Dissociative Girlhood through the Eyes of a Millionaire Twice my Age
and then, finally, my own
FOREVER LOLITA
I flew to New York alone for the first time at 17. I had just won Miss Teen USA and was coming to the city for media training and a press tour. I wore a denim mini-skirt I got at the pacsun in the mall where I also bought my first bra.
I was reading The Sun Also Rises and sat next to a man who resembled the professor of my first writing class at Princeton. The man, my seat neighbor, asked me about Hemingway. I said something, mentioned that I’d just graduated high school. There was an issue with the plane. We had to get off and then re-board another. I nervously lugged the Mikimoto tiara from one plane to another along with my book. As I waited at our new gate, the man came back with a smartwater.
“For you,” he said as he handed it to me.
I thanked him and appreciated the nurturance, because I was scared. My life was changing a lot, quickly, and I’d shrunken into myself, losing touch with who I felt I really was.
We flew! I read. I slept. We chatted. He was coming back from a bachelor party. Asked why I was going to New York. I can’t remember if I told him the truth or if I told him that I was modeling. But as we stood to get off of the plane, and head into the city, he asked me out to dinner, holding out a blank contact screen expectantly. I froze. Didn’t know how to say no. My face got hot, I mumbled something about my manager’s email.
“That’s alright,” he said. Probably equally embarrassed, and continued on. I finished the smartwater in the car to the apartment I’d stay in with Miss USA and Miss Universe throughout the year.
This apartment is also where I would start and finish Nabokov’s Lolita.
If you’re here, then you probably know the premise. Humbert Humbert in love with little girl. Creepy, illegal, and yet, still called “the only great love story” by reputable outlets. hmmmm.
17 was a weird year for me. My own loss of innocence of sorts, but once I broke the seal, I gulped down this subconscious masochism, trying to lay a frenzied blanket over guilt I didn’t even realize I was collecting.
And then, everyone say it with me, you know it by now!!!
I got a boyfriend. And we were together for four years.
And during our relationship, I got to be a sweet, girlish, girlfriend, and when we moved to Europe together, I got to be a pseudo-wife, like a little rose in a glass box.
But our breakup was layered and complex, and by the time I flew to New York to stay, alone again, this time at 22, the glass was shattered.
REVOLTING YOUNG THING
I downloaded Hinge first. And if you’ve read My night at Three Dollar Bill, then this is where we leave off. I’m at a club, dancing with a man, whose boyfriend I would meet eventually, showing him a Hinge match who was trying to send me an Uber Black.
“I like his nose,” he said.
And this was the external, dissociative influence I needed, plus my alternative was going back to my friend’s couch in Bushwick. Right by the overhead train. So I got the heels I’d given up on out of my friend’s car and got in the Uber Black and found myself greeting a doorman in a small, albeit cushy entryway. He sent me to the elevator up up and away to the penthouse.
My first profile to corporeal form. The nose is there. The apartment, large enough to have plenty of light and even more empty space. He moves with the ease of a man, for one, and a man with money, for two. Asked me what I drank. Made me a gin with water, because he’d just moved in and didn’t have tonic. We sat on his couch and talked and talked and talked. He chuckled, calling me an unemployed college graduate. But I swore I was a writer.
Somehow, I expected this. The taboo luxury of it all. We drank enough for me to bring up specific authors (I will always bring up Vonnegut or Dostoevsky if I drink enough). I made him order a book then and there on the spot.
And then…
And then.
And then!!!!!
I sat on his lap, musical and apple-sweet. My legs twitched and he stroked them; my tennis shoe fell off, my teeth rested on my underlip and I half-turned away, and…
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, those last couple lines are quotes pulled from the lap scene in Lolita and are not what happened at all because if you want that then there is plenty of erotica in print and on the internet for you to choose from!!!
That’s the crazy thing about the legacy of Lolita. Very few physical details are actually described in the book, and yet, it has been culturally and sexually adopted uniquely in the US as simultaneously salacious and despicable and desirable.
I was watching a little bit of Pretty Baby: The Brook Shields Story last night and was taken with how much of her “appeal” was that she was perceived as sexual and innocent at the same time. And I was so innocent when I went to Mr. H’s apartment. Even though I thought I wasn’t ( I still am, even though I don’t think I am). I was just running from the tail end of a relationship with someone who was just as young and innocent as myself. And Mr. H was very blunt about his attraction to my youth. And this one encounter sparked a fascination with the desirability of feminity and youth. Because you are so interesting and new and exciting to an older man, specifically. I’ve personally theorized that it’s because they’re aware of their own approach toward old age and you, as a young woman (but of age, of course) who has less years and the potential of having children eventually but not imminently are subconciously a beacon of vivacity to them. Like a projected, retro-active nostalgia mixed in with desire.
And yet, I don’t think age gaps are inherently bad. Even though the potential for exploitation is there, it doesn’t always occur. I’ve dated more men over 30 than I have under (I’m 23) and usually the ones over are more honest. More communicative. Generous.
I saw Mr. H one more time, and by then I had a day job and 10,000 more words on a novel, and I was musing with the idea of starting a dating column (heyyyy). I was a little more grown-up, I guess.
HOT POISON, VOLUPTUOUS FLAME
We have this weird inverse relationship with innocence and attraction within the confines of a gender binary. Women are considered culturally attractive young and men culturally gain attraction as they get older. But the attraction to feminine youth is strange because there is a hunger for the defilement of it, preferably without feminine agency. For the process of breaking the glass and watching the girl wilt (but not die, or dry out). And the internet, or Sofia Coppola films, or Lana songs, or the multitude of fallen girl, women, tropes can cause a dissociative kind of excitement in living through your own degradation (????), like a bruise you can’t stop touching because the pain feels like a beautiful martyrdom.
But what if we reject this. And how do we reject this?
Because the whole process creates a self reductionism. And it makes me really confused about attraction and desire. Why and when do I need my friends to externally validate attraction for me to feel it myself? Am I feeling it myself.
What externally, experientially, was, am I attracted to?
I don’t know. I think perhaps two things:
things I want for myself, like the guy who took me to Soho House and told me to read Rene Girard, who I was excited about until I finished the Girard book months before him and realized that I could get my own membership, and that these things felt more exciting and intimate on my own.
seeing a version of myself through other’s eyes that I find desirable. This one I can’t explain. I don’t know if it’s growing up while curating a self on Instagram and/or watching that self in pageant tapes being intravenously spoonfed external validation and degradation.
MADMAN, CREATURE, MELANCHOLY
I get flack online sometimes for talking about so many male authors. But I’ve also been told that the way I talk about male authors has made people hate men less. Here's my thing with male authors — I feel like many wrote whatever they wanted to write, however they wanted to write it without feeling the need to address identity at all.
Nabokov wrote a full novel about a pedophile for God’s sake. And Hemingway, living a life lulling between masculinity and feminity, got to write boyish novels with stripped clean language and subtly feminine themes.
Nabokov has another novel called The Gift. It’s about a younger man dating an older woman. He’s taken up with her as a Madona figure in the beginning, but throughout their affair he starts to notice her quirks and wrinkles, and by the end of the novel, he is sick of her, and gazes longingly at another couple:
“The girl had a delicately painted mouth and tender gray-blue eyes, and her fiance or husband, slender, elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her, was looking at her with pride.” (Nabokov, 254)
I finished The Gift the morning after my second night at Mr. H’s. He ended things before he saw me for a third time. Because I think maybe I’d become too aware of the gimmick. Too complicit in my own performance as Lolita. Maybe even too calculating in his eyes. But I wasn’t disappointed, because I think I felt attraction number one, where I wanted to be him, like Mr. Soho House/Girard. Well if I can get into one plot in New York’s cesspool map of membership clubs, then maybe I can figure out how to make money (and keep artistic integrity) as a writer. I have faith. I am young! But I have also been called “wise for my age” since I was entering my double digits (is it true or is it grooming! will we ever know?). And like Cormac McCarthy claims, because of that precocity, it takes a lot of heart to keep going sometimes. And I fill that need with intellectual and experiential curiosity. And that is how I’m girlish and young still, even if no one tells me that. I have my curiosity.
MINE, MINE, MINE
I will keep my girlishness in the ways I want to, for myself. In the ways that I enjoy. And I’m learning how to cut the middle man of experience out, the little dissociation monster that we swallow somewhere in womanhood, or girlhood, or in between.
So how do we reject this whole thing? Or at least find ourselves in it. Well…
My roommate and I have this motto called “walnut brain,” because a guy once said that, often, he’s not thinking at all, there’s just a “little walnut banging around up there.” And sometimes, thinking like a man is simply just not thinking at all. Like considering whether or not the writer you date will write about you (if they’re excited about it, it’s a redder flag), or if the girl on your flight who just graduated high school might be under age. And I don’t think we adopt walnuts all the time, but I think across gender in general, we could be better about coming to terms with feminine and masculine traits in all of us. When to be sensitive and think something to death, and when to the walnut back. But no dissociating. Less dissociating (which includes bathing your brain in a phone-induced dopamine coma).
Use your senses. Take it all in. Stop self-policing. Stop dissociating to experience yourself through others, in the real world and online.
Do the things that make you foam over with joy and passion and life.
Date someone, get married (or don’t), let your hair go gray, start the blog, pick up the paintbrush, go outside (!!!), be who you wanted to be as a kid, who you wanted to be before the world told you that your most important task was making money or preserving your youth.
Be whoever you want to be, so long as it’s not hurting anyone.
“We shall all dance, we shall all die.” (Nabokov, the gift)
The sun rises, but it also sets. And in the time in between, from birth, to first bra, to last breath, you have to just fall in love with being alive.
And you’ll only get there through your own gaze.
this was reflective + retrospective, but I’m also posting about and soliciting advice for my dating life in real time. check out my notes (and sometimes insta stories, tiktoks, etc) to help me decide things.
have a good a weekend!!! party read tell ur loved ones how much you care
xoxo,
Hailo 👼🏽
“Like a bruise you can’t stop touching because the pain feels like martyrdom” aaaah!! So beautiful! (Sorry I’m not sure how to comment on people’s writing, yet)
I really enjoyed this! It feels interesting reading this from the perspective of a girl who feels really behind in these kinds of endeavours (dating and such) You feel like a real life Carrie Bradshaw and I love it though I have nowhere to apply your wisdom at the moment <3 I will wait eagerly for that day!!!