IT IS PROBABLY a good idea, right off the bat, to tell you a bit about myself. I am a cultural anthropologist, a mother of 9-year-old twin girls, and the wife of a doctor. My research focuses on how popular culture influences sexuality.
When I was younger I was not seduced by pop culture. Some may find that hard to believe. Trust me when I tell you, as an anthropologist who fully understands the constraining aspects of culture, that I lived on the edges of normative society, sometimes intentionally. My refusal to shave my legs for more than a decade might have cost me the title of “Homecoming Queen.” I’m not kidding. I was first runner-up. I know what you are thinking, “I wonder what the other girls looked like.”
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Inevitably, our lunch conversations turn to the subject matters we are lecturing about that day. On that afternoon, I had prepared a lecture based on my fieldwork on Nevis, a small island in the Caribbean, in which I addressed the topic of sexual-economic exchange, in particular the way young girls trade sexual favors with older men for access to goods and cash. The philosopher explained that his students were in the middle of reading Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, which has been hailed as one of the best 100 books ever written. I confessed, between bites of my sandwich, that I had never read it. This came as a shock to my colleague, who understood all too well the nature of my research on girls and sex in the Caribbean. He tried to persuade me to read Lolita, exclaiming, “Wouldn’t you, of all people, want to understand the mind of a man who wants to have sex with a young girl, if not for your research, then to protect your daughters?” I could hear Mr. Spock’s voice, “move toward what scares you.”
Like many parents, the fear of someone forcing my young daughters to have sex runs deep and has the potential to turn me into a madwoman. I must admit, while up until that moment in my life, I had not yet worked up the nerve to read Lolita, I used to watch NBC’s To Catch a Predator, an evening program that sets up sting operations to catch sexual predators. It fascinated me. I studied the faces of the men on my high-definition TV, reminding myself and anyone else who would listen, namely my students and girlfriends, that pedophiles are ordinary-looking men, sometimes strangers, but more often than not, men who are in our everyday lives.
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Debra Curtis is an assistant professor of anthropology at Salve Regina University, in Newport.