whos to blame?

I found this on Tant Mieux's website:
For me this passage below was almost disturbing. This person read all of Nabokovs lesser known books before reading Lolita, and found it to be suggesting that young children really are sexual beings. This idea disturbed me. No child, no matter what a person may think, are sexually aware at the age of the nymphettes in Lolita, and this man is almost standing up for the people that can see this sexual side of the young. He claims that Hubert was not completely to blame, for Lolita was just a sexual being who was dressed up in innocence to hide her true cover. While she may have had some sexual tendancies, as a young child, she was not aware of her sexuality as Humbert had initially saw her. And by photographers photographing young girls with deep looks on their faces and a dress partially draped off the shoulder, does not suggest that the girl is trying to tempt the photographer. "but to deny that children are sexual beings is to turn one's back on our very nature" shows how this person uses these different stories and photographs to maybe support his own nature, that may strongly differ from many others. While his view on nymphettes is interesting, I found myself a little taken aback by this. Part of his blog is included below:



For as long as I can remember, I have loved the work of Nabokov. I remember reading Pale Fire and then Ada or Ardour when i was still a teenager - heavy stuff for that age, or so it seemed to me. While most readers had started or been introduced to Nabokov with his book and later his film, Lolita (with Sue Lyons and Charles Mason), i had started with the lesser known works, and eventually led up to Lolita, often considered the more perverse of his books and to some, an advertisment for incest; this poor little Lolita who is the victim of our so-called antagonist Humbert Humbert. Watch the newer version with Jeremy Irons and you'll see that Lolita isn't entirely the victim here, as anyone who read the book carefully could tell you. We're so quick to judge, and yes, incest is always wrong. But what Lolita really tells us is that children, no matter how hard we try to neuter them and turn them into innocent fairies with angel wings, as was so common in the Victorian era, will always be sexual and sensual beings. This is not an advertisement for incest by any stretch, but to deny that children are sexual beings is to turn one's back on our very nature. It is entirely possible and even likely, that a child can be sensual and even sensual without wanting any kind of touch or relationship. To break that pact, to pursue a relationship, is to traumatize and rape the child. Of this we can be clear. Lewis Carroll, nee Charles Dodgson, author of Alice 's Adventures Underground (later named Alice in Wonderland), is often compared to Nabokov (in contemporary work). We were told "little girls held a strange fascination for Carroll." Few know of Carroll's work as a photographer. That he was one of the preeminent photographers of the Victorian era, alongside Julia Margaret Cameron and O. Rejlander. Who can forget the picture of Alice Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland, posing as the "Little Beggar Girl," the jaunty thrust of her hip, the dress slipping off of her shoulder, the smoldering look in her eye. Carroll, unlike his contemporaries, would not sugar coat his models. .Even Nabokov, who much admired Dodgson and translated into Russian Alice in Wonderland, accuses him of "Nympholepsy", adding almost jealously, "he got away with it." Nabokov called Dodgson's models, "half-dressed and bedraggled nymphets," referring to the models that lie about languidly in Dodgson's photographs, their poses clearly suggestive. Really it is only in our backward glance that we find some "evidence" we say of Nabokov's nympholepsy or Dodgson's perversion. It is widely known that the Victorians were preoccupied with mythologizng children, rendering them as innocent water nymphs, frolicking jollily along the shoreline, floating in the air as cherubs, or even as full-breasted women strangely lacking in pubic hair. In this Cult of the Child, children (and women, for that matter) were sexless, yet suggestive. Their sexuality was decorated with the props of innocence, flowers and wings, halos and purifying baths, promoting, as Bram Dijkstra put it, "a genre of child pornography that disguised itself as a tribute to the ideal of innocence." (195, Idols of Perversity) Children were presented provocatively, but in a form that was acceptable. Still, if you strip away the props and the pretense from these airbrushed and dilute images, a more perverse, more fetishistic rendering is revealed.