She’s an all-too-familiar figure in today’s media landscape: the baby-faced nymphet with the preternaturally voluptuous curves, the one whose scantily clad body gyrates in music videos, poses provocatively on teen magazine covers, and populates cinema and television screens around the globe. She’s become a fixture in Western pop culture: we all know her various incarnations, from Gidget to Miley Cyrus, from Brooke Shields’ child prostitute in Pretty Baby to Jon Benét Ramsey. She’s been ardently celebrated and stridently censured, and she serves as a symbolic flashpoint for raging debates about gender, sexuality, the definition of childhood, and the criteria for social standards of acceptability.

Perhaps one reason for our fascination is her tricky double role in contemporary society — she’s simultaneously a symbol of female empowerment and the embodiment of a perverted male chauvinism. She invokes the specter of pedophilia while kindling the prospect of potent female sexuality. She haunts our imagery and our imaginations, and we know her best by a nickname that evokes meanings far exceeding their celebrated literary origin: she is Lolita.

The term has become an everyday allusion, a shorthand cultural reference to a prematurely, even inappropriately, sexual little girl — that is, a girl who is by legal definition not yet an adult and is therefore outlawed from culturally sanctioned sexual activity. Because of this legal and cultural taboo, she is also wrong — wicked, even — to deliberately provoke thoughts of such activity. And the “Lolitas” of our time are defined as deliberate sexual provocateurs, turning adults’ thoughts to sex and thereby luring them into wickedness, wantonly transgressing our basic moral and legal codes. Everything about this Lolita is unacceptable, and therein lies both her allure and her ignominy.

The original Lolita — the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel — was a rather different girl. It is clear in the book that she is the powerless victim of her predatory stepfather, Humbert Humbert. Nabokov’s Lolita is a nuanced character whose sexuality is complex: like many preadolescent girls, she is sexually curious — but she has no control over her relationship with Humbert, which is abusive and manipulative. Yet the care with which Nabokov presents her case, and his emphasis on Humbert’s malfeasance, has been overlooked in the years since the novel’s publication. It is as though the very fact of Lolita’s sexuality — the public acknowledgement that a preteen girl could be sexual, the bold focus on an incestuous liaison between grown man and little girl — has made her into a fantasy figure, a simulacrum of Humbert’s projection rather than the sexually abused and tragic figure of the novel.

It is this fantastical Lolita who has entered our culture as a pervasive metaphor. She is invoked in the popular media eagerly, as a sign of the licentiousness that appears to characterize contemporary girlhood. “Bring back school uniforms for little Lolitas!” demands London’s Daily Telegraph in an article ^[1] condemning contemporary sexy schoolgirl fashions.

Skin-baring and infantile costumes like babydoll dresses and high-heeled Mary Jane shoes are worn by girls to “evoke male Lolita fantasies,” according to a recent New York Times article ^[2]. Tokyo’s Daily Yomiuri refers to “the Lolita-like sex appeal” of nubile preteen Japanese anime cartoon characters . Even in an essay about a cathedral in Barcelona, critic Will Self writes, “La Sagrada Familia wins me over with its sheer wantonness as a building — this is the Lolita of sacred architecture.”

It is evident from these and many other such examples that Lolita in the modern parlance is a metaphor for a child vixen, a knowing coquette with an out-of-control libido, a baby nymphomaniac of sorts.

Despite the rather obvious difference between the Lolita of the novel and the Lolita of modern-day metaphor, it is the latter who inhabits current public discourse. The word “Lolita” is not used to connote a victim of child abuse or incest; a Lolita, in contemporary parlance, is never the unwilling target of a scheming and predatory adult, as was Nabokov’s Lolita. No — our Lolita is a devilish, precocious little tease with an understanding of the consequences of her coquetry. And invariably, the Lolita of contemporary metaphor is a figure of abomination. The sexually aware, provocative girl has transgressed our moral codes and acquired an expertise in areas of knowledge off-limits to her.

At the same time, there is widespread recognition that she is being coerced into her behavior by larger social forces — notably the media, popular culture, and mass marketing. “[A]dvertisements, teen films, and music videos churn out an inescapable barrage of sexually provocative images of teenage girls,” observes the historian Rachel Devlin. “In our hyper-commercialized consumerist society, there’s virtually no escaping the relentless sexualization of younger and younger children,” writes Rosa Brooks in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece. “[T]he sexualization of childhood is big business — mainstream mega-corporations such as Disney earn billions by marketing sexy products to children too young to understand their significance.” A Boston Globe news story ^[3] declares, “Bombarded by sexualized cultural forces, girls are growing up faster than ever.” The article describes 13-year-olds dressed as prostitutes for Halloween, wearing “fishnet stockings, halter tops, miniskirts and high heels,” and tracks increased sexual activity among schoolchildren. It attributes these phenomena to “a tidal wave of [mediated] sexual messages targeting an ever-younger set of girls” generated by advertising, music television, and the Internet.

So the metaphorical Lolita is a capitalist creation, an apparition conjured up by culture industries to disquiet parents, corrupt little girls, and instigate pedophiles. She comes with her own wardrobe — of lingerie, stiletto-heeled shoes, fishnet stockings and babydoll frocks — and she is to be rejected by all thinking, ethical and responsible people. She is, so to speak, a straw man.

This Lolita is in fact the antithesis of a sexually empowered girl. Sex is a natural, normal, and (at best) wonderful aspect of the human experience. It should not be a taboo or a horror, but at the same time, girls need to be able to understand their bodies in developmentally appropriate, factual, healthy ways that allow them to mature into sexually competent and functional adults. The version of sexuality that’s mass marketed, and that rests on exploiting girls’ bodies for profit, is not a version of sexuality that’s in girls’ best interests. In the U.S., there’s plenty of evidence that we aren’t offering girls an understanding of sex that helps them to negotiate its risks and responsibilities well.

From high-school girls in Massachusetts getting pregnant en masse to the one-in-four teen girls with STDs that the Centers for Disease Control identified earlier this year, it’s clear that we need to develop better, more progressive, more helpful ways to deal with girls and sex in the 21st century.