Sunday, April 14, 2019

Teen Knee & Ankle Fetish [UPDATE]


Barbara Wyllie wrote a review in the Slavonic and East European Review (2015) of John Bertram's Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design.

Here's part of Amazon's description of the book:

Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators [...] offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov scholars survey more than half a century of Lolita covers. 


Wyllie wrote that Bertram was "inspired by Dieter Zimmer’s ‘Covering Lolita’, an online collection of over 200 Lolita editions."

Reportedly, Nabokov was ‘emphatically opposed to any kind of representation of a little girl’ on the cover of LolitaNabokov's wishes weren't fulfilled, but a number of covers appear to take a middle course by merely portraying the bare legs of a nymphet.  

Interestingly, the 1997 US Random House (Vintage) cover has the following blurb from Vanity Fair: "The only convincing love story of our century."


In The Allure of Nymphets, I shared the poem “man mowing the lawn across the way from me” by Charles Bukowski:

man mowing the lawn across from me
don’t you see the young girls walking down the sidewalks now
with knives in their purses?
don’t you see their beautiful eyes and dresses and
hair? 
don’t you see their beautiful asses and knees and 
ankles?

Bukowski couldn't fathom why the man wasn't infatuated by the knees and ankles of the passing nymphets. But Bukowski isn't the only one with a nymphet knee and ankle fetish. Jérôme, the 35-year-old protagonist in the french film Claire's Knee (1970) [French: Le genou de Claire], "is struck by teenage girl Claire and harbours an unquenchable desire to touch her knee." (IMDb).

And the book covers for the novels pictured below, which are all about nymphets who are involved in age-discrepant relationships, were clearly chosen by a publishing company that was aware of the seductive nature of the knees and ankles of nymphets. Could that also be why men find catholic school girls so alluring?


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