meaning that it was not a private boarding school (which are called public schools in the UK, for some odd reason), but a public (US sense) day school.
Nasty little man regardless of where he was schooled, though.
Next up on “Literary Analysis with The Derb”
Royalist and noted bisexual Will Shakespeare and his advocacy of marrying manipulative cruel women, then committing Regicide with them.
Here on the Derb: “Where talking about something shows your support.”
huh… I seem to have stumbled upon a horse turd of truth, there. The Derb motto I made up there would explain ALOT about his world view. including how he thinks Nabokov was approving of his lust for his daughter.
Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics. He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent).
So 61% of (reporting) rape victims are minors. Is this because minors are unbearably sexy? Or because minors are easier targets for rapists’ fantasies of power and control than grown women? Take your time in answering, John.
so not interested in what a little, skinny, tinydicked, nobody likes him, “the derb” has to say. seriously: you want to fuck with this man? remind him he’s )short )skiny )needlesized )unknown. it’s nothing more than truth, and the heart of what “drives” him. he’s also stupid and/or a hypocrite. like all of them at the crack house, i mean corner.
there is no reason, today, to pay attention to inarticulate whores. let them die via drought and attrition.
Just another ape drawing the bars on his cage.
Amanda– Derb’s review says he went to a BRITISH boarding school. You need to read that part closer. Otherwise, funny shit.
I think this is your best post ever, Amanda. A thorough and well-deserved evisceration.
good take-down.
i want to submit a point for which i have no correlative evidence. on the issue of rape and why it happens when women are younger: it’s probably because the men involved are younger too. since rape is largely a crime committed by people known to the victim, it would also seem to make sense that the ages of the rapists and victims would lie somewhere within this young range, since the perpetrator is often a peer. (again, this is purely speculative.) the reason, then, why fewer rapes take place as people age may be that men lose the degree of insatiability they had when they were in their ’salad days’. in other words, Derb, it’s not that the women get less attractive, it’s that men are less, well, rapacious.
Derb’s never met a black person who lived through the 1950s, has he?
Sure. “Less fearful of itself.” We didn’t fear anything. Except negroes. And commies. And beatniks. And the atom bomb. And probably some other stuff that doesn’t matter. But for perverts like Derb, it was a fucking paradise…
I think it’s time for Bruce to kick the Derb’s ass again. (Can we all agree not to mention Ada to him? God knows what fantasies he’d think it justified.)
…..Ok, genius snark there, I must admit, but…what the fuck was the point of that Derb article? Was he making a political statement? Literary criticism? Arguing with the imaginary Lolita-haters in his head? Trying to be as creepy as humanly possible so that his wife will dump him? WHAT?
There are only two possible conclusions to be made from this man’s writings:
1) He’s a pedophile and he’s desperately trying to justify it.
2) He is filled with pedophile urges and is desperately trying to justify it.
Well… it isn’t justified.
Derb, get some help. You need it… our children need it.
p.s. - how can anyone be a faithful reader of this guy… well, unless they’re also guilty of either 1), or 2)? YUCK.
I realized nothing of the sort. And giving Derbyshire space to review Lolita is like giving Michelle Malkin Hiroshima Mon Amour (”Didya see all that badass devastation footage?”). Great post, A-$.
Assorted thoughts:
Women’s attractiveness peaks before they even get out of college? Only if you have a fetish for very young women, I guess. Most 15-year-olds I’ve met are clearly children and should not be attractive to adults, and I’m only 6 years past 15 myself. Yeesh.
Assuming that women being “less attractive” as they age means they get raped less because older women report less ignores the very real factors that young women are encouraged to report now moreso than older women were when they were in their formative years, and the definition of rape taught in college orientations and the like is broader now–many older women don’t consider a drunken college boy raping a drunken classmate to be rape, just “regretted sex.” There are a lot of reasons older women might report less. Also, college campuses do by their nature provide opportunity for rapists that exists less and less as adults progress through real life.
Having been to a college with coed bathrooms and spoken to many students from other colleges with coed bathrooms, they tend to produce two effects: women sick of dealing with the poor hygiene tendencies of many male college students or a sibling-like atmosphere. Trust me, sharing a bathroom with boys (which I’ve always done at home, what with my dad being one) did not fill me with lust. Mostly it didn’t matter; the stalls were private, and bathrooms in co-ed dorms and classrooms were usually single-user. I do not understand freaking out about coed bathrooms as a sign of our “promiscuous” society.
The Derb assumes (based on stats!) that at least 61% of rape victims are attractive, and that attraction is the root of rape. We should be so lucky. Nicely roasted, Amanda.
Derb’s never met a black person who lived through the 1950s, has he?
Hell. he’s never met a non-straight-white-middle-class-and-up-male who lived through the fifties.
I am not surprised, but delighted, to learn that Lolita is your favorite novel. It is mine as well. I can only assume that the Derb will figure out eventually, even if it has to be in the prison library.
Um, equally repulsive and disturbing is Christopher Hitchens’ review of Lolita. What is WITH right-wing pedophiliacs, anyhow? Eeeeeww. There were sections of the Hitchens review that left me wanting to wash my mind out.
http://www.powells.com/review/2005_11_22
So 61% of (reporting) rape victims are minors. Is this because minors are unbearably sexy?
no, it’s because minors are, unbearably to the derb, unable to consent to sex. whereas adult women are. so his citation of rape statistics to prove his claim about salad days is not only absurd on its face, but also doesn’t support his conclusion, because it compares apples with oranges.
I grew up in the fifties, and I was quite surprised to find that I had lived to grow up. It was a scary time.
The Derb is either a lot younger than I am (actually I think he is) or an idiot (I think he is).
I listen to books on my commute and the Jeremy Irons reading of “Lolita” is mesmerizing. An award-worthy performance.
Whoa! Derb’s idea of an attractive female is someone aged 15-20?
Dude, if you want to convince people you’re not a pervert, you need to make the minimum age equal to the age of consent.
You start talking about the attractiveness of women under the age of 18, it starts opening up all sorts of questions and people start wondering if they can trust you anywhere near their daughters or if you’va taken a trip to Thailand lately.
Wow. Reading that was difficult. I wanted to keep going, to keep laughing and such, but I also wanted to stop, so that I woulnd’t have to endure any more of the skeeziness.
Also apropos, this column from the latest Onion.
“Discussing the book with a woman friend the other day, she pointed out a thing I hadn’t really noticed: Humbert is probably a lousy lover.”
“I read this book over and over for a period of at least twenty years and it never occurred to me to consider the events from Lolita’s point of view. I was always Prince Humbert, or was meant to be. If Humbert had a good time, surely so did she.” Not that Humbert’s one of the legendary unreliable narrators in modern fiction, no, that never crossed my mind.
I am reminded of the 20th-century gentleman who said that he didn’t mind his wife reading Lady Chatterley, but that he definitely didn’t want his gamekeeper reading it. My daughter read and loved Lolita, but I think she took quite different things from it than Mr. Derbyshire did.
I’ve often heard the theory that older men hit on younger women simply because they’re terrified to be with someone who has enough experience to realize their inadequacy. This is opposed to those young men who seek out more experienced women ‘cause they like being with someone who knows what she’s doing and who can teach them more of the pleasures of sex. Good lovers are made, not born, ya know.
you know, I had to actually look up the name of Matthew McConaughey’s character from Dazed and Confused, to make sure it wasn’t “The Derb.”
and I will, now and forever call Derbyshire “The Derb,” as I’m sure his friends did in college when they weren’t getting freshmen drunk and raping them.
Which is more terrifying — that Derbyshire doesn’t realize that he’s a self-parody, or that he gets published?
Is this Derb’s way of making some kind of confession?
Can it be understood any way other than as a blog for help?
Damn. That was just nasty. No meat left on the bone. Applause, Amanda.
The 15-20 thing blew my mind then and blows my mind now. If he’d said 20-25 I’d have thought he was a creep and a pig, but 15-20 suggests that he really does have tendencies towawrds pedophilia, or has a really warped view of what your average teenage girl looks like. Now, when I was 15 I thought 15 year old girls were hot - of course, I deviate from the Derb because when I was 15 I also thought 40 year old women were hot. At 23, I still do, but I find I’m not that attracted even to 18 and 19 year olds anymore. I sort of assume that this trend of finding women my own age optimally attractive has been going strong for a decade now and probably has a few more decades of guaranteed shelf life. I hope by the time I get to 60 I’ll find myself generically attracted to women of that age, even though right now I can only think of a few examples. But I can imagine that at 60 I’ll still find 25 year old women attractive. FIFTEEN YEAR OLD GIRLS LOOK LIKE CHILDREN, THOUGH. Your average 15 year old girl, to the best of my recollection, still has babyfat in her face and in general hasn’t actually reached full physical maturity. When I was 15 that was cool, but now the idea of sexualizing someone who’s so far from looking like an actual grown woman skeeves me out. Maybe Derbyshire thought Mena Suvari was really hot in American Beauty and didn’t realize she was several years older than her character. Jesus.
Parke Godwin, my favorite writer no one I know has ever heard of, has an observation along these lines in one of his short stories; a succesful Broadway figure (forget what he was, exactly; I don’t own the collection) dies and the Devil allows him to go back in time and do something he always wanted to do: namely, try and seduce his high school crush (when she was still in high school). When he gets the chance, though, he realizes he’s just not attracted to her, since he’s still got the mind and memories of an older man. She just wasn’t very interesting, intellectually or physically, compared with the women he’d known.
Grotesque. Any parent who lets their daughter sleep over at Derb’s house or otherwise socialize with Derb’s poor teenage kid is out of their mind.
This is the creepiest thing I’ve ever read. Anyone think it’s only a matter of time before Derb is exposed for something he just spent so much energy attempting to normalize?
Grotesque.
I even started to talk like Humbert Humbert, the book’s first-person narrator, dropping words like “callypygean� and “phocine� into my conversation, to much derision from my peers.
Admittedly, I’ve used “callypygean” myself. I called one particular lass that in email for about six months before she bothered looking it up…
And I think it’s noticable that someone can write:
Humbert Humbert is a monster and a sociopath. He was a human monster, though, and a human sociopath. His monstrousnesses are hypertrophied growths of our own flaws; and his sociopathy consists in breaking rules for which, if there were not some fairly widespread propensity to break them, there would be no need.
And be posting on a site that condemns Iraqis killing occupying soldiers as terrorists that should be exterminated without pity.
“his sociopathy consists in breaking rules for which, if there were not some fairly widespread propensity to break them, there would be no need.”??
Shorter Derbyshire: It’s too bad all those other pedophiles have given such a bad name to pedophilia, because otherwise I could get away with it.
Whoa. Rape statistics as a measure of beauty? WTF? I’m no sociologist, but if rape statistics are correlated with anything in the victim related to age, it seems like it would be risk-taking. (And yes, this is properly a sociological question, which makes it odd that he gives a biologist’s analysis so much weight.)
A 12-year-old may engage in risky behavior (hanging out with that creepy uncle) by accident because s/he doesn’t know any better. A 17-year-old may do something similar (dating that creepy guy) for a different reason: s/he knows better but hasn’t fully internalized the knowledge, and is prone to risk-taking and exploring boundaries. A 25-year-old, on the other hand, both knows better _and_ acts on it.
Derb, if you’re going to try to rationalize away your tendencies toward pedophilia, you might want to look somewhere other than rape stats. Seriously.
Perhaps he is more like the protaganist in Nabokov’s precursor to Lolita: The Enchanter. In this one, the Humbert Humbert character gets run over by a train.
…god you’re stupid.
…so stupid.
Sophist, you know how I read that garbage aout 58 being “saltier?”
I noticed there were basically two options. he literally IS talking about the ancient right to fuck 12 year olds and get them all spoogy, or he thinks the 50s was a decade when everyone was a character in HMS Pinafore.
The first is more likely, but the second is far funnier.
A, you have to remember, Derb was kicked several times in the head by Bruce Lee. That’s right, BRUCE LEE. Check out http://www.thetalentshow.org/archives/002365.html
Hell, Bruce kicked John Saxon in Enter the Dragon, and BAM, guy is never heard from again. That’s a powerful kick.
PS - Chuck Norris was only saved by his magical beard.
Three thoughts about Derbyshire’s review:
I think Derb longs for the 50s because rapists were seldom prosecuted then.
It’s profoundly disturbing that he thinks greater rape frequency among younger women is an indicator that they are more attractive, rather than more vulnerable.
I worry about his daughter.
Huh. Not to nitpick language or anything, but I can’t say that I found Lolita “beautiful”, like The Derb describes it, or even especially pleasant to read. It’s interesting and well-done, and so forth, but it’s also rather like watching somebody grow old and become infirm and eventually die. There was no single huge tragedy, no one thing that was far out of the ordinary, just a small stream of reasonably normal but nevertheless unpleasant and seemingly inevitable happenings, all adding up to a larger and equally unavoidable loss which can only be endured, never really repaired. And to the degree that there was comedy, it wasn’t the kind of comedy that actually makes you laugh. but more the kind that makes you squirm. Even the ending provided no real relief or catharsis, just one more grim, degrading, unredeeming incident in Humbert and Lolita’s grim, degrading, unredeeming lives. For me it was a fascinating book, but not an easy one to stomache. So it would be hard for me to put it on my list of favorites, because it didn’t leave me wanting to read it again any time soon.
I’d contrast it with movies like Brazil, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Underground, and A Clockwork Orange. All of these are horrifying and unpleasant in their own ways, but they are also laugh-out-loud hilarious and sufficiently intense and fast-paced that the emotional experience is cathartic instead of simply disturbing. In some ways, this probably makes Lolita a more intellectually serious work, but it’s also a much less approachable one.
It’s still a good book, of course.
Ah Lolita… Humbert tragic and detestable, a person trapped into an obsession and helpless to escape it, who is at the same time so empty that he must define his life by his relationship to Lolita, but only in a way that doesn’t turn around and point out that helplessness and emptiness. I tended to pity the character for his shallowness I guess you might say, or maybe cowardice.
Anyhow, our civilization is decadent. It’s true, but it’s decadent not because we have things like Janet Jackson nipple-art on broadcast TV…
It’s decadent because we get into national fucking controversies over things like two men having romantic feelings for each other, or seeing a flash of breast, or because blowing up abortion clincs is not an insane proposition to some people, or because letting a woman who is a vegetable die after many years is controversial.
That’s why we’re decadent — because we waste our entire national discourse on things like Laci Peterson and Janet Jackson’s nipple instead of things like the increasingly authoritarian government and exploitation by plutocrats that mark this country.
like lolita, this article kind of made me feel like i was going to hurl. but this, this is pure genius:
“If I were writing a review of Lolita in Humbert’s voice, that paragraph is pretty much how it would turn out, I think.”
The guy really just writes to hear the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he?
God, Amanda, how did you find the stomach to persevere with this crap? I’d have called this sufficient cause to get The Derb expelled as an undesirable alien (& with any luck the UK would refuse to have him back, so we could just drop him into the Mid-Atlantic Trench).
As for the twisted evil little scum who ‘reasoned that a rapist is inspired to his passion by the physical attractiveness of his victim’ - that just made me physically sick. As one finger in that moron’s eye tho, accurate rape statistics usually show one of the highest-risk groups for reported rapes is solo women over 70 (not sure if that’s true in the USA tho, I havent studied their statistics).
Uh, I think you misread that. He * did* go to an English secondary school, but he states it was “public” in the American sense of the word. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve read a bunch of Derbyshire’s stuff and he’s very up-front about coming from British working-class stock.
As for Lolita, am I the only one who finds it a tad overwritten? Yeah, I know that the “point” is that Humbert was supposed to be a pretentious asshole, but I’m thinking that Nabokov was obsessed with needing to prove that “I can write well in English, damn it!” It’s brilliant, yes, but for some reason it’s not one of my favorite novels.
I’m sorry, this takedown left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Although the irony in saying this is killing me somewhat, while Derbyshire’s a bigot, a homophobe and a borderline fascist, but he’s also an entertaining, engaged thinker and a sometimes witty writer - he’s certainly not the worst of the NRO crowd - and this piece betrayed nothing more contemptible that some “golden age” fantasizing of a prematurely middle-aged curmudgeon, and perhaps a lack of tact and self-preservation in the way he chose to write of some very sensitive subjects. There’s certainly nothing in his piece that deserved this sort of thuggery.
Presumably this guy, and Derb, think that rape is some kind of Hellen of Troy type of thing; That a man is so overcomen with desire that he loses all control.
They then proceed to ignore the fact that statistics don’t really bear this out.
I mean, unless they’re willing to assert that the age at which a woman is most beutiful is 5-12.
What I love is that just looking at the collected statistics blows the idea that women are raped because of physical attractiveness right out of the water, and yet somehow these two idiots don’t accept that.
People pay this guy! This story is in a respectable (Well, they try, at least) magazine!
How an editor could read this and then choose to publish it, rather then recomending the author get psychological help, is beyond me. Mayeb it’s like in “The Producers” and they want the magazine to fail.
“his sociopathy consists in breaking rules for which, if there were not some fairly widespread propensity to break them, there would be no need.”
Good God. That so-called book review is the self-justification of the reviewer’s OWN sociopathy.
Look at this piece I’ve just quoted and think about it…he really believes that the only reason societies have “rules” is because there is a “widespread propensity” to break them?
This must mean that there is only one reason for the Geneva Conventions — and that’s because deep down, everyone is just ITCHING to be a war criminal, right? And only the Nietzschean superman (in the form of Cheney or John Yoo, for example) is “brave” enough to move beyond the petit-bourgeois rule. Right?
And the fact that in virtually every society it is a crime to have sex with a corpse reveals that in virtually every society there’s a “widespread propensity” to rape bodies in the morgue…Really?
Don’t these conclusions follow from “the Derb’s” sweeping statement - that rules only exist because of a virtually universal (if unadmitted) desire to commit all manner of atrocities?
To which I can only say, “speak for yourself, John Alden.” You only WISH that everyone had the same perverted desires for acting out evil that you do; that way you can tell yourself you’re in some way “normal.”
That, and…I wouldn’t want to ever be in the same room with a person who thinks this way. Don’t just keep CHILDREN away from “the Derb” (but for God’s sake, DO keep your kids away!), keep YOURSELF far far away from anyone who thinks this way. A sociopath does not make for a good companion.
Firefalluk, I’ve heard of many cases of rape and sexual abusie in nursing homes and home cared elderly abuse, so I’d say the risk is sufficiently high for it to be mentioned. It was certainly what sprang to mind when he was talking about the risk ages.
It’s about vulnerability, not attractiveness.
Well, this is by a man who thought it wise to murder Chelsea Clinton because her daddy had an extramarital blowjob…
Minor nitpick: the Derb is English of origin, is he not, even if exile was chosen for him in much the same way virginity has chosen Ben Shapiro? So he may actually have gone to an English boarding school.
“Callipygian” — for those of us who were too busy studying for the spelling bee to swoon over our 14-yr. old classmates. And, anyway, who’s ever met a callipygian 14-yr. old?
Moron: …Back then the complaints came mostly from social conservatives, who I imagine would disapprove of Lolita just as strongly today. The Left, however, almost unanimously championed the book…
Blah blah blah. Like the rest of the NRO crew do to every other thing that wanders across their besmogged sensoria, this stupid, stupid bastard has attempted to turn Lolita into a Right-vs.-Left political thing. Die, Derbyshire, die!
Your line, …that he gets off on fucking young girls… also makes my head hurt. Lolita is most certainly neither a story about “getting off,” nor about anonymous “girls” in the plural. Nabokov’s quote about Humbert getting one day off a year from Hell is out of the author’s introduction to the novel Despair. If Lolita is the tale of the “superb, irresistible and wholly autonomous” hero Humbert, who was successfully devoted to “getting off,” then equally so Hermann in Despair was the Scarlet Pimpernel. And also, Charles Xavier actually was the literal King of Zembla.
My two major guesses for why he kept “losing� it were that it are a) his wife kept throwing it out or b) he had to replace it every time his current copy gets crusty.
It’s probably just that books over a couple of years old are too dried-up to excite him.
Oh dear god. I live around the corner from Northampton School for Boys. At least now I have proof that the alumni are idiots…
I too think Lolita is a brilliant book. But only someone very–odd–would think of Humbert Humbert as his own personal intellectual hero. Mr. Derbyshire has revealed far more about his own character than I believe he has intended.
W, regardless of how Humbert views himself or whatever, it’s clear that his is the sort of guy who lingers around schoolyards in a raincoat.
For a wonderful feminist response (beyond Amanda’s evisceration) I can’t recommend Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran” highly enough. Fantastic book about feminism, the Iranian revolution, Nabokov and teaching.
The best interpretation of Lolita that I’ve ever heard– and which I staunchly support–has absolutely zero to do with pedophilia. Lolita is about the mid-20C clash between the brazen adolescent USA (seemingly childish and naive but flush with youthful beauty and a taste for courting dangers bigger than itself) and the stodgy, pretentious, over-refined and decreasingly virile Old Europe (helpless in the face of impetuous, willful, and moody youth (and also powerless over its charms)).
The novel is a personalization of a major shift in cultural dominance, showing the absolute impossibility of a true connection between the Old World and the New World, regardless of how enamored the two are of each other, in whatever fucked-up ways.
As for H.H. as an intellectual icon, I don’t know what the fuck that is, but I feel as though H.H. (like at least one character in all of Nabokov’s works) is largely a vehicle for the erudite and flawlessly metered prose that Vladimir dished out like no other. The too-clever-by-half thing lets Nabokov shine, flexing his intellect while assuming an ironic distance. The characters’ pretensions, basically, are Nabokov’s decoys.
Greatest English language stylist of all time, in any case.
“And also, Charles Xavier actually was the literal King of Zembla.” Not to be a pedant, but Charles Xavier runs a school for gifted children. Charles Kinbote was the King of Zembla (where I suspect Derb spent his boarding school days learning the fine art of literary criticism).
“Just another ape drawing the bars on his cage.” Ha!
Oh, and yeah, Nabokov offhandedly interpreted Lolita in the above fashion in his autobiography Speak, Memory. (not sure exactly where, as my college memories are, um, college memories)
But as far as the book being beautiful…it is. Absolutely, undeniably. The story dies about 70% through, but the lanugage throughout is absolutely flawless. That’s what’s amazing about it. The sheer lyricism and verbal force of that masterpiece symbolize everything that is right and true about prose stylism. And the best first paragraph of any book in the English language, ever (with the possible exception of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I could quote both for you, but I won’t.
Because that sounds like something Derbyshire would do.
And fuck him, anyway. As far as lit-crit is concerned, the left will eat his goddamn soul. Amanda ate most of it already, but I could dig a little nosh…
Good point, Samantha - thanks, I’d read that & forgotten it
Absolutely - that was what I was trying to say, in my clumsy fashion
One of my English Prof’s in college read parts of Lolita out loud. The juxtaposition of Nabokov’s writing, and his subject matter, made it all the more disturbing. Probably a great book, but yeeechhhhhh.
Hey, I went on vacation, and I come back to find a preview function. Cool. Almost, dare I say it, capitalistic; consumers request, suppliers respond.
I loved this. It took me from “geez, you’re bein’ kind of hard on the guy, aren’t ya?” to “who cares, this stuff is hilarious! Go! Go!”
Another blog bookmarked.
Amanda,
That was a thing of beauty and a joy for-evah. Someone forward it to social services in Derbyshire’s home town–I think that essay indicates his daughter (or someone else’s) is in some serious danger.
aimai
Cripes. And I though his enthusiastic, orgasmic support for the British empire (”The most benevolent enterprise in all human civilization”, he actually wrote) and his stated desire to move to China to escape the brown hordes of immigrants (You have to marvel at how these paladins of democracy side-step the basic principles of it. They actively ignore that democracy is a set of rules, not a medal you pin on your lapel) were the most disgusting things about this creep.
I’m reminded of a room mate I had my freshman year in college who tried to justify molesting his 2-year-old niece (he was 8 at the time). He kept saying that ’she enjoyed it.’
That was repulsive, but what’s even more repulsive is The Derb. Not that a pedophile should be held to standards, but I don’t recall reading up there any discussion of any pleasure but his own. Of course, that would fit Humbert Humbert too.
I for one tend to imagine myself as Pnin.
As usual, I read the comments and everything needed saying has already been said. I agree with Mr. memento and older about the sad nostalgia for the 1950s displayed by this Derbyshire fellow. Not that it’s any more accurate, but our take on this decade (as we looked back from the 60s) was that it was one of fearful, mind-numbing conformity. Prim, proper, white-bread, and repressed. And then you die in a nuclear war!
When my mind finally decays, I will succumb to nostalgia for the 60s, dropping acid and listening to Hendrix, while wearing love beads and protesting at the ‘68 Democratic convention in Chicago. You whippersnappers think you know about ‘free love’? Bah!
i wish someone would invent a time machine that only traveled back to 1954. that way, all the conservatives who pine for the golden years of the 1950’s could travel back and live out their wildest dreams as the fonz. of course the cost of leather jackets, motorcycles and switchblades would skyrocket effecting our present day in untold ways, but it would be worth it. we could even send back The Left so he could invest in brylcreem, then we could take all the money we made from that and pour it into our on going campaign for the destruction of western civilization. win…win.
Isn’t sex with _anyone_ under age 17 by definition rape? Statutory rape. Am I wrong here? Could that be why rape statistics are so skewed toward teens?
So 61% of (reporting) rape victims are minors. Is this because minors are unbearably sexy? Or because minors are easier targets for rapists’ fantasies of power and control than grown women?
Rape is less about attractiveness, and more about control and domination. My thought was that women over a certain age are less opportune targets, as they are both more apt to fight back AND more likely to go after your ass through the justice system.
In otherwords, women who may be the slightest empowered are not worth the trouble.
Snuh made a great point re: the rape statistics. All sexual contact with anyone under the age of consent is rape. So it’s sort of a given that the stats would skew young.
And someone defends this guy as an “engaged thinker”?!
I read Lolita at 14; it was in my school library. Afterwards, I really wanted to talk to someone about it and asked the librarian, who hadn’t read it. So she did…and ripped it to pieces, and then burned it in a trashcan.
It was beautifully and lyrically written, but 14 was not a good time for me to have read it.
I suppose I should read Lolita at some point so I know what the hell people are talking about.
“. . . saltier, wiser, closer to the flesh and the bone and the wet earth, less fearful of itself.”
This man never got over reading DH Lawrence in a closet.
Quarterican, I love Parke Godwin, but he hasn’t been writing much lately. Love, love, love the man. Derbyshire should read him.
Amanda,
That was an absolutely stunning piece of criticism. I am gravid with envy and admiration.
Wireless Enthusiast wrote: “Shorter Derbyshire: It’s too bad all those other pedophiles have given such a bad name to pedophilia, because otherwise I could get away with it.”
WE has, I think, hit an important truth about the unusual twist in Derbyshire. He is an evangelical sociopath. Like most sociopaths, he secretly thinks his own shit smells sweet. Unlike most sociopaths, he thinks he can persuade the rest of us that ours smells exactly the same. (Humbert Humbert, of course, has an identical twist and uses his own eloquence to that evangelical end).
God, what I’d give for a face-off between Humbert Humbert and Iago!!
The bottom of a long thread about a specific article is probably not the place for launching an exploration of the depressing weirdness of Derb, the other Cornerites, and their ilk (the Weekly Standard is another den of slime, Fred Barnes is the worst, but David Brooks (Brooks in particular has shown Derb like tendencies to braying about women far younger than he) is also bad, and Bill Kristol seems like his ancestors to be conservative just to provoke), but I can’t help myself. I check in on the Corner every now and then despite how it sickens me, not only because I like to keep track of my enemies (especially, as now, they’re on the run politically) but also because I keep hoping despite extremely little (arguably no) evidence that they’ll evolve. One arguable piece of evidence that Derb has evolutionary potential is his willingness to acknowledge discomfort at having to ally with Christianists (he doesn’t use that term, but it’s a good new one that’s being adopted). Derb is outspoken against Intelligent Design and I recall his using the term cosmopolitan to describe a way of thinking that possible transcend the right/left divide. I don’t hold out much hope for Derb, especially after his obvious decision to dig in his heels and assert the glories of sexism in response to legitimate criticism of his preferred age of attractiveness in females. Nevertheless, there remain glimmers of promise, for example, I think Ramesh Ponnuru at times completely understood where Jon Stewart was coming from the other night.
Although I’m right there with you about Derbyshire, I feel I should share my Lolita buying and reading experience, which is recent.
Knowing what I know about the Patriot Act, it took me months to decide to buy Lolita once I decided to read it. I couldn’t shake the thought that “someday this will be used against me.” Someday, I’ll hear the words, “and in March 2006, he purchased a copy of the banned pornographic pedophilic novel Lolita” as justification for the church/state to ship me off to a “liberal reeducation” camp.
Nevertheless, I did buy it. It’s a great novel. Definitely in the upper top ten of the best novels I’ve ever read.
The only time I really have to read is during lunch. So for about three weeks, I was carrying around a copy of Lolita. And on more than one occassion, as I stood in line waiting to pay for my food or sat at a table with the book lying on it, I received hateful stares from people.
I found myself laying the book face down when I wasn’t reading. I found myself carrying it with the cover covered by my hand.
Maybe the country isn’t this bad. Maybe I was being paranoid. But it feels this bad to me.
Did he really say peak attractiveness among women is 15 to 20? Did he really say men rape children because they are so hot?
Children are vulnerable and easy to manipulate. When you tell a woman in her 30’s that she would touch it if she really loved you but not to tell anyone, she will walk away - especially if you are her twisted father or uncle. The kind of power relationship pressure brought to bear in the rape of children is only possible with children. Adult women will kick you in the nuts.
Rapists want control, and children are much easier to control than adults.
What a twisted creep!
This was back in pre-Arnold days when bodybuilders were widely regarded as narcissistic freaks.
As opposed to the post-Arnold days where bodybuilders are widely regarded as narcissistic groping freaks.
I thought the main point of *Lolita* was that the sexual relationship between adult man and young girl destroyed both man and girl.
Did I miss something?
As opposed to the post-Arnold days where bodybuilders are widely regarded as narcissistic groping freaks.
As bodybuilders are often thought to be gay due to an evident and visible obsession with the male body, said “groping” is may merely be in service to said “narcissism”.
If you want a character to be seen as admirable, you don’t name him “Humbert Humbert”. At best, he tells you that HH is ridiculous, and that’s on his good days.
I dunno, I have to disagree with you: Derbyshire is very much like a Nabokov character, first telling you his interpretation of what has happened, then giving you the details in such a way that you can see he is completely and utterly deluded.
(And women over 30 usually have very different lifestyles than girls and teenaged or young adult women. For one thing, they are more likely to have their own cars. That could explain a lot.)
Rob C: Not to be a pedant, but Charles Xavier runs a school for gifted children. Charles Kinbote was the King of Zembla.
No, Charles Kinbote was that delusional weirdo who stole his New Wye neighbor John Shade’s last manuscript poem the day Shade was killed. Charles Xavier Vseslav was the last King of Zembla. Here, from the index of Pale Fire, is the entry for him:
Charles II, Charles Xavier Vseslav, last King of Zembla, surnamed The Beloved, b. 1915, reigned 1936-1958; his crest, 1; his studies and his reign, 12; fearful fate of predecessors, 62; his supporters, 70; parents, 71; bedroom, 80; escape from palace, 130; and across the mountains, 149; engagement to Disa recalled, 275; parenthetical passage through Paris, 286; and through Switzerland, 408: visit to Villa Disa, 433; night in mountains recalled, 597, 662; his Russian blood, and Crown Jewels (q.v. by all means), 681; his arrival in the U.S.A., 691; letter to Disa stolen, 741; and quoted, 768; his portrait discussed, 894; his presence in library, 949; identity almost revealed, 991: Solus Rex, 1000. See also Kinbote.
Three things terrify me about “The Derb”:
1) He thinks the fact that many girls under age 11 are raped makes them sexually attractive.
2) He thought it would be amusing to write a satirical article proposing to kill Chelsea Clinton to prevent her from gaining political power in the future.
and
3) He has a 13 year old daughter.
As long as we’re piling on, one little sidelight:
yet so far as anything to do with the actual reality of actual human nature is concerned, we are as prim and shockable as a bunch of Quaker schoolmarms.
I don’t think this fellow knows any Quaker schoolmarms, or indeed any Quakers at all. Just a guess.
And women over 30 usually have very different lifestyles than girls and teenaged or young adult women. For one thing, they are more likely to have their own cars. That could explain a lot.
Different lifestyle I’ll buy, car use I’ll not. I wonder what percentage of women 30 and over who were raped were raped in parking lots and garages? Statistically, both are bad zones for women of any age when it comes to rape and theft.
Lets think about this a minute. Where are you more likely to be found and assisted if you are forcibly handled - a city street? Or in your car in a parking lot or garage? A car is a miniature, contained, and increasingly soundproof shelter.
Wasn’t Chelsea 13 at the time the Derb fantasized about killing her?
Get Child Protective Services to the Derbyshire house stat!
“No, Charles Kinbote was that delusional weirdo who stole his New Wye neighbor John Shade’s last manuscript poem the day Shade was killed. Charles Xavier Vseslav was the last King of Zembla. Here, from the index of Pale Fire, is the entry for him”
Oh, snap–I’ve been out-pedanticized! Well, it was early in the morning… and my copy of Pale Fire is out on loan… and I was still reeling from The Derb’s statistics… and…. Dang!
I’m not sure if the study included statutory rape in its statistics or not; a few other (MRA) references to it include the term “forcible”; but I don’t know if there’s any basis for that distinction.
I think another reason the statistics may be skewed is reporting bias. If the victim is underage, the crime will often be reported by an adult (a parent, a teacher, etc.); it seems to me to be far more rare for someone else to report it when the victim is an adult. And since the perpetrator is often someone the victim knows and cares about, there may be a greater reluctance for the victim to report than for a third party.
Hah, I think you struck a nerve. The Lolita review has disappeared, and The Derb isn’t in a good mood.
He says in The Corner, “…I have to go to my son’s school to talk to the Dean about an “incident.” Apparently Danny’s been fighting. My immediate thought on that was: “Great! Has he been WINNING?” But of course that is “inappropriate” in the girlified public-school systems of today. The kiddies are supposed to “work out” their “issues.”
I’d like to “work out” my “issues” with the school Dean the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, it’s a woman, so I have to sit there like a good, cowed, law-abiding, middle-class American doofus and listen to how unnacceptably boyish my boy is. I hate the modern world.”
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTk0NjIxNjQ3MDVhZmZhM2JlMTkxMWNmZDRmZGZjNjU=
Perhaps Mr. Derb would prefer an earlier time, when men were men and women were girls (*young* girls, of course), and God was an Englishman.
i don’t mean to rain on everybody’s parade here but one should consider that in all the rest of the western/democratic world the age of consent is 16.
so, is it maybe just possible that we have gone a little over-board with the reference to 15-18 yr. olds as children??
i am somewhat disappointed at the lack of reasonable discussion on this.
flame away…
[…] The National Review’s John Derbyshire spiked some eyebrows a few months ago by writing about the attractiveness of women in their early adolescence and the 15-20 range. Somehow, he is now reviewing Lolita. Wow. Talk about a bad idea. Amanda Marcotte goes for the definitive annotated edition of Derbyshire’s review of the annotated Lolita. I won’t even compete with that. But his peculiar use of rape statistics to back up his belief that fifteen-year-olds are Platonic form of woman bears further discussion (note, Derbyshire’s review now appears to have been pulled, so I’m quoting this via Marcotte): Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics. […]
Wait–it’s back! The world of literary criticism rejoices!
Despite assuring us he’s an assiduous student of “Lolita,” Mr. Derb states that the nymphet in the book is named Lolita. She isn’t! Her real name is Dolores Haze.
Quarterican,
That’s Influencing the Hell Out of Time and Teresa Golowitz, great story! It’s in the Devils and Demons compilation.
Another Parke Godwin lover here. I loved his description in “The Snake-Oil Wars” of someone as “dashing as a trenchcoat and about as bright.”
Actually, “The Snake-Oil Wars” is pretty topical. Unfortuately, it’s a sequel, so you really should read “Waiting for the Galactic Bus” first.
Oh my my my. I just wandered over to The Corner — here’s Derbyshire’s latest expectoration:
The feeling’s mutual, Derb.
Amanda, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read by you. Oh my god, the Derb, can he inspire possibly any more bile after this? I bet he can. Note, Derb: this is not a challenge.
Regarding Derbyshire’s reference to what would shock a prissy “Quaker schoolmarm”: since Quaker schoolmarms have a known history of stunts like walking naked into a fundy church to illustrate the difference between social condemnation and divine judgment, he’s wrong on one more point.
Andy and Quarterican: You left out the best part of that story, the part that makes Blaustein the anti-Humbert: instead of seducing her, he gives her a pep talk that winds up making her like herself a little more, so that when he returns to the present (still dead), she’s alive and successful instead of a suicide.
The age of consent (ie: the age at which “consent” is a defence to a sexual assault) in Canada is 14.
btw, that doesn’t apply to charges of “sexual exploitation”, where it can go up to 18 and the defendant was in a position of express or implied authority over the youth.
DMS
Humbert Humbert is a monster and a sociopath. He was a human monster, though, and a human sociopath. His monstrousnesses are hypertrophied growths of our own flaws; and his sociopathy consists in breaking rules for which, if there were not some fairly widespread propensity to break them, there would be no need.
…
That’s horrifying. I hold out hope that his children will grow up to be decent human beings despite their father. But they’re going to have scars. (Hey, it can happen; a couple of Fred Phelps’ children learned to become decent human beings.)
Gack. I have no particular desire to defend manhood, being a “girly-man” myself, but it is quite possibly to “be a man” without being a bully or asshole. I’ve seen it done.
This from a man who complains that ballet has too many gay dancers.
I would like to reiterate that The Derb IS A FUCKING PEDOPHILE.
He is only attracted to teenagers. What the hell?
The ‘evidence’ he uses as justification for his disgusting problems is that since most rape victims are young, they are therefore attractive? What? Could it be possible that they are more easily tricked/physically forced into rape-situations? And why does being raped mean you are attractive? In my life I have known several women who had been raped that American society would not rate as ‘attractive’.
That man’s 13 year old daughter needs to be TAKEN THE HELL OUT OF HIS HOUSE.
Someone call the CDC where he lives. Seriously. If you show a case worker what he has to say, I can promise you his family would get a very pleasant visit from them.
FUCKING SICKO.
I’d like to “work out� my “issues� with the school Dean the old-fashioned way.
What, through mediation with tribal elder? Selecting champions and engaging in trial by combat? Writing satirical broadsides and attaching them to statues? Or how about that timeless method, daydreaming?
Karl the Grouchy Medievalist,
I think you posted one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a long time on a thread somewhere about the idea that roman soldiers only fought for eight minutes at a time? I remember that it surprised me with its erudition followed by the invocaton “yo baby yo baby yo baby.” I’m still giggling.
I was going to post that there is simply no way that Derb will ever work out his issues, there would be literally nothing left of the man without his issues, his twitches, his psychoses and his pedophilia.
aimai
Chicago Dyke,
You aren’t big on accepting people with body types that don’t match the patriarchal norms, huh?
It’s debatable that feeling sexual attraction toward fully post-pubescent humans is a sign of pedophilia. Lolita wasn’t quite there yet when the novel begins. If Nabokov had made Lolita a 16 year old, sexually active high school student, he wouldn’t have had much of a premise. But lack of self control, obsession, force, violence, disregard of prevailing societal & cultural values - & all the crazy ways people justify themselves, those are always fascinating when a great author examines them. There are numerous forms of sexual predation, & in every culture including America many of these forms are acceptable & legal. Nabokov was mulling over all of these ideas as he wrote Lolita.
Derbyshire may be the worst writer I’ve ever read. Seriously.
You get the very strong feeling that he’s typing all his essays one-handed, and not in a good way.
Selecting champions and engaging in trial by combat?
We do that after a fashion nowadays by hiring lawyers. Which I suspect is what Derbyshire does when he’s afraid his opponent might have a bigger wee-wee than he does.
Thanks for reminders on the Parke Godwin story; I haven’t read it since high school - I haven’t had an easy time tracking his stuff down, and I’ve really only read a portion of what he’s written. From the ages of 8-16, though, Arthurian novels were my favorite literary subgenre, and Firelord narrowly outnudges Sword at Sunset for top honors in my book.
tookie: the reason I think it’s a creepy thing to think is that while kids at 16 are perfectly capable of having sex physically, and many may well be ready emotionally, they’re not actually adults. They have not finished maturing. Many of my female friends looked quite different when they graduated from high school as compared to how they looked on their 16th birthday, let alone their fifteenth. Futhermore, most sexualized imagery of high school aged girls (and there’s a lot of it) tends to either use girls who actually look more mature than their age (there were a few girls in my high school who could’ve passed for college students when they were fifteen) and/or fetishize the not-quite matured aspect of a fifteen or sixteen year old girl’s appearance and manner. While I don’t agree that older women are no longer attractive, I can wrap my head around the idea that someone finds women most attractive when they’re in their early-mid twenties, because pretty much everything mainstream culture sexualizes about a woman is most likely to be present in her early twenties, before she’s lived long enough to start acquiring some wrinkles (gasp!) or certain body parts aren’t quite as high and firm as they used to be (the horror!). The average fifteen or sixteen year old girl, though, doesn’t look like that to me (and again, I’m only 23; I’m a LOT closer to high school than the Derb).
Somebody needs to introduce Derbyshire to Neil Goldschmidt and be done with it. Maybe they could collaborate on some future Broadway musical epic. Neil gets in a time machine built by Derb and goes back in time to meet Humbert, or something like that.
Aimai: I totally remember that post about roman soldiers fighting for 8 minutes. But for the life of me I can’t remember: a) where I read it (archives here don’t turn anything up); b) writing anything on it. I think someone else is the funny.
If Nabokov had made Lolita a 16 year old, sexually active high school student, he wouldn’t have had much of a premise.
And if Kubrick had hewed more closely to the book, he’d never have made his movie. Haven’t seen the other one, but I don’t think they made lil’ Dolores Haze an actual kid either.
At any rate, although it’s late in the thread, I’ve been teaching college on and off during my grad years since 1997, and non-academics often make prurient comments about my sleeping with my student. Ew and barf. What I tell them is that it doesn’t matter how physically attractive these kids are: a) as soon as they open their mouths and speak, I know how large the gulf is between us, and the attraction dies; b) I don’t get off on people who are such a position of subservience to me. Derby clearly feels otherwise (the Dazed and Confused reference? Right on).
This has less to do with whether or not derby is a pedophile, and more to do with the way some of the posters are defining ‘child’.
I’m a bit wary of modern North American society’s stance that humans are still ‘children’ at the age of 14-15-16-17 and then magically adults at 18.
Around 75 years ago my grandfather married my grandmother. He was 18, she was 14. They met in high school, ‘went steady’ for a year, then married. Rumour has it that Granny’s dresses were getting too tight. They moved into northern Ontario, my father was born a year later, my aunt followed two years after that (with one baby dead in childbirth between). They lived in a town of around 500 people, no doctor, no school, no wal-mart…But it did have a pretty good Hockey team.
My grandfather was a heavy equipment mechanic, my grandmother founded and then ran the local lending library, and helped to found the first (non-religious) school in the area. They raised two kids, Granddad fought in the second world war, while grannie kept the home fires burning.
These people were adults. They were capable of making th