That feeling of being in your early teens. You’re being preyed on by men far older than yourself. They cat-call you and you’re not sure if you should feel embarrassed or flattered. You’re a virgin but curious. You hardly know what sex is, but you exist within a culture that has made you believe you could harness some sexual control over an older man who has been having sex for longer than you’ve been alive. No longer harnessing the inherent perceived purity of childhood. Too young to be a Madonna or Whore as Freud described, but rather you are a secret third thing…
In the 1920s Sigmund Freud identified a pattern within his male clients sex lives. Many of his clients reported that they were struggling to be sexually attracted to their wives, yet found themselves to be incredibly aroused by sex workers. Freud would go on to coin this phenomenon as The Madonna-Whore Complex, writing "Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love," in 1925. This complex successfully divides a woman’s humanity into two categories that are supposedly unable to overlap, the Madonna and the Whore. A woman is forced into one of these boxes. Pure, motherly, and nurturing. Or tainted, depraved, and sexual. The loved and respected versus the desired, and demeaned.
Though I would argue that there is a third category, The Lolita. The Lolita acts as a fetishized liminal space before a girl becomes a woman, and thus ultimately becomes a Madonna or a Whore. At a glance, I think many would argue that the Lolita would fall into the category of the Madonna due to the suggested purity and innocence that accompanies the inherent youth of this archetype. However, upon closer inspection one may notice that the Lolita archetype embodies qualities of both the Madonna and the Whore, thus inspiring a unique sexual desire through the minds of men that is separate from both the Madonna and the Whore. It is important to note that the Lolita is not a real girl, in the same way that the Madonna and the Whore are not real women. They are archetypes created in the minds of men that lack the nuance of humanity in which real women possess.
The Lolita can be characterized by youth, purity, and virginity, but also by sexual curiosity, and sexual deviance. Webster’s dictionary defines Lolita as an English-language term defining a young girl as "precociously seductive." and therefore is defined by traits attributed to both the Madonna and the Whore. Making the Lolita the third sought after archetype. The Lolita embodies the untouched, virginal purity of the Madonna, though accompanied by the paradoxical sexual seduction of someone seemingly far more experienced. The physical purity of the Madonna, but with the mental impurity of the Whore. This archetype can be seen blatantly within films such as Dolores Haze in both film adaptations of Lolita (1962 and 1997), Angela Hayes in American Beauty (1999), Adrian Forrester in The Crush (1993), and Mathilda in Leon The Professional (1994). The girls within these films are between the ages of 12-16 and all of them are virgins, though despite their sexual inexperience, they are painted as the aggressors, pursuing men much older themselves. Thus placing the men in these scenarios in the “victim” role, as they are being “preyed” on by these girls, and must resist temptation.
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