Escaping the Lolita Myth: Giving voice to the real Dolores Haze

Abstract

This article explores the ‘Lolita myth’ – the idea of a sexually precocious adolescent girl who seeks sex with an adult male. It considers the misreadings of Lolita that created the myth; and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings on Lolita, foreshadowed in her phenomenological description of sexual difference in The Second Sex (1949/2011), her own grooming of teenaged girls and her attitude to the age of consent. Responding to a recent interest in the ethics of intergenerational sex in existential psychotherapeutic circles, it considers the implications of the Lolita myth in sexual abuse cases, celebrity female experience, and in the lived experience of participants in my doctoral research into adolescent sexual grooming.