Humbert v. Price: Child Sexual Abuse Across Gender Lines, or Wolves in Sheeps’ Clothing
- Victoria Xia
- Mar 17
- 6 min read
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 classic Lolita is perhaps one of the most controversial works in Western literature—it has been banned in several countries and challenged in more, it has faced countless conflicting interpretations ranging from a tumultuous romance between a May-December couple to a horror story of a young girl’s abuse led by an unreliable narrator, its existence forged questions of the author’s morality as a human being… perhaps, even, in part due to events in his own childhood that could have mirrored the interactions between predator and victim in his most infamous novel. Lolita, too, is considered a masterwork of Nabokov’s writing, a plot teased in Laughter in the Dark and half-scrawled in The Original of Laura, but perfected only in the careful vomit of Humbert and Dolores: precisely-penned like his pinned butterflies, with stomach-turning acts of aggression entangled in his characteristic almost-overly-verbose style that invite praise like moths to a flame, and peppered with French musings and allusions to writers older and deader than he. These are the things that turn a dull documentary of a morally-bereft man into a dry, full-bodied vintage: bitter, with a mouthfeel that sends shivers down a sommelier’s spine, drunker with every sip, the mind fogged with stardust and smoke.
Alissa Nutting is not Vladimir Nabokov.
Nutting’s 2013 debut novel Tampa is daring, blunt, and visceral, ripping skill from her background in essay-writing to dip her hands into the bleeding carcass of real-life injustices. Based off of former schoolmate Debra Lafave’s 2005 statutory rape case and notoriously-light sentencing (which raised questions as to whether a male offender would have received a harsher one), eighth grade teacher Celeste Price explicitly and callously preys on pubescent boys for a singular, immoral selfishness; she’s conventionally attractive, charismatic, and calculated. She grooms two students, the first of which she throws away when he continuously attempts to form an emotional bond between them. She is needlessly cruel to adolescent girls, jealous of their proximity to their preteen peers. She grows disgusted with her victims the second they show a hint of adulthood—growth spurts, muscles, facial hair. She is only ever sexually satisfied with underage boys, and shows no interest—disdain, even—in her adult husband.
In many ways, Humbert Humbert and Celeste Price are very much the same kind of monster: they are pedophiles (specifically hebephiles) and sexual predators, they claim that their philias stemmed from sexual experiences in early adolescence, they are teachers at some points in their lives, they are considered jaw-droppingly gorgeous by the opposite sex and can use their practiced charm to terrible effect—they, like spiders, carefully ensnare the objects of their obsessions in their webs to isolate them from their loved ones and those who might rescue them, ensuring that they can only lean on the person who sought to ruin them.
Their differences are obvious: Humbert is a man, while Price is a woman. Their ages and age gaps with their victims are different: Humbert is thirty-seven when he meets twelve-year-old Dolores Haze (a twenty-five-year age gap), while Price is twenty-six when she meets freshly-fourteen Jack Patrick (a twelve-year age gap; not long after him, she meets Boyd Manning, who is just a tad younger). Humbert is a widower; Price is married. These can be gleaned at a bare, grazing glance at their stories, but their perverted similarities—and how these differences affect others’ perceptions of them—are what truly stand out.
Already, with just a handful of scattered traits between two similar predators, a thousand things change in their cultural perception—the sexual abuse of boys by women is often considered almost unthinkable, with a 2022 Croatian research study affirming that the most common visualization of a child sexual predator is a man (specifically, a single man over the age of fifty in a child care or church position). Statistics from the same study note that, out of 1,159 news articles including mentions of child sexual abuse perpetrators, only 0.5% of them indicated that a woman was the perpetrator.
From a purely surface-level point of view, this means that the majority of child predators are men—which, by fact, is true. However, on a societal level, when looking at how most people perceive child predators, it implies a “type” of person that is a predator: he is always an old, mentally-ill man in a position of power over children; he shows his inner sickness on the outside, must be ugly, fat, or balding; he openly creeps on other people and makes them uncomfortable, is incapable of functioning in normal social situations without somehow hinting that he preys on little girls and boys. Frequently, too, are gay men stereotyped as predators, despite the fact that sexual orientation does not predetermine one's pedophilia, nor the lack thereof. In essence, the picture of a child predator is not of a “person” at all, but of an inhuman, evil monster in man’s clothing; a type of special villain who shows its moral rot on its face and in its daily interactions. It is recognizable from a distance, and anyone who fits this image should be kept far away from children and the places they frequent.
What happens when a predator deviates from this image?
Humbert is already far from what most people would imagine a predator to be: again, he is conventionally attractive, well-dressed, well-spoken, and well-mannered; he is not old enough to be looked on with disdain or pity, but not young enough to seem irresponsible or irrational. When he is with Dolores, people view them as father and daughter (and those who know them better know certainly that he is Dolores’s legal stepfather—another thing to hide behind). He is a widower, university professor, and trusted member of his community, and few characters in the novel ever suspect his pedophilia until he is arrested and tried for murder.
Price is a step further from the stereotype. She is a young, married woman who wears nice makeup and does her hair every morning; she dresses cleanly and flatteringly for her meticulously-maintained figure. Her students love having her as a teacher, and she treats her coworkers with a cold yet convincing congeniality; she is considered a perfect wife and daughter-in-law, yet is not so impossibly perfect that her peers consider her suspicious. Furthermore, it cannot be understated as to how beautiful she is: she used to model bikinis in her college days, she is constantly ogled by the men she encounters on the regular, and is even said to be too attractive to go to prison, as her good looks would put her at a higher risk for sexual violence—nevermind the fact that sexual assault has been noted to more frequently be due to a desire for power and control rather than a lapse of judgment or personal lust—in an eerily-similar comment that Debra Lafave’s lawyer made during her own trial for having raped a fourteen-year-old boy.
When a predator doesn’t look like a predator—or, at least, what we think a predator would look like—people like Price and Lafave slip through the cracks. Women—particularly attractive, young women—are considered harmless, completely incapable of the horrid crimes one thinks of when they see the phrase “child sexual abuse.”
To wider media of Tampa’s time (and, sadly, even now), attractive young women who prey on boys are not seen as pedophiles, sex offenders, or abusers—they view these women generously, like angels who give young boys their first taste of manhood, giving a “chance” with a beautiful woman, the “gift” of a sexual experience with a grown-up; the boys should be grateful that their hot blonde twenty-something schoolteacher decided to choose them as targets, that they got to fulfill the fantasies that every teenage boy must have about that kind of beauty (like Price, Lafave also modeled bikinis at some point in her life, and when the pictures were shown to the public, swathes of Americans agreed that such a woman would have, indeed, been a subject of their fantasies as teen boys—making a laughingstock of the student she raped).
When a predator doesn’t look like a predator, abuses get ignored. Sexual assault is mocked and left unreported, unfiled, and uninvestigated. Long-term manipulation is twisted into something people claim to have desired.
It is in cases like these that one must shed the notion that a child predator is simply a “monster”—because, yes, they do terrible, evil things, but it is not true that their abuses are completely “inhuman,” unimaginable.
Instead, it must be remembered that their evils are completely able to be committed by human beings: real, flesh-and-blood people who walk the streets you walk and have conscious control over the things they do, not slimy creatures that lurk in the dark and only appear in horror stories. They do not necessarily show their perversions on the outside. They can be of any gender, age, socio-economic class, or physical attractiveness; they can be your coworker or friend. Here, at least, is a warning not to overwhelm a predator’s image with dehumanization, because the evil they committed is very real, very human, and very possible—and perhaps done by the person you’d suspect the least.
Comments