dolores, online.
notes on lana del rey, tumblr trauma, girlhood & internalizing lolita.
*Mild content warning for mentions of SA/grooming.
Twelve. Thirteen, maybe. We closed our bedroom doors and huddled in our beds, enshrouded in nighttime, opened up our laptops and leaned close. We giggled and gasped and tried to be quiet, tried not to wake up our parents. The go-to activity at sleepovers, then: to traverse the deep-dark of the internet, together. We thought we could do this and still come back intact, untouched. No one could touch us from the screen, we reasoned. We could not possibly be cut into and scarred by our computers, we believed. We logged onto Omegle and sometimes lied about our age, but often did not, stupid and bored as we were, and still, still, every time, anonymous men would pull their dicks out on video chat and tell us all the ways they’d like to pick us apart, unmake us from the inside out. We laughed and rolled our eyes and kept logging off, and went to bed, but. But. Maybe we didn’t think about it much the next morning. Or the next year, even. But those nights: they lingered. Linger, still. They did a damage so slow and subterranean that it often feels impossible to locate, to name, damage that seeps into our desire and renders us afraid of our own bodies, our own histories and all that we cannot quite remember but cannot quite forget.
We were girls then. We had too much unsupervised Internet access and not enough critical thinking skills, not yet. We were bored, yes, but we were also lonely, hurt, anxious, awkward, burning, raging, needy, love-hungry and love-starved. We were trying to fill out the gaps the only ways we could, the ways we’d been taught. To find men to tell us that we were real, that we could provoke reactions in their bodies, that we weren’t tissue-paper, weren’t crumbled dandelions and soured milk. We were real, with their ugly dicks out and their mindless grunting. We were real and yet we left our screens less and less sure of our own needs, sensations, desires.
I wanted, more than anything, to be seen—and yet, to be seen as I really was seemed unbearable: I wanted to be seen and to be witnessed, but as an imagined, glossy, hyper-feminine self, not the real one with braces, acne, gender dysphoria, and clinical depression. Tumblr became a shrine, a space of digital devotion, of malleable religiosity that could be applied to almost anything, and one of our most beloved saints, at the time, was Lana del Rey.
I was 13. I was a child, formless, all untethered bones and embarrassment over everything ever and living in a constant state of adjustment, of discomfort, of a wrongness as elemental as my genes. I was not yet grown; I was growing, and friendships kept dissolving and regrowing in the cracks of the sidewalk.
I craved form. To be designated a shape, structure, language, and to carve myself under someone’s, anyone’s, instruction. To be told how to be, because to embrace the unruliness did not feel, then, like a viable option. This is how most of us discovered Tumblr, I imagine, and how most of us—the particularly unlucky and secretly love-hungry among us—found Lana. Tumblr was a breeding ground for us, mosquitoes gestating in a stagnant pool of shame, latching our mouths onto any arm we could find, and she happened to be in the closest vicinity.
I believed, for a moment, that this was power, pure and unrefined, red sugar between my teeth: to be desired, by men, by the people who got to shape the world and everything and everyone in it, was to have power, I thought. Men’s attention collided with every worst need and you became real. It felt like power, for a second there, that currency of male attention, electrifying, secret. I mistook being-looked-at for being-real. I wanted so badly to believe in Lana, in Lolita, to deny Dolores Haze her own wild mangy needy child-self, to believe in my own worthiness. I needed to believe that I did have power, because I needed to believe that I had a choice, any choice, at all.
What seemed like choices then now reveal themselves to be anything but; I didn’t ‘choose’ to whittle my body and selfhood into a shape deemed permissible by men, I didn’t ‘choose’ to hunger for thinness and normative notions of gender expression and male attention, culture and patriarchy chose that for me, and neoliberalism engineered the whole nightmare to make it feel and look just like a choice.
Lolita is who I wanted to be, because at least Lolita got some sort of agency, some sort of story-arc. At least I could mythologize a love story; the alternative was a horror show. Girlhood only felt survivable if I could rewrite Dante’s seven circles of hell into a romance—it felt like the only way to keep myself afloat, moving, alive.
We reblogged countless pastel-hued, daisy-checked images of dainty pale girls in pink babydoll dresses and mouths sucking a lollipop; GIFS from the 1997 Adrian Lyne remake of Lolita, blushing faces hidden behind red heart-shaped glasses, short tennis-skirts and pouting glossed lips. Hidden amongst the stylized aesthetics of pink-pretty girlhood lived the more disturbing imagery: self-harm scars constellating wrists and thighs, pro-ana propaganda, idolized malnourished white girls, and essentially every form of romanticized self-cruelty, hyper-sexualization, and mental illness. We had only two choices, it seemed: worship your pain or deny its existence entirely. There was no room to be what we really were, children, liminal and fragmented and weird and inchoate and needy. We could only dress up our hurt, make it edible and cherry-coated, or reject its validity altogether. The same thing seemed true about our sexualities: flatten, stylize, manipulate and perform, or deny and deflect its existence. Our desiring did not come into play; our desiredness was what mattered.
How do I explain, how this brutal mental calculus, this psychic alienation, fucks with your ideas about sex and desire, at age twelve, thirteen? How to communicate just how insidious and silently violent our cute little collages really were, behind all of the American Apparel and Alicia Silverstone? How to tell you that this website felt unbearable, hellish, in most ways, but also felt like the only space in which girls could express their knotted, messy feelings and experiences and percolating selves without the same relentless shaming and surveillance of the ‘real’ world?
Look: we thought we were in control. That we had the power to sexualize ourselves, to wield our youth like a currency, that this sensation of being-wanted held any of the same weight as the power patriarchy had, to destroy and unmake and dehumanize and legislate who got a self and how. Tavi Gevinson, founder/EIC of the beloved magazine and mid-2000s haven of girl-culture, Rookie, wrote, about the uniquely-situated cruelty and complexity of tween/teenage girls: “Their capacity to perpetuate these standards doesn’t mean they are not also victims of these standards.” It is so much less terrifying, less debilitating, to imagine yourself empowered by all the things that actually work to dehumanize and dissolve you. It is maybe one of the handful of defense mechanisms anyone socialized as a girl has, and it is a particularly hard instinct to unlearn, this urge to convert poison-into-potion. This instinct, what I call the interior Lolita, haunts my sexuality even now, at age 23. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully outsmart her, even though I know better now.
Lana’s fetishization of (white, thin, conventionally pretty) youth, of nation itself and the empty white aesthetics of ‘Americana,’ of young girlhood and its sexualization, did something irreparable and malignant to our collective psyches, to our collective sexual selves. It’s tricky territory: I don’t blame her. I still love so much of her discography and think she’s brilliant in so many ways. So though I cannot disavow her entirely, her attachment to her own whiteness and victimhood is a form of harm I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by. Like: duh. Her entire thing, back in 2012/2013, relied on maintaining a fantasy, a delusion, about desire and gender and power. We were kids, and we did not have the critical thinking skills or analytical faculties to parse out the nuances of a persona, of an affect: we took Lana at her word, is what I mean. We truly believed ourselves to have the same sexual agency as a grown person. This misinterpretation of sexual liberation, of feminism, is no small thing. Back then, I believed that to deny me my own ability to consent or self-sexualize—though I was, again, a child—was antifeminist, was denying me personhood. In other words: denying me my right to cater to and entertain the male gaze was, I thought, sexist.
To claim victimhood was gauche, whiny, was inherently antifeminist, an affront to girls’ autonomy, I thought. I did not yet understand that these sensations can exist simultaneously: that one can grow into their sexuality without shame, and still be fundamentally unable to consent to sex with grown adults given their age, and the power imbalances embedded in culture and every dynamic, due to patriarchy and everything else. Maybe what I mean is, I couldn’t yet imagine a sexuality that didn’t look like sexualization: I couldn’t imagine a sexuality that didn’t just look like the male gaze.
We did not invent the male gaze, or patriarchy, or Lolita. I am constantly reminding myself of this fact, as I think all girls should: you might internalize Lolita, because how could you not, but you did not invent her. She is not there because something is wrong with you but rather, because something is very wrong with our culture. I did not yet realize, then, that you cannot really ‘reclaim’ an experience as your own when that experience is an imagery concocted and imagined up entirely by men. I empathize with my younger self, with all of us, stranded on the islands of shame and hunger, trying to feel real, identifiable, deserving of visibility. We just wanted to rescue Dolores from her own story, from the man-imagined Lolita, and perhaps, in doing so, rescue our own sexualities, our own tired selves. We were victims and perpetuators of a cultural nightmare, one we inherited, one we did not invent, and, simultaneously, we were subversive in the ways we could be. We claimed Lo’s subjectivity and tried to wrestle her free from the dark-dark of Humbert’s clutches; we curated ourselves back into the driver’s seat. Yet the images, the aesthetics we so revered and regurgitated—we didn’t invent those, either, and they could never fully belong to us. Lolita is not ‘crazy’ or unbelievable, but her sexualization is not hers, either.