There was a time within my generation (X) and the generation previous (BabyBoomers) where the sexuality and promiscuity of young girls was touted and celebrated. Now the cultural climate is less inclined to do so, even within the art and intelligence minded community. Lolita was published in the 50s and shocked the culture, but we were swayed by the elegant prose, and the insight into that doomed world. Such brilliant words, so elegantly written made the story of something selfish, horrible and pathetic seem almost noble in it's broken and twisted sort of way. If a life such as Lolita's were visited upon someone we knew and loved, and I mean really loved (think platonic or family love, NOT an objectifying sexual obsession), we would be devastated. In today's culture young girls (and boys) are still sexualized, but it's not as openly accepted as high art as it seemed to be back a decade or two ago. These days 'art' like that is most often frowned upon and criticized. Of course, there is internet porn and pedophilia, more prevalent than ever for sure, but not socially acceptable and artfully or openly celebrated as it was in the late 60s-70s-early 80s. If anything, it's considered exploitation and a plague on society, and rightly so.
You might not recall Brook Sheilds' & Nastassja Kinski's early careers, but I do. Girls like them made life for men like Roman Polanski possible. I was among their era and found myself awash in similar but less overt circumstances in those times. We were the willing nymphs in our own de-flowering, but we were too young and too naive to realize it. We were the immediate beneficiaries of the sexual revolution, and we reciprocated in kind. It was a heady time. There was great freedom but very little responsibility and when you don't have both, someone gets hurt.
And really, the down side to the Sexual Revolution, which is now only fully realized in retrospect, is the sexual part of it. The civil aspects of it, equal pay for equal work and equal rights - were the crux of it, and the noble and best part of That Revolution. Sadly that is where our society still lags behind. But we have all sorts of sexual freedom and we have the diseases, the guilt the broken relationships and every ill-gotten aspect of it. We are free to indulge in every dimension of sexual freedom, and I don't think we as individuals, or society is any better or happier for it, in a general sense.
When I was the child, it seemed a good thing to forge ahead into every experience I could imagine and had read about. When I was an adult with children of my own at the very same age as I was when I tried such things, I had a crystal-clear picture of how unready and ill-prepared I really was. It is the height of selfishness for an adult to coerce a child into adult practices of any kind. We realize now that our thinking and decision making brain-parts are not fully formed until our mid-20s. Yet common sense in such matters took a huge slide around that time (70's/80's), and many adults, gladly encouraged the promiscuity of very young people for the sake of freedom. It was not unheard of for some adult within ones sphere of acquaintance to provide the very under-aged with drugs, alcohol and art, either real or questionable, in the form of literature or movies. In times past, it would not have been so widely accepted, and now since that era, it has fallen out of favor. I don't necessarily think all of these 'Svengalis' were purely evil and out to harm, I do think some were naive themselves, still navigating the new cultural and artistic freedoms without the benefit of hindsight. Some were simply misguided, and still some were just sick and perverted.
It has taken me a long time to fully recognize and understand this. When I was a girl, it seemed very hip and very romantic to have the attention of older men. When I was a girl I thought the parents of my friends who permitted them to get drunk and high were wonderful. Still I retained a slight uncomfortable notion, about it. Those situations could be scary and out of control and they could very likely lead to complicated consequences. For me, it has been years of processing all of those things, and dealing with the issues they caused in my life.
Exploitation of all kinds is worse now, with human trafficking and slavery global and more widespread than ever. Yet there are subtle differences. I don't think a movie like Pretty Baby could be made today, or at least have the same kind of universal praise for it's controversial subject, which titillated more than it shone a light on the ugly underbelly of prostitution. There is a great collective frown nowadays from a wide swathe of the population when the underage pretty young stars of our day get too adult and sexy. It seems to hurt their careers rather than help them (Remember Miley and the pole dance, anyone?). Roman Polanski's career has been greatly overshadowed by his controversial illegal activity regarding this subject, and that has probably limited him a great deal, no matter how brilliant a director he is. Brooke Shields disclosed she's on anti-depressants, particularly needing them during postpartum. She has spoken frankly about her body image issues, and one wonders that she might not have had such pronounced issues if she had not been placed on a pedestal of sexual desirability before she was even in high school. Just speculating. It's just not as socially acceptable for kids to have the same kind of early career as she and Nastassja Kinski had. I often wonder how Nabokov's Lolita, if she lived, would have fared in the years after her life with Humbert, and what her opinion and evaluation of her life would be, at different times say in her 20's, 30's 40's and beyond. But of course, Lolita is fiction, and the best kind of fiction in the salacious and seductive world of under-aged sex-goddesses - she died young and stayed pretty and never became a fully grown and fully realized woman.
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