SOCIETY THE LOLITA EFFECT BY M. GIGI DURHAM (Duckworth £8.99)
By Jenni Murray Last updated at 6:03 PM on 06th May 2009
'Oh no', was my first reaction when I was asked to read The Lolita Effect by M. Gigi Durham PhD.
Subtitled The Media Sexualisation Of Young Girls And What We Can Do About It, I assumed it would be another densely written, American, academic tome, blaming feminism for the breakdown of moral order and urging us to lock up our daughters to preserve them from peril.
Britney Spears' video for Hit Me Baby, One More Time
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There's example after example of music, film, advertising, manufacturing and retail industries that have long played with the Lolita Effect and have turned our girls into 'jail bait', 'prosti-tots' or 'kinder-whores'.
Durham reminds us that Lolita in the original novel by Nabokov was not a consciously sexually voracious child, but an ordinarily attractive 12-year-old girl, fascinated as all children are by the mysteries of sex, who was used and abused by the novel's middle-aged protagonist Humbert Humbert.
Lolita (1997), starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain
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The book is a call for the complex questions of power and gender to be included as a part of what we now call sex education, and for us to offer girls the chance to achieve real empowerment and emancipation for themselves. It's a tall order, but it's a start.
I would recommend the book to parents and teachers who want to help the youngsters in their care grow up with a healthy and confident attitude to sex, and the critical faculties to make their own wise choices.
