She stood on the endless green field path, dressed in a pink lace bubble dress, lined with white knee socks, holding an equally cute pink bag and parasol in her hand, and oh, a ribbon tied around her neck, looming under her long curly blonde hair. She looked like an innocent little girl who hadn't grown up yet.
"No matter how irrational the way of life, as long as you feel happy, as long as you feel happy, it is good, the rococo spirit told me." 」
This is the dress of 17-year-old Momoko Ryugasaki (Kyoko Fukada) in Japanese director Tetsuya Nakajima's film The Tale of the Lower Wife, the so-called Lolita style – a girl costume derived from the Victorian and Rococo era, plus gothic and punk cultural influences.
If you've been to Japan, you're no stranger to outfits like this, and it's easy to find cute girls dressed in Lolita-style outfits on the streets. But is Lolita just a clothing style?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >Who is Lolita? </h1>
Lolita is an aesthetic, not only an aesthetic of clothing, but also an aesthetic of women. This aesthetic is slowly internalized from the "male gaze" to the "female gaze on herself."
Of course, you can say that women have "objectified" themselves since then, or you can say that women have grown their own power from this "gaze", but we are not talking about a "feminist" issue now.
In contemporary Chinese Internet vocabulary, "Lolita ( short for Lolita) means "cute, cute little girl", and this "cute girl" comes from the MOMO princess in the 1982 Japanese manga "Sweet Fairy", which continues to develop in the Japanese two-dimensional world and becomes an "imported product" across the ocean.
1982 Japanese manga Sweet Fairy
Although "Lolita" has a profound relationship with Japan, it has only been a few decades since the second dimension of the world, and as early as 1955, in France, the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov published the book Lolita and caused controversy in the literary world in the 20th century, but it is still a classic.
The book tells the story of a middle-aged man, Humbert, who is hopelessly in love with a 12-year-old girl, Dora reiss. Humbert has always been fascinated by girls aged 9-14, he calls them "little witches", but not every little girl is a little witch, they must have some kind of traits, such as "ethereal, elusive, witty, rough and elegant".
Humbert restrained his desires until he met Dolares, who married Dolares' mother, Charlotte, and became her stepfather, but kept hiding an unspeakable (or unexplained) "conspiracy" against the little girl.
Charlotte discovers the secret and angrily rushes out of the house and dies in an accident. Since then, Humbert has finally "possessed" the 12-year-old girl and embarked on a journey of road, sex and love with her.
"In the early morning, she was Lo, an ordinary little Lo, four feet ten inches tall and wearing only one sock; lola in loose pants; dolly at school; and Dolores when officially signed. However, in my arms, she will always be Lolita. ”
"Dolores" as a Spanish name (the girl's biological parents were very fond of Mexico) can be affectionately referred to as "Lo", "Lola" or "Lolita". Although no one else calls the girl "Lolita" in the novel, this is actually the protagonist Humbert's personal love name for the little girl. Later , "Lolita" entered popular culture and was also used to describe "precocious" girls.
Stills from the movie Lolita
The work was rejected by the five major publishing houses in the United States at the time because Lolita was regarded as a "pornographic novel that wasn't erotic enough."
In Nabokov's own words: "In real society, the word 'pornography' has meant popularization, commercialization, and strict adherence to certain rules. Obscenity must be combined with mediocrity, and all aesthetic pleasures must be completely replaced by simple sexual stimulation. Achieving sexual stimulation requires some traditional vocabulary that allows the recipient to have a direct effect. ”
However, Nabokov is not the only one who has created this aesthetic of little girls in the literary world, as in the 1925 book "Foolish Love" by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, 28-year-old Kawai adopted Naomi, a 15-year-old girl with a mixed-race temperament, hoping to "tune" her as an ideal woman and marry her.
Compared with "Lolita", the text of Junichiro Tanizaki in "Idiot's Love" is more brazen and bold, depicting a lot of Papa and Baby games, and what is more overflowing than "love" is Kawai's "delusion".
Not only male writers, French female writer Margaret Duras also depicts Chinese men in their 30s and 15-year-old French girls in "Lovers", stories about love, desire, loneliness and despair.
Born in 1959, Japanese female writer Arimi Yamada challenged Junichiro Tanizaki's "Foolish Love" with "The Love of the Sages" by a mature girl who taught teenagers.
Stills from the movie "Lover"
In the world of literature, writers can indulge their crazy ideas in their pens, do whatever they want in the temple of art, and blend the flowers of beauty and evil in reality and fiction. But note that the premise is, in the world of literature.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > "Little Witch" or "Victim"? </h1>
Even in the world of literature, Lolita and Fool's Love are controversial works, but if this happens in real life, there is only one result - crime.
In China, sexual intercourse with a young girl under the age of 14, whether voluntarily or not, is punished heavily as rape. In other countries, the legal age varies, from 12 to 21 years old, which is related to national conditions and local religion.
Even if some people are wronged and think that they may be the real Humbert, they are just passionately in love with his daughter, his future wife. But this is like wenqing coffee shop everyone can go, but there are few people who can really write poetry and novels, and people who can write great novels and poems are not the same as not committing crimes. Art can beautify everything, but that also only happens in the world of art.
In Lolita, Doraise is a wayward, precocious and even somewhat wild "little witch", adolescent girls have their special magic, she has long seen through Humbert's intentions, although Humbert tried to give her sleeping pills and tried unsuccessfully, she took the initiative to tease and hug Humbert.
But Doraise is also an orphan who lost her father at an early age and then lost her mother, her relationship with her mother is not good, adolescent girls are not birds in cages, they have various channels to understand the "outside world" and "adult world". For Dora reis, maybe it was nothing more than an adventure to rebel against her mother, an attempt into the adult world, a game, something she herself hadn't figured out yet.
But Humbert is different, he is a middle-aged man who is almost 40 years old, he knows exactly what he is doing, he knows how to threaten the little girl to make her obedient, he tells Doraris that if he tells others that he raped her, she will eventually have to go to a welfare home, or even to a correctional school, a correctional home, a juvenile detention center because of her behavior. Perhaps for Dora reis, Humbert was her only, desperate, vicissitudes.
During the road trip, Dora res cried violently several times, but the whole book was a self-narration from Humbert's point of view, his psychology, his love, his senses, Dora Reis was the object of his deep gaze.
He constructs Dorarese's character from his male perspective, but does not speculate on the girl's heart, and Humbert in the book admits this—he has not observed Dorarese's inner world except for her cute appearance.
Dolares leaves, and the playwright Q, who took her with her, is also a "pedophile", and when Humbert goes to Q to "get revenge", Q says a key sentence - "She asked me to take her to a happier family." ”
Maybe it was another lie of Dora reeds, maybe it was her true words. When Humbert last met Doraise, she married a simple young retired man who was pregnant, and Humbert described her as "hopelessly vicissitudes at the age of 17."
Junichiro Tanizaki's "Foolish Love" is also a completely male gaze perspective, and in China, a literary work that has sensationalized both sides of the Taiwan Strait, there happens to be a narrative from a completely female perspective.
Although separated by a hundred years, there may be some "interesting" and heavy dialogue in both literature and reality, and this book is the late Taiwanese female writer Lin Yihan's "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise". After the book was published, Lin Yihan committed suicide and died, which triggered a lot of speculation.
"Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise"
After Lin Yihan's death, many people believe that the story in the book is her own personal experience, and I think Lin Yihan may prefer people to talk about the literary nature of the book—about what she called "aesthetic pleasure" in the interview.
It is a pity that the literary nature of the book cannot be discussed in detail here, and the novel is not documentary literature, it is a fictional paradise, so I will only use the character Fang Siqi in the book as an example.
In "Fang Siqi's First Love Garden", Li Guohua, a married cram school teacher, has been seducing, raping and sexually abusing 13-year-old female student Fang Siqi for many years. She had admired him and thought it was love, but the truth was that she lived alone in the abyss of darkness, from a rainbow of childhood paradises to the paradise of adult sin.
She said "No, I won't", she still kept saying "I'm sorry", she was bullied on the Internet for help, she had no way to ask for help...
"If this is love, why do you feel violent? Why do I feel broken? Why does the teacher ask a female student to be replaced by a female student? If this is not love, how can Teacher Li, who is full of knowledge, still be so confident, undoubted, and unashamed after doing it? ”
Screenshot of Lin Yihan's interview video
Lin Yihan said in an interview before his death: "Primo Levi said a sentence, he said that the concentration camp is the largest massacre in human history, but I want to say, no, the largest massacre in human history is Fang Siqi's rape. ”
She said the question she really wanted to ask in the role of Li Guohua was, "Can art contain an element of cleverness?" The converse is, "Could it be that art has always been just rhetoric?" ”
So, those real-life Lolitas, are they "little witches" or "victims"? I think that's an obvious question.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the boundary between literature and reality</h1>
Of course, we can't easily speculate on the "unfathomable" of the valley of human nature, and the male protagonist in Danish director Thomas Winterberg's film "The Hunt" is charged with sexually assaulting girls because of the retaliatory lies of precocious girls. Some netizens said, "Innocence is the greatest evil, and fairy tales are the biggest taboos." ”
We can't knock over a boat of people with one pole, a stick on a child, a stick on an adult, then there are few morally pure people in this world. Everyone is creeping to the ground with original sin on their backs.
There is no "aesthetic" of art in the real world, it is more cruel, single, dirty, rape of young girls is endless, just "adapted from the true story" of the work (such as the Korean movie "The Melting Pot" and "Suyuan") is unbearable to see, not to mention the naked real news reports.
Stills from the movie "The Melting Pot"
There are always weak predators in the social jungle, and it is easy for people to get angry when it comes to raping young girls, and young girls really can't take on the power from the other end of the scale. So what if sexual violence happens to adult women?
"You took the initiative to seduce, right?" "Why don't you resist?" "This is the Immortal Jump, right?" It is easy to condemn the victims, just like Fang Siqi was mocked when she asked for help on the Internet, Japanese female journalist Ito Shiori was personally attacked and threatened after accusing Yamaguchi Kei, South Korea's "MeToo" movement was in full swing, South Korean female artists were one after another suspected of sexual violence and committed suicide, and the recent South Korean "Room N" incident and the previous child pornography dark web also caused the world to be in an uproar.
If everyone arbitrarily extrapolates reality with a bystander's attitude, the victim will only be hurt twice, third, or even several times. However, it is also easiest to condemn the victim, because the weaker party is often powerless to fight back, and they may face people with higher strength, capital, and power than themselves, and it is more likely that they are unspeakable from the sexual assault of acquaintances.
People always think that sexual violence occurs on a dark and windy night in the moon, and the victim is pulled into the grove and violently treated, but that is only the bridge of the TV series.
We cannot always stand on the moral high ground, but we cannot turn a blind eye to violence, silence is also a crime, and collective silence is a collective crime. So how to speak up for the victims?
We have laws, we have the Internet, we have the "MeToo" movement that burned all the way from Europe and the United States to Asia in 2017, and South Korea has spawned "SchoolMeToo", with students from more than 70 schools responding and marching in the streets, accusing teachers of sexual violence against students.
Korean campus "Metoo" campaign
We also have the media. The media has the responsibility to uphold basic social ethics and the public interest, and the mission of the media is to expose the truth, not literary creation.
Back to the boundary between literature and reality, "Lolita" is an aesthetic in the literary world, "Lolita" is a subculture that extends from the two-dimensional world to the line, but this must not beautify the crimes in the real world, nor can it challenge the law and social morality, let alone swallow people's culture and way of thinking.
Moreover, Humbert also tried himself in the text: "If it were left to me, I would sentence Humbert to at least 35 years in prison for rape and dismiss the rest of the charges." ”
Let Lolita stand back in the endless wilderness, the misty mountains, the crystal clear lake, let her grow freely, and maintain the vitality, willfulness, roughness, curiosity and innocence of childhood and youth.
Give her the right education so that she can confidently explore the mystery of romance, passion, fantasy, sex and love as an adult.
Author | Jiang Wen
Edit | Li Shaowei
Typography | CAT
Image | Partly from the web
Produced by SouthWind Window New Media