Skanky Vamp
Sniffin' the Slayer
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2008
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From popsugar
In one of the most widely recognized images of Vladimir Nabokov's titular Lolita, a car's rearview mirror tightly frames the face of a fair-haired, fair-skinned girl. Her precocious gaze holds our attention from just behind the heart-shaped sunglasses perched atop her nose. The sunglasses are bright red, a perfect match for the girl's cherry-stained mouth and the lollipop that rests between her lips.
But suckers and sunglasses never appeared in Nabokov's 1955 novel. They didn't turn up in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film, either. Rather, these props were selected by fashion photographer Bert Stern, who shot the promotional stills for Kubrick's Lolita in 1961. Stern purchased them at a five-and-dime to adorn Sue Lyon, the 14-year-old actress cast in the role of Dolores "Lolita" Haze.
Since then, the lollipop has come to signify a coquettish temptress: young, sweet, sexy. A controversial ad campaign for Love's Baby Soft perfume in the 1970s featured a woman holding a lollipop to her cheek with the tagline, "Because innocence is sexier than you think." Children of the '90s may remember the lollipop as a natural if not all-too-obvious prop for Baby Spice of the Spice Girls. And it would not be a stretch to suggest that Lil Wayne's 2008 song "Lollipop" does not simply imply its objectifying motif but pushes the metaphor to its explicit end. Despite how sharply this seductive, hypersexual distillation contrasts with Nabokov's Lolita, a 12-year-old girl violated at the hands of an adult abuser, the trope has persisted for decades.
In her article "Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography: Candy, Consumption, and Dying Flowers," Dr. Morna Laing details how such media references point to a culture historically fixated on a fetishized tension between girlhood and womanhood, in which young girls are oversexualized and adult women are infantilized. There's a term for it, "nymphetmania," and it has a cinematic history that long predates Lolita. Lollipops can be found at the origins of this pedigree, linked especially to Shirley Temple. In the early 1930s, Temple sang "The Good Ship Lollipop" to an audience of fondling men in the film Bright Eyes and performed with the candy in hand in a series of films called Baby Burlesks, which — you guessed it — are about toddlers playacting adult burlesque shows.
In one of the most widely recognized images of Vladimir Nabokov's titular Lolita, a car's rearview mirror tightly frames the face of a fair-haired, fair-skinned girl. Her precocious gaze holds our attention from just behind the heart-shaped sunglasses perched atop her nose. The sunglasses are bright red, a perfect match for the girl's cherry-stained mouth and the lollipop that rests between her lips.
But suckers and sunglasses never appeared in Nabokov's 1955 novel. They didn't turn up in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film, either. Rather, these props were selected by fashion photographer Bert Stern, who shot the promotional stills for Kubrick's Lolita in 1961. Stern purchased them at a five-and-dime to adorn Sue Lyon, the 14-year-old actress cast in the role of Dolores "Lolita" Haze.
Since then, the lollipop has come to signify a coquettish temptress: young, sweet, sexy. A controversial ad campaign for Love's Baby Soft perfume in the 1970s featured a woman holding a lollipop to her cheek with the tagline, "Because innocence is sexier than you think." Children of the '90s may remember the lollipop as a natural if not all-too-obvious prop for Baby Spice of the Spice Girls. And it would not be a stretch to suggest that Lil Wayne's 2008 song "Lollipop" does not simply imply its objectifying motif but pushes the metaphor to its explicit end. Despite how sharply this seductive, hypersexual distillation contrasts with Nabokov's Lolita, a 12-year-old girl violated at the hands of an adult abuser, the trope has persisted for decades.
In her article "Rewriting Lolita in Fashion Photography: Candy, Consumption, and Dying Flowers," Dr. Morna Laing details how such media references point to a culture historically fixated on a fetishized tension between girlhood and womanhood, in which young girls are oversexualized and adult women are infantilized. There's a term for it, "nymphetmania," and it has a cinematic history that long predates Lolita. Lollipops can be found at the origins of this pedigree, linked especially to Shirley Temple. In the early 1930s, Temple sang "The Good Ship Lollipop" to an audience of fondling men in the film Bright Eyes and performed with the candy in hand in a series of films called Baby Burlesks, which — you guessed it — are about toddlers playacting adult burlesque shows.