Come to bed, Lolita
NS February 1st, 2008
I was just having my lunch and listening to BBC Radio 2 when a conversation on air caught my attention. The dj mentioned this story, which just came out today, about a group of mothers from an online parenting forum who complained to Woolworth’s about a product on their website which they found offensive. The item in question? A bed range aimed at six-year-old girls, called ‘Lolita’. Woolworth’s withdrew the item from their site soon after they received the complaints.
The debate on air was whether or not these mums should have the right to ask companies to remove things which they find offensive but that not everyone does. Some callers said the women were ‘hysterical’ and that what they were doing amounted to bullying and censorship. Others, including the woman who originally spotted the ad and posted about it online, said that everyone knows the connotations of the name Lolita and that it’s not appropriate to be naming a young girl’s bed after a literary character who was the object of lust for a man having sexual urges for his 12-year-old stepdaughter. A spokesman for Woolworth’s claims that the staff responsible for the website had no idea who or what Lolita was and that even after the complaints started rolling in, they all, including the mangers, had to look it up on Wikipedia to find out what all the fuss was about.
Now, I don’t know which is scarier — that there are people who think it’s A-OK to name a girls bed after a paedophile’s fantasy or that the staff had never heard of, let alone read, Nabokov’s classic. I think the latter is actually more frightening to me. The former I’ve just come to expect. Remember the Tesco debacle last year, in which the giant retailer was selling a pole dancing toy for children at its stores? Or even more recently, Wal-Mart finally pulling from its shelves a pair of pink sparkly underwear, sold in the girls department, that read ‘Who needs credit cards…’ on the crotch? Sad but true.
So what do you think? Were these mums right to complain about the sexual nature of the item and ask for it to renamed or removed, or are they just getting themselves worked up over nothing? Is the sexualization and exploitation of children all in the heads of hysterical parents or are they right to call these companies out on their practices if they find them offensive?
