Blog Post #5- Responding and Reflecting

Today, I found an interesting piece of information that I thought should be shared. In regards to Vladimir Novakov's novel Lolita, Novakov never wanted for the book's cover to have  young girl on the cover, much less in a sexualized manner. However, this request was ignored again and again in favor of sexualizing these young girls, in many ways falling into a similar trap that people who believe that Lolita is a romance novel have fallen into.
                                                 
                                                
The book itself is attempting to make light of a trend that continues into popular culture today, the sexualization of women, young girls at that, and normalizing this behavior. It is incredibly toxic, but society tends to shrug this off, much like many characters in Lolita, including the young Dolores herself tend to brush off the fact that Humbert Humbert has a very dangerous and very sexual obsession with a girl much to young. In lieu of making this a more feminist lens oriented post, I will simply state that from a psychoanalytical sense, having sexual attraction towards a prepubescent child or a minor in any case is not only illegal to act upon, it is a mental problem, and one should seek help for it. Many people unfortunately do have these feelings, and even more unfortunately act upon them, and this is caused more often than not by society's portrayal of young girls not as the girls they are, but as the young women they are expected to one day become. Overall, Lolita shows that this trend is allowing for mental illness to fester and grow within society, and next to no one has done anything to stop it, and this has led to many horrible things happening.
To end, I will simply add with this picture, as a way to show just how much this does effect our society: