paul childs wrote:
>
> >We can never be quite sure whether the japanese
> >lolitas are following their "own" desire or that of some media
> >agent. Probably it is a mixture of both.
>
> Which was my point, desire manifests differently in Japan than it does in Canada or anywhere else and reflects personal interpretation of social structures.
I would like to add that probably the "psychological" significance is not the same among different individual "lolitas." That is the problem in bringing in psychological analysis to explain social trends -- such analysis, it seems to me, seldom if ever escapes the vulgar 19th c. materialism (or "biologism") which informed Freud's original work. Any psychological principle applied to public affairs has to be absolute, because if it fails to explain _one_ person in the group being discussed there is no reason to assume it doesn't equally fail to explain most of the rest. Undoubtedly each lolita has her own private motives, which a psychologist studying her could uncover (or which she herself could explain even). But there is no reason to assume that what explains Lolita 1 also explains Lolita 2 (except, as I say, the vulgar materialism Marx identifies in the third and sixth Theses on F).
We can make a beginning of a social explanation of the general phenomena, but we can have no confidence that that applies to each individual history.
Carrol