On the Ploughshares blog, Mishka Hoosen explores the phenomenon of young women claiming for themselves the “nymphet” moniker on various Tumblr pages. Hoosen argues that it is more than simplistic fetishization of the themes induced by Nabokov’s Lolita—these women are owning their forbidden sexuality within the protections allowed them. Like the Lolita character, they claim this power as a reassurance to themselves, exercising the ability to destroy in the face of their own real or potential destruction:
This, this is where that same garden and a twilight becomes a thing to both process trauma—all kinds, from real-life abuse to the everyday violence of living as a girl and a child in the world—and a place to claim the heart-shaped sunglasses, the daisy chain, the lipgloss…
