As we’ve seen from previous entries, many Lolita figures of the pre-Lolita age are made out to be autonomous. They may be young girls, but there is no doubt about the fact that both Tessa and Ariane are choosing—however dubiously—their elderly male lovers. They are the ones who go after these men, thus absolving their older lover objects from the charge of pedophilia.
We haven’t yet encountered a reluctant Lolita: a teen girl who might be interested in an affair with an older man, if the circumstances were right. A girl who does need to be protected from the predators around her because they look so much like romantic options. A Lolita who, at 17, wants something that in ten years, two months, five minutes, might reveal itself as the disgusting trespass it was.
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