Curing the Lolita Complex

Who would disagree that the “baby-faced nymphet” — perhaps embodied most explicitly by a school-uniformed Britney Spears in the Baby One More Time video — is a regular fixture on the media landscape? What we might disagree on though is how to counteract it. Some believe that shielding girls from sex for as long as possible — preaching the abstinence message and the pregnancy/STD/victimhood perils of sex — is the only way.

Durham disagrees. Girls do not need “rescuing” from sex, she says. Merely the media’s one-dimensional, profit-driven version of it, which is based purely on male fantasies without a nod to female needs or desires.

Rather, girls should be encouraged that it is their right to enjoy it, thus reclaiming their sexuality from a culture that increasingly positions them as passive, objectified sex kittens who are not encouraged to actually want sex or get any pleasure from it yet are mandated to be desirable to males — to look up for it but not, of course, act on it, for that would be sluttish.

Times Online