catalogued in the same way that butterflies are carefully classified,” as one of Nabokov's biographers has explained. (Nabokov was a famous lepidopterist.) Conversely, Nabokov detested “Freudian voodooism,” as he once put it, because he saw in Freud an attempt by psychiatry to corner, appropriate, and submit to generalized principles people's inner lives. And submitting one's inner life—the unique hazard of one's personality, the camera obscura of one's own personal store of memories—to a set of deterministic explanations was for Nabokov an indignity on par with the expropriations of the Bolsheviks. (Metcalf, 2005)
A collection of letters between the novelist and social critic Edmund Wilson makes it clear that Ellis's research was a direct inspiration for Lolita. In 1948, Wilson sent Nabokov a copy of “Havelock Ellis's Russian sex masterpiece,” and nine days later, Nabokov responded by writing: “I enjoyed the Russian's love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny” (Karlinsky, 2001, p. 230). The 106-page “sex masterpiece” is an account of a young man, sexually initiated at the age of twelve, who in his thirties begins to seek out the favors of child prostitutes (from age eleven on up) in the Ukraine. Nabokov shares his fascination for Havelock's “tiny tots” in his memoir Speak, Memory, most explicitly in the Russian version, Drugie Berega:
Our innocence seems to me almost monstrous in the light of various confessions dating from the same years and cited by Havelock Ellis, which speak of tiny tots of every imaginable sex, who practice every Graeco-Roman sin, constantly and everywhere, from the Anglo-Saxon industrial centers to the Ukraine (from where an especially lascivious report by a land-owner is available). (Karlinsky, 2001, p. 229)2
One thing of note about Nabokov's Lolita, in the context of Ellis, PIE, and the steady propagation of the idea of children as sexual beings, is that Lolita was the sexual aggressor in the relationship, and Humbert Humbert, for all his unpleasantness, more of a hapless victim of her seductions than an actual predator.
To get a sense of how far-reaching Ellis's influence is—not apart from but congruent with his influence on literature—there was a syllabus in the 1990s at Cornell University called “The Sexual Child,” described as follows:
With respect to children, the American imagination today is defined by what we might call pedophile gothic. The sexual child, as a volatile emblem of trauma, has become the focus of moral panics from every point on the political spectrum—panics about cultural phenomena as various as pornography, psychotherapy, day care, parenting, the women's movement, the Roman Catholic priesthood, access to the Internet, and every level of school curricula. But what do we think a child is or ought to be? What does it mean to love or desire a child? Who promotes the idea of child sexuality and why? (Free Republic, 2002)
Havelock Ellis was included in the course, and lectures had titles such as “The Child as Sexual Object and Sexual Subject,” “Big Bad Wolves,” “Loving Children,” and “Having Children” (for which one of the readings was Nabokov's Lolita). English professor Ellis Hanson, the course instructor, defended the course's content by stating, “The erotic fascination with children is ubiquitous. One could hardly read a newspaper or turn on a television without feeling obliged to accept, study, and celebrate it.” In his own words, the course was designed to “undermine preconceived notions about what a child is, what sexuality is, and what it means to love or desire a child” (Capel, 1998).
The bisexual “trans man” Pat Califia also contributed to the course. At the Ipce (International Pedophile and Child Emancipation) site, Califia wrote:
Culturally induced schizophrenia allows parents to make sentimental speeches about the fleeting innocence of childhood and the happiness of years unbroken by carnal lust—and exhaust themselves policing the sex lives of their children. Children are celibate because their parents prevent them from playing with other little kids or adults…. They are not innocent; they are ignorant, and that ignorance is deliberately created and maintained by parents…. Even though many prominent sex researchers have documented the existence of sexual capacity in children (for instance Kinsey verified the occurrence of orgasm in girls and boys at less than six months of age), our society is fanatically determined to deny it. (2003)
As I'll get to in a later chapter, Kinsey's “researches” didn't verify anything because he used child sexual abusers to get his data; oblivious or indifferent to the children's suffering, he almost certainly misrepresented it as pleasure—just as child abusers often do. Califia's piece cites how “very often, these children are consenting partners in the sexual activity [and even] initiate the sexual activity with direct propositions or with seductive behavior.” S/he argues that “[T]he claim that sex with a parent is more damaging than being beaten [is] ludicrous”—without saying why this is the case. In reference to the sexual exploitation of children for profit, Califia writes: “Closing down this industry without providing alternative employment is equivalent to sentencing young people to frustration, abuse, or suicide in cozy little suburban ranch-style prisons” (2003).
Califia was somewhat ahead of his/her time with such arguments; or perhaps, considering that they formed a central part of the Cornell University course in the 1970s, s/he was instrumental (like my brother) in normalizing prostitution, child or otherwise. In March 2015, The Daily Telegraph ran a piece about how British university students are now making extra money in the sex industry. The piece reads more like an advertisement:
Researchers surveyed 6,750 students, of whom 5 per cent said they'd worked in the sex industry. Almost a quarter admitted they had considered it. The reasons they gave were to fund their lifestyle, pay basic living costs, reduce debt at the end of university, sexual pleasure and curiosity. One in 20 sounds like a lot, hence a general shock at the findings. But frankly, given the relative ease of sex work—and the fact that it's so lucrative—I'm surprised more undergrads aren't giving it a go…. There are, of course, less than pleasurable elements of sex work. But aren't there in every job?…Student sex workers aren't victims; they're making a choice. And after all: they're running a business; handling the accounts, branding, marketing and sales. How many other undergraduates can claim that? (Reid, 2015)
In Germany, prostitution has been legal since 2002, and there has been a recurring debate ever since over whether the government can legally oblige women receiving unemployment benefit to become “sex workers” (Chapman, 2005). So much for freedom of choice.
My brother did his own stint as a sex worker, and in Dandy in the Underworld he called prostitutes “the most open and honest creatures on God's earth.” “The whore fuck,” he wrote, “is the purest fuck of them all” (S. Horsley, 2007, pp. 197, 199). I am sure he would have applauded the Telegraph's view of sexual self-exploitation as social liberation, though he might have been disturbed and disappointed to discover how fashionable his supposedly subversive views had become.
CHAPTER IV
Progressive politics and witchcraft: Brazier's Park, order of Woodcraft, Common Wealth
“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”
—George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
It would be nice if, somehow, I could lay all of this information out as a straightforward, linear narrative; but that would be a little like hoping to put a leash on an octopus. If the connections I am attempting to map were simple, straightforward, and linear, they would already be obvious for all to see. Octopi do not come to heel when called. Of course, there is a danger that, since I am selecting the material in order to show
